APRIL 10 — Somewhere between hell and a hard place lies Gaza.
A sweltering, sand-choked strip of land barely hanging on by a thread, now severed cleanly by the blade of political sadism. Once described as the “world’s largest open-air prison,” it’s no longer a prison. It’s an execution chamber. And the warden just threw away the key.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister with the dead eyes of a man too far gone, just announced to the world:
“Not even a grain of wheat will enter Gaza.”
Not a grain.
Not a crumb.
Not a drop of mercy.
Forget humanitarian law, forget the faint pretences of diplomacy. Smotrich — fanatic in a designer suit — didn’t just close the borders. He padlocked the very arteries of life itself. He looked at 2.2 million souls, half of them children, and decided they don’t deserve to eat. He’s playing god, and he’s chosen famine.
Bezalel Smotrich gestures at a handing over ceremony after he took office as the new Israeli Finance Minister in Jerusalem January 1, 2023. — Reuters pic
I’ve walked war zones. I’ve seen hunger. I’ve seen mothers boil leaves for soup and fathers break down in shame because they can’t find bread. In Gaza, they are past that. They are in the starving-to-death phase of this engineered nightmare. Kids gnawing on weeds. Families bartering the last possessions of the living for a few cups of flour.
Before the war, 80 per cent of Gaza’s people relied on aid to survive. That was before. Before Smotrich’s crusade to bleed the Strip dry. Now? Aid convoys sit like gravestones at border crossings, blocked from moving an inch. Gaza is a slow-motion funeral. Except no one’s allowed to bury the dead.
Since Israel ripped up the ceasefire and reignited full-scale attacks on March 18, over 1,400 Palestinians have been killed in fresh strikes, thousands more wounded. But those numbers are already a blur. Since the war began in October 2023, more than 50,700 Palestinians have been killed. Imagine every seat in Yankee Stadium wiped out, then double it.
And here’s the kicker: even Netanyahu’s government, bloodied as it is, had been murmuring about maybe, just maybe, reopening the flow of aid. Smotrich torched that thought like a man drunk on revenge.
“It’s good that the war has begun,” he said, grinning like a man watching the house burn, “We are changing the reality in the Middle East.”
Changing the reality? He means flattening Gaza until it looks like the surface of the moon. He means rewriting history in ash and bone.
And let’s not dance around this uncomfortable truth: the starvation of Gaza isn’t some unfortunate by-product of war. It’s a tactic. A weapon. A calculated strategy of medieval siege warfare, repackaged in modern language. Siege until surrender. Starve until silence.
Unicef calls Gaza “hell on earth.” The World Food Programme warns of “catastrophic” hunger. But these warnings float like smoke into the void. They bounce off iron walls and fan the flames of Smotrich’s war machine.
Meanwhile, global leaders issue tepid statements, as if watching Gaza bleed out is just another dreary chapter in the endless Middle East chronicle. They sip their cocktails in Brussels, draft their resolutions in New York, while children in Gaza drink saltwater because the wells ran dry.
There’s no glossing over this: what’s happening in Gaza is a crime against humanity, executed in slow motion, televised to the world, and met with catastrophic apathy.
This is not security.
This is not self-defence.
This is collective punishment on biblical proportions. And history, mark my words, will remember it as such.
When this war is over — and it will end, as all wars do — people will ask: how did we let it happen? How did we let a modern nation-state choke off food and medicine to millions, with full knowledge and cameras rolling?
And someone, somewhere, will mention Smotrich. They will say his name the way we say history’s darkest names. Not in respect. Not in admiration. But in shame.
Gaza, for now, starves.
But Gaza also endures.
And the thing about starving a people is that you don’t kill their memory. You sharpen it. You harden it like steel.
And someday, long after Smotrich and his ilk are footnotes in war crimes tribunals, Gaza’s story will still be told. Not of defeat. But of survival.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
