Let's not forget what's happening in Gaza
Amid the economic chaos unleashed by Donald Trump's trade war, the world seems to have stopped looking at Gaza, which Benjamin Netanyahu's government is taking advantage of to implement a plan that openly seeks to expel the Palestinian population from the Strip. How? By making life increasingly difficult, condemning the population to hunger, a lack of medical supplies, and the psychological torture of constant bombing and military incursions.
In recent weeks, the Israeli army has implemented a new tactic that consists of increasingly reducing the space where the nearly two million Gazan civilians living in the Strip can take refuge. It has reduced their space and blocked the entry of any type of humanitarian aid, with the result that the situation deteriorates a little more with each passing day. According to UN data, at least 345,000 Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from extreme hunger (phase 5), and 91% are in a food crisis situation. 60,000 children need urgent treatment for malnutrition, while on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border in southern Gaza, hundreds of trucks loaded with humanitarian aid remain blocked. Community kitchens run by the UN World Food Programme have now become targets for Israeli fighter jets, as have water pipelines. As if we were back in the Middle Ages, hunger is Israel's primary weapon of war right now.
Therefore, the objective now is no longer to destroy Hamas or free the hostages, but rather an ethnic cleansing operation. At least that's what the thousand Israeli reservists who signed a letter demanding an end to the war and negotiations with Hamas believe. They were expelled from the army in retaliation.
Netanyahu acts with total impunity because he knows he has Washington's backing for this policy. Let's remember that it was Trump himself who spoke of turning Gaza into a resort Mediterranean and relocate the Palestinian population elsewhere. The complicity between the two leaders, as became evident the other day in the Oval Office, suggests that this is the plan being implemented on the ground.
The humanitarian crisis in Gaza should therefore return to the media and political agenda, and the European Union should be leading the initiative. Pressure must be increased on Netanyahu and at least not become unwitting accomplices in this humanitarian catastrophe that the retaliation operation for the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, has become. Brussels cannot continue to look the other way in such a destabilizing conflict. Because, after all, Netanyahu's attitude in Gaza right now is not so different from Vladimir Putin's in Ukraine, although the responses to the two crises are so different.