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A senior official at the global rights group implored members of the international community to "uphold their moral and legal obligations to bring an end to Israel's ongoing genocide."
Amnesty International on Monday published new testimonies of Palestinians suffering from Israel's "systemic and intentional" campaign of starvation in the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of people—including more than 100 children—have died of malnutrition over 682 days of US-backed genocide.
Israel "is carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation in the occupied Gaza Strip, systematically destroying the health, well-being, and social fabric of Palestinian life," Amnesty said in an introduction to the testimonies of starved and forcibly displaced civilians in the embattled enclave.
Amnesty said that the victims' accounts underscore the group's "repeated findings that the deadly combination of hunger and disease is not an unfortunate byproduct of Israel's military operations."
"It is the intended outcome of plans and policies that Israel has designed and implemented, over the past 22 months, to deliberately inflict on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction—which is part and parcel of Israel's ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza," the group added. The statement used language found in the treaty under which the International Court of Justice is currently determining whether Israel is committing the crime of genocide.
Among the 19 Palestinians interviewed by Amnesty are Hadeel, a 28-year-old pregnant mother of two, who said, "I fear miscarriage, but I also think about my baby: I panic just thinking about the potential impact of my own hunger on the baby's health, its weight, whether it will have [birth defects], and even if the baby is born healthy, what life awaits it, amidst displacement, bombs, tents."
Aziza, age 75, told Amnesty: "I feel like I have become a burden on my family. When we were displaced, they had to push me on a wheelchair. With toilet queues extremely long in the camp where we stay, I need adult diapers, which are extremely expensive. I need medication for diabetes, blood pressure, and a heart condition, and have had to take medicine which has expired."
Nahed, who is 66 yearsc old, said that "people I knew were almost unrecognizable" due to the effects of famine, and that "the experience of hunger and war has changed Gaza completely."
Adding that the desperate scramble for food "has denied people their humanity," Nahed described what she saw at an aid distribution site. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed or wounded while seeking aid, including more than 850 people slain at or near sites run by the US-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) whistleblowers have said they were ordered to fire live bullets and artillery shells into crowds of desperate aid-seekers, even when they posed no security threat.
"I had to go there because I have nobody to look after me," Nahed explained. "I saw with my own eyes people carrying bags of flour stained with the blood of those who had just been shot."
One emergency doctor at al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City—which has endured multiple IDF attacks, including the alleged execution of children in and around the facility—told Amnesty that many patients would be leading "reasonable lives" were it not for the "combination of starvation, destruction, and depletion of the healthcare system, unsanitary conditions, and multiple displacements under inhumane conditions."
Referring to Israel's imminent US-backed reoccupation of Gaza and plan to ethnically cleanse 1 million Palestinians from in and around Gaza City, Erika Guevara Rosas—Amnesty's senior director of research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns—said Monday that "as Israeli authorities threaten to launch a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza City, the testimonies we have collected are far more than accounts of suffering, they are a searing indictment of an international system that has granted Israel a license to torment Palestinians with near-total impunity for decades."
Such impunity was implicit in a recording broadcast on an Israeli news channel Sunday in which former IDF Gen. Aharon Haliva said that for every Israeli killed during the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, "50 Palestinians must die," and "it doesn't matter" if "they are children."
Guevara Rosas continued:
To even begin reversing the devastating consequences of Israel's inhumane policies and actions, which have made mass starvation a grim reality in Gaza, there must be an immediate, unconditional lifting of the blockade and a sustained ceasefire. The impact of Israel's blockade and its ongoing genocide on civilians, particularly on children, people with disabilities, those with chronic illnesses, older people, and pregnant and breastfeeding women is catastrophic and cannot be undone by simply increasing the number of aid trucks or restoring performative, ineffective, and dangerous airdrops of aid.
"In the face of the horrors Israel is inflicting on the Palestinian population in Gaza, the international community, particularly Israel's allies... must uphold their moral and legal obligations to bring an end to Israel's ongoing genocide," Guevara Rosas added. "States must urgently suspend all arms transfers, adopt targeted sanctions, and terminate any engagement with Israeli entities when this contributes to Israel's genocide against Palestinians in Gaza."
The new Amnesty report came as the Gaza Health Ministry said the Palestinian death toll from Israel's 22-month annihilation and siege of the strip topped 62,000—mostly women and children—although experts say the actual toll is likely far higher. The ministry also said Monday that at least 263 people, including 112 children, have starved to death since October 2023.
Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation—deny Gazans are starving. However, even as staunch a supporter as US Vice President JD Vance has acknowledged that "little kids... are clearly starving to death" in Gaza.
I found faces, hundreds of them, of children, mothers, teachers, tired men with empty pockets and broken sandals. Each looked directly into my eyes and asked, without accusation or anger: Are you still human?
Nothing prepared me for Gaza.
As a US physician trained in emergency medicine, I’ve spent decades in trauma bays across the United States, watching lives come undone. I’ve worked in rural hospitals where people arrived too late and urban trauma centers where they came too often. I’ve seen the machinery of US healthcare grind the spirit out of caregivers and patients alike.
