Netanyahu's 'no starvation' lie amounts to a rhetorical war crime.
Who dare call it genocide?
Gazans Are Dying of Starvation (NYT headline)
After 21 months of devastating conflict with Israel, Gaza’s most vulnerable civilians — the young, the old, and the sick — are facing what aid groups say is impending famine. (New York Times)
ME: Dear NYT. Why the passive voice? Gazans aren’t dying from starvation. They are being slaughtered and starved to death by the Israeli government and the IDF while the West sends its prayers and sympathy.
Netanyahu has a media problem. That’s all.
When skeletal children appear on the front page of The New York Times, most people see famine. Netanyahu sees a PR problem.
In his latest press conference, the Israeli Prime Minister accused the Times of “defamation,” claiming that emaciated toddlers in Gaza aren’t starving—they’re suffering from “cerebral palsy.” The implication? That the global outcry over famine is a Hamas-orchestrated hoax, and that humanitarian horror is merely a misdiagnosed neurological condition.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday told local media, “There is no hunger. There was no hunger. There was a shortage, and there was certainly no policy of starvation.”
Despite assertions by Netanyahu and the IDF that there is no starvation, aid organizations and relief groups describe catastrophic shortages of food, clean water, and medicine, conditions they say are worsening as the war grinds on.
World Health Organization chief Tedros Ghebreyesus on Thursday warned that the more than 2 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza face mass starvation, in addition to threats posed by continual bombing.
More than 20% of pregnant and breastfeeding Palestinian women who have been screened are malnourished – “often severely”, according to Ghebreyesus.
Netanyahu’s strategy here is textbook: discredit the most emotionally resonant evidence (skeletal children), reframe it as medical misrepresentation, and then accuse the media of blood libel-style vilification.
This isn’t just denial. It’s a rhetorical war crime.
* * *
The Democratic caucus is fracturing under the weight of Netanyahu’s forced famine in Gaza. Some are speaking out forcefully. Others are hedging. And a few are actively defending the Israeli line.
Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York, is running against Zohran Mamdani for Mayor of New York. Cuomo’s stance on Israel’s starvation tactics in Gaza is a masterclass in political hedging—just enough moral concern to appear humane, but not enough to alienate his pro-Israel base or threaten the flow of AIPAC money into his campaign chest.
Cuomo now finds himself cornered by Mamdani’s growing base of support and his opponent’s moral clarity. In a Bloomberg interview, Cuomo briefly broke ranks:
“Do I support what the Israeli government is doing vis-à-vis Gaza? No. Do I support Israel impeding humanitarian aid? No.”
But by the time The New York Times called, Cuomo was already backpedaling:
“I was airing what some people feel… That’s their opinion.”
This wasn’t a change of heart—it was a change of audience.
* * *
Overall, the progressive wing of the Party has remained firm in its assessment of Israel’s Gaza genocide. A majority of Dems recently voted to block “offensive” arms sales to Israel—a historic shift that signals growing discomfort with the party’s pro-war politics. Sen. Bernie Sanders has taken the lead in calling for an end to military support for the regime.
Bernie still won’t call it genocide, but instead says, Netanyahu’s unrelenting military operation is an “extermination of Gaza.”
I’ll leave it to others to haggle over that one.
