Commentary: Dehumanizing and starving Gazans has been a strategy all along

An Israeli soldier would position his leg against the wall in the narrow corridor to our school, then order us: “Pass under my leg, or no school.”

That was a recurring event for us children during the early 1990s in our Al-Shati refugee camp in northern Gaza, the “beach camp.”

It took us some growing up to understand it as systematic humiliation, an experience that would define most of our encounters with the Israeli army. That left many of us feeling helpless and outraged, as it seemed an attack on our humanity.

This is why when former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant called us “ khayot adam” (human animals) after Hamas’ bloody attack on Oct. 7, 2023, it was not a surprise. Yet, this time, there was an eerie feeling that Gallant was thinking beyond the typical Israeli dehumanization of us.

“It was a prelude to dismantling what was left of us as a people,” Yousri al-Ghoul, a novelist from Gaza, told me over Whatsapp, in one of many ongoing conversations I maintain with contacts, friends and family in Gaza.

Throughout history, dehumanization preceded and justified atrocities. The Nazis before the Shoah, and the Hutu against the Tutsi before the 1994 Rwanda genocide.

Before Israel’s 1948 inception, the Zionist movement in Palestine negated our national consciousness, calling us merely “Arabs,” suggesting an absence of a unique identity. And by viewing us much as colonial powers viewed their subjects, we were perceived as inferior and less worthy of statehood.

Many Israelis today see Palestinians as Palestinians — a people with an identity — but still hang on, at least unconsciously, to the notion of superior Israeli Jews. This hierarchical thinking has normalized the occupation, so that Palestinian resistance against it is perceived as aggression against the natural order.

Decades of undermining our agency has evolved to a monstrous level, destroying what was left of our physical existence. Seemingly, it’s now not enough to besiege, indiscriminately bomb, displace and starve us. We’re now asked to die for food.

“We were lured into death traps labeled as humanitarian aid,” says Ahmed, a history teacher in Gaza, referring to the new system of food distribution under the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

“Even our bodies, the last pasture of dignity, are reduced to breathing corpses,” he added.

“Corpses” is the word the commissioner-general of the U.N. aid agency for Palestinians, Philippe Lazzarini, used to describe Gazans. Quoting a colleague in Gaza, he said they “are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.”

This is a metaphor my uncle, a professor of English literature, has used to describe Gazans under Israeli siege since 2007. He quoted T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to paint an image of a Gaza engulfed with despair and spiritual aridity.

To Ahmed, “corpses are not people, so no compunction killing them.”

Indeed, the Gaza war is the bloodiest in recent memory. Palestinian numbers point to 59,000, including 18,000 children, killed by the Israeli military as of July. A study by the University of London estimates the death toll to be 100,000.

More than 85% of those who remain alive are displaced, squeezed into only 20% of the narrow strip of land. Many of them are facing famine, while the rest are months into sustained malnutrition.

A dire situation has weakened many Gazans’ sense of self. No longer do they care if they live or die, many have told me.

Over a thousand aid-seekers were killed as they tried to reach Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution sites, but people still went knowing they may not come back. “The U.S. contractors manning the aid treat our desperation as savagery, and the IDF shoots us like rats,” Ahmed angrily said, referring to Israel Defense Forces.

And the hungrier and more deprived people become, the less “like us” they appear.

Al-Ghoul, the novelist, lamented how the “hunger games” turned some people against each other, driven by basic survival instincts. He added: “Don’t talk to me about civility when my children are fading to skin and bone.”

Meanwhile, Gaza writer Mahmoud Assaf told me that as the war fractures Gaza’s society, “personal survival tops everything. Very few people are now concerned with culture, education or morality, things that Palestinians typically took pride of.”

Assaf was offered money to sell his cherished library to be burned as fuel in the absence of basic petroleum-based products or wood. “I actually considered the offer to feed my children,” he said.

“You lose your soul hopping hungry from a displacement tent to another while herded by Israeli drones and tanks. You feel you don’t deserve to live,” he added.

But in the ocean of despair, there are those who find salvation in faith to reclaim some of their humanity.

My mother, 65, is losing the strength to walk because of malnutrition, as I watch helplessly from the U.K. But she tells everyone to keep faith, because through faith “she feels complete as a human being.”

A comforting outlook for many Palestinians, in a world they feel has abandoned them.

“The world says the Holocaust happened because they didn’t know about it. But the Gaza bloodshed is live-streamed,” my friend Murad told me.

He added, “What can I do to prove my humanity to be worthy of saving?”

“Shall I show them my blond blue-eyed daughter so they can relate to us? How about our malnourished cats?”

Our conversation was after an Israeli airstrike killed Murad’s sister and her family in Al-Shuja’iyya, a neighborhood in eastern Gaza City. We spoke as he searched for water to wash up following hours digging out his sister’s family from the rubble.

Murad’s niece, 5, died from malnutrition a week ago.

And like all Gazans, he’s deprived of grieving his loved ones. “No time to grieve,” he said, because one has to shut down such natural human instincts to physically survive.

And in doing so, one loses part of their soul, the sense of self as a human being.

To close the circle of dehumanization, they deny our right to feel pain.

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Emad Moussa is a Palestinian British researcher and writer specializing in the political psychology of inter-group and conflict dynamics.