By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

“Six-hundred days on, the humanitarian situation in Gaza is at its darkest point yet,” reads the latest statement by the UN’s Humanitarian Country Team of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which coordinates Palestinian aid. Israel has kept Gaza under a near total siege for three months, preventing food, medicine, fuel and clean water from reaching Gaza’s more than two million residents. Deaths from starvation mount as the Israeli military bombs and assaults hospitals, homes and tent camps for the displaced in so-called “safe zones.”

“Palestinians in Gaza are enduring what may be the cruelest phase of this cruel conflict,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said on May 23rd. “The entire population of Gaza is facing the risk of famine. Families are being starved and denied the very basics. All with the world watching in real time.”

Israel’s violence is waged on Gaza with bipartisan US support. On the same day that Guterres spoke, Israel bombed the home of Dr. Alaa al-Najjar while she worked at the Nasser Medical Complex’s emergency room. Nine of her ten children were killed. Her husband, also a doctor, and her sole surviving child, 11-year-old Adam, were grievously injured.

Her brother-in-law, Ali al-Najjar, responded to the attack:

“We started pulling out charred bodies. One of the Civil Defense workers was handing me one of the bodies. She [Dr. Alaa al-Najjar], standing next to me, recognized it. She said, ‘This is Reval. Give her to me,’…as if her daughter were still alive. She asked to hold her in her arms…She wanted to embrace her daughter, forgetting that her daughter was burned in front of her eyes. We took those charred children and transferred them to Nasser Hospital. I took the doctor with me. She is now caught between the dead, her only surviving child and her husband, who is between life and death.”

Adam was rushed to Nasser Hospital’s emergency room, where he was treated by Dr. Graeme Groom, an orthopedic surgeon from London volunteering in Gaza.

“It’s difficult for me to describe the horror of what happened to her family, because we were in the operating theater all day, and this little scrap of humanity arrived when we should have finished what we had planned to do. Poor Adam was sent up to us for us to remove his left arm,” Dr. Groome said days later, speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour. “People who are very, very close to explosions have what we call a traumatic brain injury. Their brains are scrambled, and their cognitive function may be permanently damaged. We will continue to work on his arm and his other injuries. Time will tell about his brain injury.”

Those Palestinians in Gaza who have miraculously avoided death or injury during Israel’s more than 600-day assault and siege still face catastrophic food shortages, lack of clean water and sanitation, and the crushing physical and psychic trauma of sustained siege, hunger and war.

Al Jazeera reports Israel is targeting community kitchens, with up to 20 of the small but vital facilities destroyed in recent weeks. This further drives the desperate population to limited aid stations set up by a shady, US-based, Israeli-backed organization, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Hours before GHF began operations this week, its executive director Jake Wood resigned, writing, “It is clear that it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence, which I will not abandon.”

Drop Site News journalist Jeremy Scahill described the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation on Democracy Now!:

“It was established by people with ties to the CIA and Israeli intelligence, meant to serve as part of Netanyahu’s war of annihilation. Netanyahu himself said…that he was getting some pressure, even from his most passionate backers in the Republicans in the Senate. He said that they didn’t want the optics of starving Palestinians, that this could hinder the ability of the United States to continue arming and supporting him, and so they wanted to give the veneer of some form of aid.”

Scahill says that GHF “created what international aid officials have said are concentration camp, or internment camp, like conditions” to distribute paltry food aid. Troops guarding the installations have fired into the crowds, killing and injuring people seeking food.

While Gazans face starvation, President Donald Trump maintains his plan for the US to “own” Gaza, to develop it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” NBC reported the Trump administration discussed plans to resettle up to one million Palestinians from Gaza to Libya, which the White House denies. Regardless of the destination, ethnic cleansing is a war crime and a crime against humanity.

Meanwhile, citizens and students around the world continue to defy crackdowns on Palestinian solidarity protests, demanding a just and enduring peace in Israel/Palestine.