Ahmed Moor, The Guardian - I recently looked up a biography of Rudolf Höss. The Kommandant who led the Auschwitz prison camp in Poland during the second world war was fastidious in his duties. He successfully oversaw the extermination of millions of people from 1940 to 1943, and, according to accounts, seems to have been a father who cared for his five children. His home life was imagined, and captured, by the film-maker Jonathan Glazer in his 2023 movie The Zone of Interest.
John Primomo recounts, in his biography, how the Nazi would randomly select groups of prisoners and sentence them to die by starvation. Höss was eventually captured by Nazi hunters and hanged for his crimes, in his case a slow death on a short gallows.
Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli defense minister, is the primary architect of the starvation policy in Gaza, which is unfolding as I write. The international criminal court issued a warrant for his arrest indicating “reasonable grounds to believe that Mr Netanyahu … and Mr Gallant … bear criminal responsibility for … the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.”
Gallant’s successor, Israel Katz, has embraced the Gallant policy. He and his boss, Benjamin Netanyahu, broke the ceasefire with Hamas in March. Since then, they have worked fastidiously to starve the people in Gaza – food, medicine and critical supplies for the maintenance of human life have all been prevented by Israeli troops from entering the territory for more than two months. This video shows a young girl, Rahaf, who is starving to death.
On 2 May, Amnesty International issued an urgent notice. “Israel must immediately end its devastating siege on the occupied Gaza Strip which constitutes a genocidal act, a blatant form of unlawful collective punishment, and the war crime of using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” it reads.
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