Israel Blames Hamas for Malnourishment of Israeli Captives as It Deliberately Starves Gaza
In a letter to the UN Security Council, Hamas blasted Israel for gaslighting the world on its forced starvation policy.
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The United Nations Security Council is meeting on Tuesday afternoon at Israel’s request. The special session, which Israel wants to focus on the conditions of its captives held in Gaza, will take place as the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ratchets up his campaign to blame Hamas for the impact of Israel’s forced starvation campaign in the Gaza Strip.
Ahead of the meeting, Hamas is vigorously rejecting Israel’s allegations that Palestinian forces in Gaza are abusing Israeli captives by depriving them of food. “For the Israeli prisoners held by the resistance in Gaza, they are experiencing the same conditions as the people of Gaza,” Hamas officials wrote in an August 4 letter to the council obtained by Drop Site. “The famine—caused by the occupation regime—affects all areas of the Strip, and inevitably its effects are reflected upon the 'Israeli' captives, just as they are reflected upon their captors, their families, and the overwhelming majority of Gaza’s population.”
As international outcry and condemnation of the forced starvation policy mounts, Israel has launched a media blitz to invert the narrative and accuse Hamas of preventing aid delivery and starving the roughly 20 living Israeli captives still being held in Gaza.
On August 2, Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, released a video of a severely malnourished Israeli, Evyatar David, digging what he said was his own grave. “I haven’t eaten for three days. There’s not enough food. I barely get drinking water. They give me what they can get,” David says as he holds a shovel inside a tunnel. “This is the grave where I think I’m going to be buried in. Time is running out.”
The Qassam video was clearly aimed at bringing international attention to the starvation in Gaza and to increase pressure within Israel on Netanyahu to return to ceasefire negotiations. Netanyahu responded by accusing Hamas of not wanting a ceasefire deal. “They want to break us with these horrifying videos, with the false horror propaganda they’re spreading around the world,” he said.
The Israeli government subsequently broadcast David’s image on a video billboard in New York’s Times Square, claiming, “Hamas is starving the Israeli hostages,” saying the plight of the Israeli captives was being “Ignored by the media too busy echoing Hamas propaganda.”
On July 31, Palestinian Islamic Jihad released a video of another frail Israeli captive, Rom Braslavski, and said the video was filmed shortly before it lost contact with the fighters guarding Braslavski. His status remains unknown.
The videos—which break with international conventions prohibiting the public humiliation of detainees—sparked widespread condemnation of Hamas by Western governments and the International Committee of the Red Cross. “These videos are stark evidence of the life-threatening conditions in which the hostages are being held,” the ICRC said in a statement on August 3. “Persons deprived of liberty must be afforded humane treatment and acceptable conditions. They must urgently receive the medical care and attention they require. All forms of public exposure that humiliate persons deprived of liberty and endanger their safety must be avoided.”
Israel has also released videos of Palestinian detainees, including those that contain coerced confessions of alleged crimes, which is prohibited under the Geneva Conventions. Israeli soldiers have repeatedly posted videos on social media of Palestinian detainees stripped, bound, and blindfolded.
In a letter to the UN Security Council on August 2, Israel called on the international community “to focus on supporting the efforts to return the hostages, to exert pressure on Hamas and to unequivocally condemn its actions.” The U.S. endorsed Israel’s request for the special session.
From the early stages of the Gaza genocide, Israel has baselessly accused various UN agencies and officials of supporting Hamas or of being Hamas operatives. Throughout July, as international anger intensified over Israel’s starvation campaign, Israel began publicly blaming the UN for the blockade on food, falsely claiming that it was refusing to distribute it. During the recent round of Gaza ceasefire negotiations, Israel has staunchly opposed handing the role of coordinating aid delivery in Gaza back to the UN—a term Hamas has insisted on in any potential ceasefire deal.
In its letter to the UN, Hamas cited international law, asserting that Israel’s blockade constituted a force majeure that prevented the Israeli captives from receiving sufficient food and medical care. “If the blockade and denial of basic necessities by the occupying power constitute a force majeure that prevents the provision of essential needs, the detaining party shall not be held responsible,” Hamas officials wrote.
Senior leaders have echoed this point. “Al-Qassam Brigades do not intentionally starve the captives. They eat what our fighters and all our people eat, and they will not receive any special privilege in light of the crime of starvation and siege,” said Abu Obeida, Al Qassam’s spokesman, on August 3. He added that Qassam would grant the Red Cross access to the Israeli captives to deliver food and medicine, but not without those same supplies being distributed to the Palestinian population.
