By Jamal Kanj

Imagine you are at home, with your wife and children. It’s dinner time before you put your three children to sleep. The room is cold, the propane cooking cylinder empty, no food, no electricity, or drinking water.

Your youngest child, Manar, cries, “I’m hungry. We haven’t had food for the last four days.” She rubs her dry bluish hands together, “Uhf-uh-ih-ih-uhhf, … I’m cold.” The words escape her chattering teeth.

You, let’s say your name is Nader, look at Manar’s feeble body, her pale skin has lost color. The once bouncy curly black hair had tangled and knotted like a cluttered eagle nest, unwashed for more than a month.

Ahmad asks his wife, “Noora, did you search the cabinets and closets for the dry food?”

Noora took a deep breath, “More than ten times, our kitchen is as empty as our stomachs.” She looked at the cold floor in despair, her face twisted into a sorrowful mask.

“Press this against Manar’s stomach,” he said in a low voice and handed Noora a bag full of sand. “It’ll help her sleep, again.”

It wasn’t the first night they put their children to sleep with a sack of sand on their stomach. This has become a common method for Gazans to suppress hunger. It was after midnight when Manar stopped crying, only then Nader and Noora had a chance to close their eyes, not knowing how more miserable the next day would be.

Unsure of the time, Nader jumps from the floor mattress to a strong pounding at the door. Loud pandemonium and commotion outside, he looks at his watch, 3:45 am. His first thought, the Israeli military ordering residents to vacate the building before blowing it up, as they had done dynamiting blocks of buildings in his neighborhood a week earlier. Noora and the children awake. Manar crawls to the corner with her siblings, wraps herself around her mother.

Nader leaped to the door to find his neighbor brother, Ali, on the other side panting for air.

“Come Nader … come, let’s go.” He stopped to catch a breath after running up the stairs. “Flour trucks.” His chest ballooned and deflated several times, “trucks arriving at the Nabulsi roundabout.” Ali moved sideways to make way for neighbors clumping down the stairs.

The children’s faces lit up. Their eyes like laser light, at Nader, wide open, waiting for his response.

“There were Israeli tanks at the roundabout. They ordered me home yesterday and didn’t allow me to bring water,” Nader said.

“The UN is distributing the flour. The Israelis allowed the trucks in.” Ali looked down the stairs, “Let’s go before it’s too late.” He urged Nader.

Nader turns his head toward his children, Manar’s laser focused eyes turn into a vacant stare, open mouth. He clenched his teeth, pulled the winter coat from the hook, closed the door behind and followed his older brother Ali, down to the street.

The above is not a work of imagination, but a reality of life endured by thousands of individuals in Gaza for more than 150 days. It is exactly what happened in the Flour Massacre on February 29 to thousands of starving fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters in north Gaza. Where Israel used aid trucks to lure, murder and injure almost 900 hungry civilians. The blood of the starving, young and old, man and woman, drenched the flour sacks meant to feed hungry children.

In its efforts to render life in Gaza uninhabitable, Israel has not only targeted essential infrastructures such as hospitals, universities, water treatment plants, and roads but has also directed attacks towards civilian police. This deliberate targeting of police aimed to exacerbate the suffering and provoke a collapse of law and order. Despite warnings from the U.S. against targeting civilian police who maintained public safety and managed the orderly distribution of food, Israel dismissed such concerns, seeking to create lawlessness and chaotic conditions to worsen starvation and justify its actions as in the case of the Flour Massacre.

In covering the story, the Gaza absent Western media became willing outlets to market Israel disinformation cloaked in euphemisms to obscure the grim reality on the ground. Outlets like CNN along with other print media and the BBC for example referred to the death of 112 and the injuring of 760 hungry human beings as “Gaza food aid carnage” or “a chaotic encounter with Israeli troops,” blaming the death on stampedes and truck drivers. They then broadcasted, unquestionably, Israeli-manipulated videos showing the product of the Israeli designed chaos and claiming the hungry crowd posed a threat to its soldiers.

This wasn’t different from an earlier misinformation propagated by CNN Wolf Blitzer, when hosting Mark Regev, the Israeli version of the German Joseph Goebbels, in his show, The Situation Room, on November 15, 2023 where he started the show by saying “Happening now, the Israeli military says it uncovered Hamas weapons and a command center inside Gaza’s largest hospital.” Needless to say, it was all false. In spite of Regev’s abject disregard to basic truth, the Israeli Goebbels was brought again to CNN this week to market the flour truck massacre spinning lies, unchallenged, and claiming no Israeli involvement in the gunfire and blaming the shooting on “Palestinian armed groups.”

