The image of a ten-year-old child weighing only 4.2 kilograms is not up for debate. It is not an opinion. It is not a symbol. It is evidence. Evidence so brutal, so simple, so definitive, that it exposes every word uttered by diplomats and governments over these past nine months as a lie.

When a child weighs as much as a newborn, what is happening is no longer a humanitarian crisis. It is a sentence. And when that sentence is shared by thousands, when it happens while aid is blocked, while water, food, and oxygen are denied, we are facing the oldest and most shameful of crimes: killing by starvation.

On July 24, 2025, UNICEF and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) published a devastating update: more than 34,000 children in Gaza are suffering from severe acute malnutrition. In many of them, the body has begun to consume its own muscle mass in a desperate attempt to stay alive. In others, the damage is already irreversible. Doctors Without Borders has documented cases of neurological atrophy caused by prolonged starvation. Al-Awda Hospital in the north confirmed the death of seven children from cachexia in the last 72 hours.

This is not a war. This is hunger as a weapon. This is genocide by attrition.

And the world has allowed it. Has sustained it. Has fed it.
Because unlike the Nazi ovens, this time there is no way to say “we didn’t know.” Everything has been documented. Everything has been published. Everything has been shown.
The photos. The bones. The mothers screaming in front of white body bags. The babies without incubators. The morgues with no room. The camps without rice. The waiting lists to die.

This is a Final Solution, 21st-century version: slow, televised, justified by mainstream media, carried out by drones and vetoed in the Security Council.

When the Israeli army bombs a grain silo, it is not fighting terrorism. When it blocks flour shipments, it is not defending itself. When it destroys wells, it is not responding to Hamas. When it lets children die of hunger, it is fulfilling an objective.

“Every Palestinian child is a bullet against Israel,” I heard in 1994, from the mouths of young Israelis fresh out of military service. I was 24 years old, with three small children, and I never forgot that phrase. Because it was clear. Because it wasn’t a metaphor. Because it was a doctrine.

More than thirty years have passed. And today, I watch it being carried out live.
Who is accountable for this? Who is allowing this? What web of interests, cowardice, guilt, and complicity has made it possible to torture an entire people while the world does nothing? How can Germany send weapons and money to the very regime that lets children starve, after promising the horror would never be repeated? What justifies the United States’ continued veto of every resolution calling for a ceasefire? Where are the world’s jurists, the treaties, the sanctions, the International Criminal Court, the Rome Statute?

What will it take for the world to say enough? A live-streamed Auschwitz? A mass grave broadcast by satellite? A child dead from lack of air with a UN logo stamped on their forehead?

Gaza today is not a conflict. It is a mirror. A dirty and real mirror in which all of humanity is seeing itself—unmasked. And it doesn’t like what it sees.
And you, reading this, cannot look away.

Because you have seen it.