“At this moment, while the Security Council is preparing to convene an emergency session to discuss the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza, the United States and the Zionist occupation are attempting to divert the discussion to the matter of the occupation soldiers held captive in Gaza,” said Osama Hamdan, a senior Hamas leader, in a speech broadcast Monday night. “This deflection ignores the unprecedented humanitarian disaster endured by more than 2 million of our people in Gaza as a result of the siege and starvation campaign imposed by the occupation—a blatant violation of all international resolutions and a challenge to the International Court of Justice’s call to stop the genocide.”
Hamdan highlighted the starvation in Gaza, including specific cases where the elderly and infants have died due to hunger. “The occupation has turned the Gaza Strip into a full-fledged Nazi-style detention camp, comparable to the infamous Auschwitz camp,” Hamdan said. “The world must act to stop this crime and prosecute those responsible, who attempt to cover their crimes with false crocodile tears, and it must compel the Zionist entity to abide by international humanitarian law.”
In its letter, Hamas urged the council to keep the focus on Israel’s conduct and the horrifying death toll it is inflicting on the entire population of Gaza. More than 61,000 Palestinians have been confirmed killed since the genocidal war began. At least 188 Palestinians have died of starvation-related causes, including 94 children, according to the health ministry.
“The worst-case scenario of Famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip. Conflict and displacement have intensified, and access to food and other essential items and services has plummeted to unprecedented levels,” according to a recent report from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a leading international authority on food crises. “Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths.”
Hamas also highlighted the fact that there are officially more than 10,000 Palestinians confirmed to be held in Israeli prisons and detention facilities, along with an estimated 4,400 taken from Gaza since October 7 and held in military sites where, according to their own testimony and as depicted in leaked video footage, they have been subjected to abuse, torture, starvation, sexual assault, rape, and extrajudicial killing.
“Under these inhumane conditions endured by the Palestinian detainees in the occupation regime’s prisons and detention facilities—supervised directly by the far-right minister accused of terrorist activity, Itamar Ben Gvir—76 Palestinian prisoners have lost their lives due to torture, starvation, and medical neglect since the beginning of the genocidal war on Gaza, including 46 martyrs from the Gaza Strip,” the letter asserted. It added that the Red Cross and other international groups have not been granted access to Palestinian prisoners held in military facilities.
Hamas urged the security council to compare the health situation of Israeli captives released during previous ceasefire deals with those of Palestinians freed from Israeli captivity. “Our prisoners released from the occupation’s prisons have returned in deteriorated health, having lost significant weight, as visibly evident in their appearance, and as they themselves attested to the harsh treatment and poor food provided to them,” Hamas’s letter said. It called on the UN and the international community “to address the inhumane conditions faced by our detainees in the occupation’s prisons and detention facilities and to put an end to the violations of international law and human rights perpetrated by the occupation authorities against them.”
In the month since President Donald Trump announced that a Gaza ceasefire deal would be signed within days, the situation in the Gaza Strip has grown more harrowing by the day. Israel’s full-spectrum blockade, imposed on March 2 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unilaterally abandoned the January ceasefire deal, has reached a stage where emaciated Palestinians, including small children, taking their last breaths has become a daily occurrence. Israel, with the full support of the Trump administration, is once again sabotaging negotiations for a ceasefire deal that would free ten living Israeli captives—half the number believed to be held in Gaza—and resume the flow of food, medicine, and life essentials.
An emboldened Netanyahu is now reportedly considering a significant escalation of Israeli military operations inside of Gaza. Whether this threat is real or a tactic to increase pressure on Hamas remains an open question. What is certain is that Israel is intentionally starving the population of the Gaza Strip as it continues to wage a scorched earth bombing campaign.
“Daily, [Palestinians] face a crime of the age—through deliberate killing by bombing and starvation—the effects of which have now reached even the two [Israeli] prisoners shown in the photos suffering from hunger, just like the two million of our people,” said Hamdan. That the world allowed Israel to conduct this siege and genocide unabated for nearly two years, he said, “will remain a witness—and a mark of shame—on the foreheads of all those who support or collude with the occupation in its crimes, as well as those who remain silent or fail to act to stop them and hold the perpetrators accountable.”
The full text of the Hamas letter is available here:
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Whatever Israel says... it's a lie!
All this with the help of the orangutan in the white house. Despicable.