Gaza is starving — and we are just watching

AS Gaza continues to be battered and starved by Israel, the conscience of the world lies buried beneath geopolitical calculations and a shameful silence. The UN has warned of “famine-like conditions." Human rights observers call it deliberate and violent deprivation. But, we must call it what it truly is: genocide by starvation. As every day the world stays silent, it becomes a collaborator in this slow, systematic annihilation of an entire people. Gaza has become a symbol not just of suffering, but also of how easy it is to kill with impunity when the world refuses to speak.

History will judge this moment harshly. Thousands of innocent lives, many of them children, have already been extinguished by the Zionist war machine. Israel has bombed hospitals. It has reduced schools to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of people have been forcibly displaced. Civilians are cut off from food, water and electricity. Even baby formula.

All of this is known, and yet global corporate media continues to contort itself out of shape to mollycoddle the killers and blame the victims. And the nations that never hesitate to lecture the world on democracy and human rights now watch in silence. And, we Indians are uncomfortable being counted among nations that convey that Palestinian lives do not matter.

Let us not pretend that we, in India, do not know what is happening in Gaza or evade responsibility by saying that we have a lot of our own domestic concerns that deserve immediate attention.

When people are denied food, water, medicine and shelter, not by accident, but by deliberate state policy, it is not merely a humanitarian crisis; it is a war crime. Unfortunately, a civilisational nation like India is being counted on the side of those who are designing and perpetuating this genocide because, in our silence, we have joined others to pronounce the death of

our shared humanity. Let us not say, “We didn’t see it coming." We saw. We knew. We did nothing.

Our moral failure is evident in India’s online public sphere, where sections of the digital community have displayed troubling insensitivity toward Palestinian suffering. Social media platforms feature posts that appear to celebrate violence, with comment threads under news articles showing disturbing indifference to civilian casualties. Users share content that treats Palestinian pain with callous disregard, even mocking it, creating an environment where human suffering becomes a source of partisan satisfaction rather than compassion.

While such insensitive content circulates freely, conscientious Indian citizens attempting to organise peaceful solidarity demonstrations face harassment and detention by police. Students and civil society members calling for a ceasefire, removing blockages on humanitarian aid, compassion and urgency in our national response are branded as troublemakers. The state apparatus that often overlooks online hate speech becomes active in suppressing those advocating for peace and justice.

A recent high court ruling, where petitioners were challenging the refusal of police permission to a protest against the genocide in Gaza, betrayed a concerning judicial attitude towards international solidarity protests. The court insisted that citizens should prioritise domestic concerns over issues thousands of miles away, controversially asserting that focussing on distant conflicts, such as those in Gaza, was not patriotic. The Bench also warned that such demonstrations could potentially complicate the nation’s foreign policy and diplomatic relations, particularly concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which it deemed a matter of national foreign affairs. The judiciary’s emphasis on narrow national interests and patriotism, effectively discouraging engagement with global human rights issues aligned with Palestinian solidarity, echoes the prevailing ‘national sentiment’.

Historically, India has never chosen the safety of remaining indifferent or silent. If Gandhi or Nehru were alive, would they have remained ‘neutral’ when Israel, with the active support of the West, is systematically destroying a population’s capacity to survive? They would have worked to stop the killing and starvation with all their might. India’s record on opposing systematic discrimination, oppression and genocide is well documented.

In 1946, the interim Government of India requested the inclusion of the issue of discriminatory treatment of Indians in the Union of South Africa in the very first session of the UN General Assembly, making the fight against apartheid a part of the UN’s agenda from its inception. Throughout the apartheid era, India consistently supported international sanctions and boycotts against South Africa’s racist regime. As a leading member of the Non-Aligned Movement, India supported UN Resolution 3379 in 1975, which equated Zionism with South Africa’s apartheid as a form of racial discrimination.

More fundamentally, India is a signatory to the Convention on the 1948 Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention explicitly states that “genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which (the Contracting Parties) undertake to prevent and to punish." Article II defines genocide as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group", including “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction."

The systematic denial of food, water, medicine and shelter to Palestinians, enforced through blockades and deliberate destruction of infrastructure, clearly falls under this definition. India’s legal obligations under international law demand recognition of these acts as genocide and active efforts to prevent them, not diplomatic silence that enables their continuation.

Following the Gandhi-Nehru tradition, India should have gathered the courage to say that starvation in Gaza is not collateral damage. It is calculated. It is enforced through the destruction of food systems, walls and barbed wires and violent blockades. As hundreds of aid trucks sit stalled, children wither away and die from malnutrition. We are watching the most grotesque form of warfare: forced starvation.

What is happening in Gaza is not the result of war’s chaos — it is a cold, calculated campaign to break the will and body of an entire people by a handful of armed-to-the-teeth states with insatiable bloodlust. Such is their desire to maim and kill that they are criminalising protests of their own citizens. Palestinian children are dying not because there is no food in the world, but because they are deliberately cut off from it. The denial of basic necessities — bread, water, medicine — is being used as a weapon of war. And yet, the global community, armed with reports, satellite images and testimonies, watches and does nothing.

Manoj Jha is a Rajya Sabha MP, Rashtriya Janata Dal.

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