But nothing prepared me for the weeks I spent volunteering at a hospital in Gaza. Nothing prepared me for the faces.
Not the statistics. Not the headlines. Not even 40 years of watching the Israeli occupation strangle Palestinian life with checkpoints, silence, and administrative cruelty.
No one should need more proof to feel the inhuman precision with which children are being targeted in Gaza, crushed not by chance, but by design.
When I arrived at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, I thought I might be helpful. I had skills, experience, knowledge. But I found something else entirely: a theology of suffering, a human Blue Mosque, a Hagia Sophia built of tarps and rebar and ash. A sacred geometry laid down in grief.
A place where stones have been replaced by the soft bones of children, and the call to prayer is now the wail of a mother whose baby was just wrapped in a death shroud. Gaza is not rubble; it is a broken house of God, a mosque of flesh and resilience, where every injured child is a mihrab pointing them back to their humanity.
I found faces, hundreds of them, of children, mothers, teachers, tired men with empty pockets and broken sandals. Each looked directly into my eyes and asked, without accusation or anger: Are you still human?
The French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas wrote that “the face of the Other” is the foundation of ethics. Not a metaphorical face, but the literal presence of another human, staring at you in their radical vulnerability. Not asking for anything. Just being, and in that being, commanding you: Thou shalt not kill. And thou art responsible.
That’s Gaza. It is the face of the Other turned toward us. We, the West, armchair allies, media skeptics, Israel Defense Forces apologists, and progressive handwringers alike, are being looked at.
And we are failing.
There is no universe, no scripture, no coda, no strand of human DNA where it is natural to shoot children in the back of the head as they carry sacks of flour. There is no ethical system, no wartime doctrine, no security calculus in which a mother killed while reaching for fava beans can be explained away without doing violence to language itself.
What is happening in Gaza is not war or strategy or self-defense. It is the ritualized and systematic destruction of the most vulnerable, performed in broad daylight under the collapsing architecture of international law.
It is unnatural. Not just wrong, not just cruel, but a rupture in the moral biology of our species. It offends the fundamental contract of being alive. It is a humiliation of biology and a heresy against physics. It is unnatural, like fission: a tearing apart of what was never meant to be touched. It belongs to the stars, to the great incomprehensibility, to cataclysm, to apocalypse. It does not belong on Earth, and never in the body of a child.
There is a room in the emergency department at Nasser Hospital with six trauma bays. As in any hospital, there are monitors and equipment. But what defines the room is the floor: a mosaic of congealed, scrubbed, and recongealed blood. Every 20 minutes, a crew enters the stage, they pick up debris, tissue, IV tubing, and gauze, then throw water across the floor. With long squeegees, they push the red tide into the drain. It is mechanical, but also meticulous and highly orchestrated. Still, it cannot erase the smell. Or the taste of blood in the air. Or the faces.
A 14-year-old child came in while I was there. She was brought from Mawasi, where the “safe zone” is nothing but coordinates agreed upon by artillery software. My fellow US physician had passed a tent school in Mawasi earlier, likely the same kind of school where my patient studied: a school that had been turned inside out by a drone toting a high-velocity rifle.
The girl’s shoulder was gone. Not dislocated. Not fractured. Gone. Replaced by shredded muscle and smoke and dirt. Her dark eyes were open. She was conscious. Her mouth moved, but she did not speak. That is Levinas’ face: the face that makes no demand but reveals everything.
The children killed while retrieving food were not on a battlefield. They were in the ruins of a society that has been deliberately starved. This is not collateral damage. This is intentional. It is the predictable outcome of a siege that has weaponized hunger and then punished the hungry for trying to survive it.
What makes it more obscene is the silence following each killing. The Western governments that mouth the words “civilian casualties” like they are a clerical error. The media that speak of “complexities” and “context,” as if complexity justifies targeting starving people and context renders a dead toddler’s face invisible. The theological contortionists who try to fit this into some redemptive historical arc, as if a baby’s flesh split open by shrapnel is somehow part of prophecy.
It is not. It is a desecration of everything sacred. And it is being done with the money, silence, and diplomatic cover of the so-called civilized world.
I did not go to Gaza to be a hero. I went because I’ve watched the slow, humiliating collapse of US medicine, where we document more than we listen, discharge patients without follow-up, fight insurance companies harder than sepsis. I went to remember what it means to be a physician, not a provider or a billing unit. Someone who kneels by a body and stays.
And here’s what I found. In Gaza, where there are no electronic medical records, no scribes, no Joint Commission audits, no Press Ganey scores to measure patients’ experience, I found something we have lost: time. Not time in the capitalist sense of billable hours or productivity, but sacred time, shared time, human time. In Gaza, physicians sit with people. They bear witness. Sometimes they fix them. Sometimes they just keep the face of the human being before them from being alone.
I also found a clarity of purpose. In Gaza, the distance between patient and physician collapses. There is no buffer, no euphemism, no illusion. Physicians get their hands bloody and hold patients as they die. And they do it without glory, recognition, or compensation.
They do it, and I did it, because the face is looking at us. Because it is not a child from Gaza. It is a child. Period.