Unarguably, CNN, much like most of the American and European news outlets, have become a platform for disinformation with Israeli embedded hosts such as Blitzer who honed his journalistic prowess as a pro-Israel propogandist working for America Israel Public Affairs Committee, serving as an editor for its Near East Report in the mid 1970s.

It wasn’t until Al Jazeera aired a video showing the “chaotic” scene amidst heavy gunfire around the food truck, along with footage revealing bullet injuries in the upper bodies of victims, when some U.S. outlets, such as the New York Times, who espouses a faux professionalism, couldn’t continue ignoring the flagrant Israeli lies. The paper revisited the Israeli drone video that was made available to the compliant U.S. media outlets. After careful review the newspaper concluded that the footage had been altered with “ multiple clips spliced together.” The edits conveniently erased the events just before the crowd dispersed in all directions, evading bullets, scrambling over trucks, seeking cover behind vehicles and structures, and falling to the ground from direct gunshot wounds.

It is important to point out, the targeting of aid trucks at the Nabulsi roundabout is neither the first nor the last of Israeli attempts to obstruct the delivery of food aid in Gaza. Approximately three weeks prior, on February 6, Israel fired upon a crowd gathering at the Kuwaiti roundabout, while naval gunboats targeted UNRWA humanitarian food trucks. More recently, or three days following the Flour Massacre, on March 3rd, Israel once again opened fire on a hungry crowd awaiting food trucks at the Kuwaiti roundabout, resulting in the deaths and injuries of several civilians.

The submissive prostration of Western media, providing unchallenged platforms to Israeli PR spokespersons, is unprecedented in the so called “free world.” By agreeing to Israeli directives restricting media access into Gaza, Western mainstream media has no presence to report from the theater. Gone AWOL, the media has been transformed into an active participant in whitewashing Israeli genocide where the Gaza coverage has been regulated, directly and indirectly, by an Israeli hasbara manifested by the managed evidence and narrative of the Flour Massacre. Or to paraphrase the original Goebbels, Western mainstream media has become a “keyboard on which Israel plays.”

In fact, Western, and particularly American genuflection to Israel extends beyond the media. Case in point, almost two weeks ago, the White House National Security Communications Advisor, John Kirby, disparaged his own U.S. army, praising the Israeli forces for taking actions to protect civilians, stating that he was “not sure our own (American) military would take” similar actions.

When asked about the murdering of the hungry civilians in Gaza, Kirby’s boss, Joe Biden pled ignorance stating “There’s two competing versions of what happened. I don’t have an answer yet.”

In avoiding answering the question, the U.S. president accorded equal credence to the Israeli disinformation machine. In keeping up with his standing, Biden is consistent in his anti-Palestinian bias hyperbolizing Israeli victimhood, while downplaying Israeli crimes against Palestinians under the pretext of not having enough information.

This week and after five months of pleading for Israel to allow more aid trucks into Gaza, Biden joined other inept Arab dictators in an inconsequential gesture dropping 38,000 meals to 2,4 million in Gaza. A stunt by the incompetent leaders which is aimed more at mollifying international outrage against Israel than a genuine desire to alleviate the mounting starvation levels in Gaza.

The made for TV theatrical air drop of mere 38,000 meals was like a grain of sand on the beach of Gaza. The parachuted meals were equivalent to providing a minuscule 0.005 of the daily meal for every Gazans, or the equivalent of offering 5 loaves of bread per 1000 individuals. This is a farce and rings hollow from an Administration that plans to send Israel almost $15 billion, in addition to the weapons and political cover that empower Israel to carry out the very siege the air drops purportedly intend to mitigate. The starvation in Gaza is not due to a drought or a natural disaster, but an Israeli made catastrophe enabled by Biden, Western governments, and blessed by Arab dictators.

As you read this, remember Nader, who joined his brother Ali to feed his hungry child, Manar. He would have been most likely one of those killed or injured in the February 29, Flour Massacre. His children, if alive, are still hungry and cold at home, watching through a broken window (U.S.) aid parcels parachuting from the skies alongside the roar of an American-made jet delivering 2000-pound bombs over their heads.

Manar, if she wasn’t among the more than 15 children who tragically perished this week from malnutrition and dehydration, will always recall how the Israeli-made starvation drove her father to death.

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Jamal Kanj is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international commentaries, A version of article is published on Al Mayadeen TV.