The images are finally breaking through the propaganda fog. Starving children – ribs sharp beneath thinning skin – have made the front pages, from The Daily Express to The New York Times.
Aid agencies are now echoing what Palestinians have been shouting for months: this is not a humanitarian crisis. It is a man-made famine. It is genocide, and it is being broadcast in real time.
According to Doctors Without Borders, cases of severe malnutrition among children under five in Gaza have tripled in just two weeks. A quarter of the children and pregnant women examined were malnourished.
Since May, famine deaths have surged – over 50 in the past week alone. The World Food Programme confirms Gaza receives just 12 percent of the food it needs. A third of the population is going days without eating. Babies are starving, mothers faint and aid convoys are shot at or turned away.
Now, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) has issued an urgent alert: the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip”.
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Famine thresholds for food consumption and acute malnutrition have already been breached. Starvation and disease are accelerating. Without immediate intervention, the outcome is clear: mass death.
So how did the self-proclaimed leaders of the free world respond?
With cruelty in three dialects.
Social engineering at gunpoint
US President Donald Trump delivered the blunt-force version: snarling, smirking and fundamentally uninterested in anything that cannot be monetised or golfed on.
As skeletal children flickered across screens, Trump lied without blinking and denied there was a famine in Gaza. His team sabotaged ceasefire talks in Doha, blamed Hamas for selfishness and walked away – back to the clubhouse.
Trump’s indifference is total, playing golf while Gaza withers, he reveals the full rot of his worldview: entitlement, cruelty and a billionaire’s disdain for those beneath him
Hamas had proposed exactly what the international community demanded: UN-led food distribution, withdrawal of Israeli troops from civilian areas and a permanent ceasefire in exchange for hostages.
But that was far too humane for Washington and Tel Aviv. They preferred their aid weaponised, their food politicised and their victims punished for surviving their tons of bombs.
The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a failed Israeli-American “humanitarian” scheme, was put in charge of feeding Gaza. Instead, it helped map out killing zones.
Leaked documents detail $2bn “transit camps” to “re-educate” Palestinians – colonisation rebranded in PowerPoint – not relief, rather social engineering at gunpoint.
Even Israel’s military admits there was no evidence Hamas stole aid. Still, Gaza starves – not by accident, but by design.
This is policy, and if anyone was still unsure, Netanyahu clarified: “In any path we choose, we will be forced to allow the entry of minimal humanitarian aid.”
Not enough. Not urgent. Minimal.
Starvation, then, is not collateral; it is a strategy. Relief, drip-fed, outrage managed. This is rationed agony. Suffering, meted out with precision.
Trump indifference
Meanwhile, in Scotland, teeing off as Gaza collapsed, Trump was not only dodging genocide; he was running from Jeffrey Epstein’s shadow. Palestinians – like the trailer park teens in Epstein’s Rolodex – do not exist in Trump’s gated universe. He sees only property values and dinner reservations. Everything else is expendable.
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Trump’s indifference is total. Playing golf while Gaza withers, he reveals the full rot of his worldview: entitlement, cruelty and a billionaire’s disdain for those beneath him.
But he was not finished. Between rounds, Trump moaned: “We sent $60m… nobody acknowledged it… makes you feel a little bad.”
Apparently, Palestinians should send thank-you cards for the starvation, for the tents torched in the night and the children torn apart by US-made bombs.
This is Trump’s empathy: crumbs followed by tantrums – the logic of a mob boss. You clap or you get nothing.
Trump does not just deny famine, he mocks it and downgrades it to “probably malnutrition”. He lies again about Hamas stealing aid, even as Israeli officials admit otherwise. He wants praise for food that never arrived and impunity for the policies that blocked it.
Then there is British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the master of the soft veto. Where Trump bellows, Starmer tiptoes. While tens of thousands chanted for a ceasefire, he released a polished video offering to treat a few injured Palestinian children in Britain. A gesture? Or a stage prop?
Behind the sober tone lies staggering complicity. Starmer has done nothing to stop arms exports to Israel, including F-35 jet components. He talks about airdrops as if tossing food from 3,000m is more than a photo op. These drops kill as often as they feed.
Starmer plays the reasonable man – all poise, no pressure – as if a well-worded statement could hush the cries from Rafah
When asked why Britain will not act, officials shrug: we must follow America. And yet, when Trump abandoned Ukraine, Britain led alone.
The difference is not capability; it is will, or rather, its absence.
What could Starmer do? Plenty: suspend arms exports, freeze Israeli assets, sanction GHF-linked firms, join South Africa’s genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and even recall the ambassador.
He could say the word: genocide.
But instead, he plays the reasonable man – all poise, no pressure – as if a well-worded statement could hush the cries from Rafah. He performs concern while the bodies accumulate just behind the curtain.
Macron’s illusion
Then comes French President Emmanuel Macron, cloaked in silk and the language of peace while selling his illusion. He announced France would recognise a Palestinian state. Dramatic? Until you read the fine print: no borders, no capital, no end to occupation, no teeth.
It is the same vision floated by Canada’s prime minister: a “Zionist Palestinian state” – defanged, demilitarised and designed to grease normalisation deals with Arab states. It is not a state, but a hologram, a soundbite, a mirage.
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While the Israeli army storms the occupied West Bank, while the Israeli parliament pushes annexation, Macron offers paper recognition.
His “support” is sleight of hand, a magician’s flourish to distract while the real work of ethnic cleansing proceeds unimpeded.
If Macron were serious, he would sanction Israel, freeze reserves in French banks, support the ICJ case and stop arresting French citizens protesting genocide. But seriousness was never the point; performance was.
And now, Starmer is following suit, offering to recognise a Palestinian state – not as an unconditional right to the whole of occupied Palestinian land, but as a bargaining chip, dangled only if there is no ceasefire, to politely urge Israel to reconsider its course.
Where Macron offered a mirage, Starmer offered a shadow of one – not solidarity, not strategy, just PR in slow motion. Trump sneers, Starmer stage-manages and Macron suavely deceives.
As Gaza starves and aid workers plead for a ceasefire, these men deliver rehearsed lines, not rescue. They offer theatre in place of leadership, gestures in place of justice, and euphemisms in place of courage.
While Israeli ministers call openly for Gaza’s erasure, these men retreat behind velvet curtains, pose for cameras and nod gravely.
They are not statesmen.
They are performers.
Their suits are tailored.
Their cowardice, too.
Trump is only different in style, not in substance.
Where Macron and Starmer lacquer their complicity in diplomacy and euphemism, Trump bellows his out like a wrecking ball – no disguise, just arrogance live-streamed.
But the core is the same: a shared, deliberate disregard for Palestinian life, a common indifference to suffering and a unity of inhumanity.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
