Starmer and Lammy wring their hands while Gaza starves
JVL Introduction
Tom London provides a useful commentary on the latest UN Report which is a formal declaration of famine in Gaza.
David Lammy responded to the Report saying:
“The confirmation of famine in Gaza City and the surrounding neighbourhood is utterly horrifying and is wholly preventable.
“The Israeli government’s refusal to allow sufficient aid into Gaza has caused this man-made catastrophe. This is a moral outrage.”
And what is to be done?
“We urge the Israeli government to change course and halt its plans.”
There is no effort to persuade Israel that the UK is serious: essential arms supplies and dual use exports to Israel continue merrily, trade is uninterrupted, Israeli criminals – ministers, government officials, military commanders, and violent settlers complicit in the genocide – remain unscathed.
The cynicism of the Starmer government is beyond belief.
RK
The famine in Gaza is not the result of a natural disaster. It was created deliberately by Israel with the support of the West, including the UK.
Israel is actively blocking the supplies that could relieve the famine. This is also effectively supported by the UK Government, notwithstanding its current hypocritical handwringing; mere words in the absence of meaningful action are useless.
Meanwhile, the starving people in Gaza are also being bombed, by planes and drones, and shot by soldiers or US contractors.
A million of our fellow human beings in Gaza City are being ordered to “evacuate” (some for the eighth time in the last 22 months) and be “absorbed” in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. Amira Hass, a highly respected Israeli journalist, comments that this is like how her parents were once “evacuated and absorbed”: her mother to Bergen-Belsen, her father to a ghetto in Transnistria. Increasingly, people are likening what is happening to the Holocaust.
Listen at the link here to Tom Fletcher, a senior UN official, about the famine declared by the relevant UN body, the IPC.
This is the transcript of Fletcher’s words.
Please read the IPC report, cover to cover. Read it in sorrow and in anger. Not as words and numbers but as names and lives. Be in no doubt that this is irrefutable testimony.
It is a famine. The Gaza Famine.
It is a famine that we could have prevented, if we had been allowed. Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel.
It is a famine within a few hundred metres of food, in a fertile land.
It is a famine that hits the most vulnerable first. Each with a name, each with a story. That strips people of dignity before it strips them of life. That forces a parent to choose which child to feed. That forces people to risk their lives to seek food.
It is a famine that we repeatedly warned of. But that the international media has not been allowed in to cover. To bear witness.
It is a famine in 2025. A 21st century famine watched over by drones and the most advanced military technology in history.
It is a famine openly promoted by some Israeli leaders as a weapon of war.
It is a famine on all of our watch. Everyone owns this. The Gaza Famine is the world’s famine. It is a famine that asks ‘but what did you do?’ A famine that will and must haunt us all.
It is a predictable and a preventable famine. A famine caused by cruelty, justified by revenge, enabled by indifference and sustained by complicity.
It is a famine that must spur the world to more urgent action. That must shame the world to do better. It is a famine that therefore also asks ‘… and what now will you do?’
My ask, my plea, my demand to Prime Minister Netanyahu and anyone who can reach him:
Enough. Ceasefire. Open the crossings, north and south, all of them. Let us get food and other supplies in, unimpeded and at the massive scale required. End the retribution. It is too late for far too many. But not for everyone in Gaza. Enough. For humanity’s sake, let us in.
Fletcher asks us to read the IPC report. It is at this link.
If you search for the IPC report online, it is not the first listed document. That is an Israeli Government document denouncing the IPC report. Israel keeps telling barefaced lies, and this document is yet another. Time and again, the UK media, to its shame, has treated Israeli lies as true, or at least plausible, without applying proper journalistic analysis.
Israel and the USA and a group of Western countries, including the UK, all bear responsibility for the famine and genocide in Gaza.
In the UK, there is a consensus between Labour, Conservatives and Reform to support Israel, whatever war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide it commits. The Government continues to supply Israel with weapons, including vital components for the F-35 fighter jets used to indiscriminately bomb civilians. It provides surveillance information, and training for the Israeli army and crucial diplomatic support.
More political energy has gone into suppressing protest against the genocide in Gaza than in actually trying to stop it.
UK media bears responsibility too. It has used omissions, word choice, framing and other propaganda techniques to avoid setting out what is happening with the necessary clarity. Instead, it obfuscates, complicates and spreads doubt.
The IPC report makes two main recommendations:
- Act without delay to put in place an immediate humanitarian response at a large enough scale to prevent further deepening of suffering and avoidable mortality from this entirely man-made catastrophe. There should be no equivocation, no doubt, and no excuse for inaction. Partial and temporary relaxations of restrictions have been repeatedly implemented in response to previous reviews and alerts, only for restrictions to be reapplied as international attention has turned elsewhere. Failure to act decisively now will result in an avoidable escalation of a catastrophe.
- Exert maximum pressure to achieve a ceasefire. This is necessary to allow for restoration of essential, life- saving services at the scale required to revert famine conditions.
Nothing we can do as UK citizens is likely to directly influence Netanyahu or Trump.
It should, however, be possible to influence our own government to take meaningful action against Israel, such as imposing sanctions of the kind put on Russia after it invaded Ukraine. Such actions by the UK could influence other countries and put real pressure on Netanyahu and Trump.
More people in the UK need to stick their heads above the parapet and speak up loud and clear and tell our government that this abomination – the genocide and man-made famine in Gaza – must be stopped now.
To receive Tom London’s occasional mailings contact him here.
Frances Coppola has put a lot of work into Zionism and the original framing of the ‘homeland’. It is painful to extract a Jewish heritage out Zionism, and I guess it is helpful to get intellectual feet on solid ground, especially in Britain. For me as a non-Jews this has been helpful this is a useful contribution.
Frances writes: […]there are enormous areas that I have as yet left untouched. And no doubt there are things I have missed or misinterpreted. But I hope I have, as Antonius said, “dealt with the pseudo-facts and dethroned them from their illegitimate eminence.”
Never has it been it more important to expose the fallacies and assert the truth; for if innocent lives were being sacrificed every day and human beings kept in anguish and suffering in 1938, how much more is that true today.”
https://coppolacomment.substack.com/p/lies-deceit-and-betrayal