"It's not a war; there is no Palestinian army in the Strip deployed against the IDF." Francesca Albanese, under US sanctions and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is convinced, faced with the daily proliferation of images of malnourished children in the Strip:"Hunger in Gaza is a crime scientifically calculated by the Israeli government, a goal to be achieved to convince Palestinians who will survive to leave in the phenomenon that Tel Aviv calls voluntary migration."

THE COMMENTARY – The importance of photojournalism in barbarism

From Gaza,"parents tell us that their children are crying themselves to sleep because they're hungry." This was stated yesterday by the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus...

And for those of these children who survive, the damage caused by malnutrition will have a devastating effect on their growth, in addition to the trauma.

You have long been calling what has been happening in the Strip since October 8, 2023, a “genocide.”

I would add that this is one of the cruelest genocides in history, because it was perpetrated using twenty-first-century technology and means.

Tunisian President Kaïs Saied yesterday showed Massad Boulos, US President Donald Trump's envoy, photos of malnourished children in Gaza, including a picture of a crying child eating sand. How can anyone accept all this?

It's almost unimaginable for us to accept that months-long hunger can lead to the eating of dirt and stones. Palestinians in the Strip are deprived of everything; Israel aims to reduce them, including children, to a feral state. The most basic needs are denied to a population of 2 million, who are continually displaced and shunted from one end of the 365-square-kilometer Strip to the other, now largely increasingly southward.

There is also an IDF ban on bathing in the sea, but why?

Why must they deny desperate people without running water even the chance to wash in the sea? These are all elements of Israel's same criminal plan, implemented with the full support and complicity of the United States.

What criminal plan?

Ethnic cleansing. Which is being carried out with the genocide in the Gaza Strip, but also with the emptying of the Jordan Valley and the installation of 300 more checkpoints in the West Bank.

Returning to the famine, 953 trucks have been stuck for weeks between the Kerem Shalom crossing and Zikim. Another element that demonstrates Israel's planned, calculated, and desired famine?

Of course. The underlying problem is allowing the responsibility for distributing aid to the same state accused of crimes against humanity, and thinking it can do so through this GHF, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, strictly under international law. They've created a hellish mechanism.

President Herzog said yesterday: “Israel is firmly committed to respecting the norms of international humanitarian law. Even in the midst of war, we are doing everything we can to help civilians in need, in accordance with international law and our Israeli and Jewish values.”

First of all, it's not a war, because I'm not aware of a Palestinian army arrayed against an Israeli army. Otherwise, we're faced with a legal situation that wouldn't even allow us to discuss the issue of humanitarian aid with Israel; it's all wrong. The brazenness of what they want to do is well captured in the video created with artificial intelligence by Israeli Minister Gila Gamliel: the brazenness of the details, with the new settlers eating in the new restaurants while children and other people are starving. But Israel will not emerge from this horror with the same candor with which it entered it after October 7th.

He mentioned October 7th, many observers repeat the refrain: none of this would have happened without October 7th. Isn't that right?

On October 7th, a terrorist act of unprecedented violence occurred, a threat and a devastating blow inflicted by Hamas on Israel and its security. But what has happened since October 8th, 2023, is unjustifiable; it is not a legitimate use of self-defense under the United Nations Charter. October 7th cannot justify the total destruction of Gaza and its inhabitants.

The other objection that has become a refrain is this: Dresden was also bombed and razed to the ground to defeat Nazism.

I believe it's not wrong, however, to begin considering another comparison. What happened to the Jews in Europe in the years preceding the Holocaust: dehumanization, ghettoization. Perpetrated transnationally and with a significant role played by the media. The hatred against Jews then strongly resembles the hatred against Palestinians today. Confinement in ghettos, starvation, deportation. It's all there. Italy also witnessed and participated in it all; in 1938, it passed the racial laws. Today, similarly, it is perhaps the country that has provided the greatest political, diplomatic, and publicity support by opposing the suspension of the Association Agreement between Israel and the European Union.

So Italy is also an accomplice, are we also guilty of the images coming from Gaza?

Of course. Furthermore, Italy owns 30.2 percent of Leonardo, which should be brought to justice for continuing to supply weapons to Israel in the genocide in the Strip. The shareholders should know they are profiting from the deaths of children and the malnutrition so often depicted in recent images (including those of little Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq from Gaza City, a year and a half old, published in these pages, which are outraging the world, or that of Osama al-Raqab, five, from Khan Younis, published on the front page of this newspaper, ed.). And Italy would have an obligation to monitor.