For reasons rooted in privilege, the words of white US witnesses seem to carry more weight. But some truths are self-evident. No one should need more proof to feel the inhuman precision with which children are being targeted in Gaza, crushed not by chance, but by design.
During my stay, I thought often of my children back home. Although they are adults, I missed them with an ache that broke open every time I heard a child cry.
Before I went, I recorded a video in case I didn’t return. I wasn’t trying to inspire them or ask them to follow; I just needed to say the truth. The world is on fire in some places, and sometimes I feel I have to move toward it. Because if I don’t, something in me goes quiet and stays quiet. Silence doesn’t belong in Gaza. Not now.
So I say clearly: It is unnatural to kill children for being hungry. It is unnatural to shoot a girl in the spine because she walked near a food truck. It is unnatural to erase a family for the crime of standing in line for aid.
And if we allow that to become natural, if we flinch and say nothing, we are no longer witnesses; we are participants. And we will deserve the severity of history’s judgment.
"This goes far beyond 'wrong side of history,'" said journalist Ryan Grim.
The US State Department announced Saturday that it would halt the issuing of visas to children from Gaza in urgent need of medical care.
The decision came after a frenzied campaign by the racist online provocateur and close Trump confidante Laura Loomer, who raged over the weekend about the arrival of badly injured Palestinian children in Houston and San Francisco earlier this month.
The arrival of these children had been arranged by the US nonprofit group HEAL Palestine, which has helped at least 63 children "receive lifesaving surgeries, prosthetics, and rehabilitative care in the US."
In what she claimed was an "exclusive" report, Loomer—who has described herself as a "Proud Islamophobe," and as "pro-white nationalism"—shared a video posted by HEAL Palestine of children on crutches and wheelchairs arriving with their families at a US airport.
She falsely claimed that the children's shouts of joy were "jihadi chants" and that they were "doing the HAMAS terror whistle" and referred to the children as "Islamic invaders from an Islamic terror hot zone."
Loomer tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the State Department in another post: "How did Palestinians get Visas under the Trump administration to get into the United States? Did @StateDept approve this? How did they get out of Gaza? Is @SecRubio aware of this?"
The day after Loomer's tirade began, the State Department announced that "all visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days."
HEAL Palestine issued a statement Sunday saying it was "distressed" by the State Department's decision. Contrary to claims by Loomer that the children would become "like leeches on welfare," HEAL clarified that the children in the country were here "on temporary visas for essential medical treatment not available at home."
"After their treatment is complete," the organization said, "the children and any accompanying family members return to the Middle East."
Rhana Natour, the director and producer of All That Remains—a documentary for Al Jazeera's Fault Lines on a 13-year-old Palestinian girl who traveled to the US to receive treatment after losing her leg in an Israeli airstrike—told Drop Site News that the humanitarian visas canceled by the State Department are granted "exclusively to burned and disabled children and their parents."
(Video: Al Jazeera English)
Loomer took credit for the department's cancellation of the visas, thanking Rubio and calling it "fantastic news."
"Hopefully, all GAZANS will be added to President Trump's travel ban," Loomer wrote. "There are doctors in other countries. The US is not the world's hospital!"
In response, the X account for Drop Site, which has frequently highlighted the work of HEAL Palestine, responded to Loomer, saying that "Your taxes aren't funding the care for these Palestinian children," and that their treatment was being funded entirely through private support from donors.
"The only role of US tax dollars in the picture," Drop Site said, "is the costly review the State Department will now be forced to conduct because of a deranged racist's ravings to block children from lifesaving treatment."
Loomer later suggested that the wounded Palestinian children were being treated "for free," at the expense of US taxpayers, while "US Veterans are homeless on the street, unable to get healthcare."
Journalist Ryan Grim, Drop Site's co-founder, responded: "Trump slashed Medicaid, slashed the [Department of Veterans Affairs], slashed [Affordable Care Act] exchange subsidies, and increased the military budget to over a trillion dollars but Loomer wants people to think that the reason they don't have healthcare is that a Palestinian child got treated thanks to donations from people heartbroken at what Israel is doing to children."
"The trillion dollars being spent to blow the arms and legs off of children is the problem," Grim continued. "Not the children themselves."
In July, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) reported that since October 2023, at least 17,000 children have been killed and 33,000 injured across Gaza, many of them attacked by Israeli forces "as they [lined] up for lifesaving humanitarian aid."
The UN reported Friday that "10 children were losing one or both legs every day," making Gaza "home to the largest group of child amputees in modern history."
Despite having no formal position, Loomer is one of the most influential figures in the Trump administration—reportedly having spearheaded the hiring and firing of aides for key roles, including in the National Security Council.
Loomer has said that the US is a "Judeo-Christian ethnostate" being "destroyed" by immigration, and—following the opening of Trump's immigrant detention camp "Alligator Alcatraz"—joked that the "alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals," a number referring to the total population of Latinos in the United States.
Following news of the State Department's decision to cancel visas for injured Palestinians, Grim wrote that it "looks like [Loomer] is also setting visa policy."
"So we want to arm Israel to the teeth, allow them to block food and medical aid from getting into Gaza, and also condemn those facing medical emergencies to death," he said. "This goes far beyond 'wrong side of history.'"