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Starvation In Gaza and The Famine That Goes With It / Alex de Waal

Jun 10 2025
What the Israelis are saying is that they aren’t actually very clear on what their endgame is other than ‘Hamas must go’. So there are very powerful lobbies in the current government. The settler lobbies are very explicitly saying ‘the Palestinians should leave. Should leave their land be resettled somewhere else’. And then there are others who are saying ‘it would be sufficient for Hamas to be entirely uprooted to surrender and for some other government authority to come in’. But until there’s a clear and credible plan that people can believe, it’s unlikely that anything that Israel is offering either going to be acceptable. Clearly the Palestinians don’t want to leave their land. They have insisted that at least the Gaza Strip is theirs. Obviously some want more than the Gaza Strip. At minimum, they say the Gaza Strip is theirs and they should be allowed to stay. And until there is something that is acceptable to the great majority of the Palestinians than the Palestinians and much of the world will interpret this as a campaign, the end result of this is ‘either they move or they die’ and that surely is unacceptable.

World Peace Foundation director Alex de Waal returns to This Is Hell! to discuss his recent writing at the London Review of Books, “Starvation in Gaza".
Alex also recently posted the article, “The brutal flaw in Israel’s starvation plan: Famine won’t bring victory”, at UnHerd.

A new installment of “This Week In Rotten History” from Renaldo Migaldi follows the interview.

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Guest

Alex de Waal

Alex de Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation and a research professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

 

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