Israel has used detention and starvation to bring Palestine to heel

Author Fintan Drury focuses on Israel’s less-reported use of detention and of starvation as a horrific and deplorable attempt to bring Palestine to heel long before Hamas’s strike

Palestinian women wait with their sick children for medical care in an overcrowded clinic in Gaza City on Wednesday. Photo: AP/Jehand Alshrafi

We know that the number of dead in Gaza is in the many tens of thousands, with the respected international medical journal The Lancet estimating the figure at more than 100,000. These are the children, women and men who have perished in the relentless aerial bombing, the indiscriminate armed warfare of the IDF that includes scores of independently verified assassinations of children by sniper shots to the head.

We know that as this genocide continued, Israeli citizens and Jewish families from Europe and the United States were supported by Israeli security services in the theft of land that has been ongoing for generations in the West Bank. The advances of the settler movement over the last two years are at levels unprecedented in the decades of oppression; the number of Palestinians killed is equally so.