Gaza is not a humanitarian crisis. It is a laboratory of imperial famine, where the settler state starves a people with U.S. funding and European silence. What they call aid, we call ammunition.
By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | May 12, 2025
I. When the Colonizer’s Press Whispers the Truth
PBS NewsHour has always been the velvet glove of U.S. propaganda. Draped in soothing tones and tote-bag liberalism, it specializes in laundering atrocity through the language of “concern.” And in this case, it’s Laura Barrón-López—White House correspondent, CNN contributor, Beltway insider—who delivers the script. Her co-authors, Satvi Sunkara, Gerard Edic, and Andrew Corkery, are standard-issue national affairs producers—career functionaries of the imperial media apparatus. Together, they broadcast genocide with a calm affect, because the job isn’t to prevent the crime. It’s to make it sound reasonable.
PBS, for all its self-marketing as public service journalism, is heavily funded by the same imperial class it pretends to hold accountable. Its backers include the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, BNSF Railway, Raymond James, and the Department of Defense–aligned think tanks that help shape its foreign coverage. It’s no accident that while Gaza starves, PBS is running banner ads urging viewers to “Save Public Broadcasting.” That’s the real priority: keeping the lights on in D.C., not restoring them in Rafah.
And yet, this report on Gaza dares—perhaps unintentionally—to show us the skeleton beneath the skin. The broadcast features Ghada Alhaddad of Oxfam describing “catastrophic” conditions: malnourished children, collapsed hospitals, market shelves stripped of vegetables, mothers rationing water by the drop. But listen closely to the framing:
- “No food, water, shelter or medication has been allowed into the embattled territory…” — Who is the agent? Who is denying aid? Passive voice smuggles in plausible deniability.
- “Aid groups warn of a worsening humanitarian crisis…” — Not a war crime, not a siege, not genocide. A “crisis,” like an earthquake or a plague.
- “Once the siege is lifted…” — As if this were a natural blockade, not the deliberate policy of a settler-colonial regime backed by U.S. dollars and bombs.
The role of PBS here is not to tell the truth—it’s to soften it. To reduce colonial starvation to a logistical hiccup. To frame total war on civilians as a tragic impasse between two sides. It offers the viewer emotional catharsis—sympathy for starving children—without ever naming the structure or the state that’s killing them. It reports the horror. Then scrubs the politics. This is cognitive warfare through omission. And every omission is a battlefield surrendered to empire.
II. Siege Is the Policy, Starvation Is the Weapon
The facts are devastating. But more importantly—they are structured. According to the interview, Israel has blocked all food, medicine, fuel, and water from entering Gaza since early March. Hospitals have collapsed. Aid groups like Oxfam distributed their last food parcels in April. Mothers are watching their children fade into bone while eggs, milk, vegetables, and clean water vanish from the markets. Fuel for desalination is running out. Starvation is spreading, and the humanitarian infrastructure has been choked into paralysis.
What this article only implies—what we must state plainly—is that none of this is accidental. Gaza is not starving because of war. Gaza is starving because starvation has always been a Zionist weapon. This is a policy of calibrated deprivation. In 2006, an Israeli advisor to the security cabinet told Haaretz that Israel would “put the Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die of hunger.” The state literally calculated the caloric minimums needed to avoid famine, while deliberately limiting imports. That was under Olmert. Today under Netanyahu, it’s not a diet. It’s extermination.
The context is even broader. This siege follows more than 17 years of blockade and repeated military assaults—2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2023. But this time, it is unrestrained. More than 35,000 Palestinians are dead. Over 70% of housing stock has been destroyed. Schools, bakeries, UN shelters, and hospitals are bombed with impunity. Food convoys are attacked. This is not “collective punishment.” That term is far too polite. This is deliberate demographic war. This is colonial elimination through hunger, thirst, and burial.
And who enables it? The U.S. Congress, which just approved another $26 billion in military aid to Israel. The Biden administration, which vetoes every ceasefire resolution at the U.N. The Trump regime, which praises Israeli “restraint” while offering tariff exemptions for Israeli arms manufacturers. Europe wrings its hands. Egypt collaborates in sealing the Rafah crossing. The Arab League holds summits. But Gaza is alone—except for the people of the world who see clearly that this is genocide, and that the so-called “rules-based order” is just settler power in diplomatic drag.
There is no logistical failure here. There is no humanitarian “emergency.” This is siege warfare by the book. A full-spectrum counterinsurgency against Palestinian existence itself. And the only thing more brutal than the policy is the silence it demands from those who know better. That silence is complicity. That silence is paid for in children’s ribs.
III. Gaza Is Not a Tragedy—It’s a Frontline of Anti-Colonial Resistance
The West wants you to feel sorry for Gaza—then shut up. They want you to cry for the children, then change the channel before asking why they’re dying. But Gaza doesn’t need tears. It needs analysis. It needs action. And above all, it needs the truth: this is not a humanitarian crisis. It is a colonial war. Starvation is not collateral damage—it is imperial strategy. And Palestine is not a charity case. It is a national liberation struggle under siege.
The blockade, the bombs, the famine, the fuel denial—these are not isolated cruelties. They are part of a unified counterinsurgency doctrine designed to eliminate Palestinian life, memory, and resistance. This isn’t about Hamas. Israel’s goal is total social collapse. Make life unlivable. Push people south. Then say it’s self-evacuation. Burn the olive trees. Bomb the hospitals. Seal the borders. Then claim Gaza is empty. That’s not war—it’s settler strategy with U.S. financing.
Meanwhile, the Western media asks if Gaza is “on the brink of famine,” as if children weighing 20 pounds isn’t already the edge. As if a population eating animal feed isn’t already over it. The same imperial press that framed Iraq’s starvation as “sanctions” now calls Gaza’s genocide a “humanitarian challenge.” But famine is not a glitch. It’s a weapon. It’s rationed genocide. And the only thing more nauseating than the crime is the choreography around it.
Yet even under rubble, Gaza refuses to surrender. Mothers boil weeds. Doctors operate by flashlight. Resistance fighters defend refugee camps with salvaged weapons. Children recite poetry in the ruins. Gaza is not only starving—it is fighting. It is affirming that the Palestinian nation exists, and will exist. In every tunnel, every tent, every whispered prayer, Gaza is a declaration: we are still here. And that defiance is what terrifies Zionism more than rockets ever could.
This is not a crisis to be managed. It is a front to be joined. The question isn’t “how do we feed Gaza?” The question is: how do we help Gaza break the siege—materially, ideologically, internationally? Mourning is not enough. Understanding is not enough. Only solidarity that interrupts the siege can honor the dead and protect the living.
IV. Starvation Is Policy—Solidarity Must Be Strategy
The bombs may fall in Gaza, but the war runs through Washington. Through every AIPAC fundraiser, every weapons contract signed at the Pentagon, every veto cast in the U.N. chamber. The settler-colonial siege of Palestine is not just an Israeli project—it is the frontline of hyper-imperialism, where U.S. power launders genocide through foreign aid packages and bipartisan applause. To stand with Gaza is to stand against the entire global architecture of empire.
But this stand is not theoretical. It has a lineage. In 2009, dockworkers in Oakland refused to unload an Israeli ship. In 2021, tens of thousands across the U.S. shut down highways, marched on weapons plants, and linked Black liberation to Palestinian resistance. Indigenous organizers from Turtle Island to the Andes have long recognized the kinship of their struggle with Palestine’s—because settler colonialism speaks the same language whether it’s Hebrew or English. Cuba, Venezuela, and South Africa have all taken diplomatic action to isolate the Zionist regime. And today, Arab and Muslim youth across the West are rising—against silence, against repression, and against their governments’ complicity.
Now it’s our turn. Solidarity isn’t a slogan—it’s sabotage of the colonial supply chain. It means moving beyond hashtags into material disruption. It means understanding Gaza not as an isolated horror, but as a node in the matrix of imperial control. And it means acting like the bombs are falling on our own kin—because they are.
Concrete tactical actions for U.S.-based revolutionaries:
- Target Zionist infrastructure: Shut down Israeli weapons manufacturers, logistics firms, and companies profiting from the siege (e.g., Elbit Systems, Boeing, Raytheon, Caterpillar).
- Expose complicity in your institutions: Force schools, unions, churches, and city councils to divest from Israeli bonds, contracts, and partnerships.
- Disrupt normalization: Confront media figures, politicians, and cultural institutions that sanitize genocide under the guise of “dialogue” or “balance.”
- Link struggles: Forge joint campaigns between Palestinian, Black, Indigenous, and migrant organizations resisting settler violence in all its forms—from ICE raids to Israeli airstrikes.
- Build revolutionary infrastructure: Organize defense committees, aid caravans, counter-propaganda networks, and international delegations that materially assist Palestinian survival and resistance.
Gaza doesn’t need our pity. It needs rupture. It needs the empire’s logistics to break. Its weapons to rust. Its lies to wither. And its people—those of us inside the belly—to turn from spectators into saboteurs. This is not a test of morality. It is a measure of commitment. The line has been drawn in rubble and blood. Choose your side.
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