The Gaza famine and the US-Israel final solution

The UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification declared last week officially what has been obvious for months: that due to the starvation blockade around Gaza and the deliberate denial of food aid as a weapon of war, that Gaza is suffering from a catastrophic famine. The IPC report details the utter devastation that has already beset the people of Gaza because of their deliberate starvation by the Israeli occupation, and the worsening consequences if Aid is not allowed into Gaza. The report makes clear that this is an “entirely man-made” crisis, and that without intervention, “avoidable deaths will increase exponentially.”

Some grim highlights from the report:

– Nearly one-third of Gaza’s population—641,000 people—already face “starvation, destitution and death.”

– Another 1.14 million are in the “emergency” phase 4.

– 87% of UN aid trucks were intercepted in July.

– Bakeries are shut, and wheat flour prices have soared 3,400% since February.

The daily reality for the Palestinian people of Gaza is scavenging through trash for food, and watching their children starve to death, because the criminals in the US, Israel, and Egypt have decided that they should die. An end to the genocide and mass starvation, the immediate resumption of aid, and a Nuremberg-style tribunal for everyone involved (starting with Biden, Trump, and Netanyahu) is the bare minimum demand that should be made by any person of conscious. With the Palestinian resistance and their few allies like the Yemeni people being willing to put everything on the line to ensure the survival of their people, the question remains: what are you going to do about it?

The murder of Anas Al-Sharif

Anas Al-Sharif and three other Al Jazeera journalists were killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike, adding to the hundreds of journalists killed in Gaza–in less than two years, over 270 journalists have been murdered. Israel intentionally carries out these assassinations to try to censor the 24/7 coverage of their war crimes; following journalists’ every move, they target the tents in which they work. Israel did not attempt to skirt blame, justifying the assassination by portraying Anas as “secretly” for Hamas, and merely “posing” as a journalist, pointing to a photo of him and Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the October 7th Al Aqsa Flood that successfully broke through the apartheid wall.

Just 28 years old, all Anas and his family have known is a Gaza under siege. A father of two, both of his children were born in the Jabalia refugee camp; in December 2023, 2 months into the ongoing genocide, his father was killed in an Israeli airstrike on their family home.

In April, Anas penned his final message to be shared in the case of his death, reflecting on the horrors he had been witnessing every minute of every day, as he bravely worked to expose the atrocities Israel continues to commit. He expressed disappointment in the world for allowing this live-streamed holocaust to continue–“Not even the mangled bodies of our children and women moved their hearts or stopped the massacre that our people have been subjected to for over a year and a half.”

Israel brazenly continues to attack the press on the ground in Gaza, whilst Western media continues to manufacture consent with their semantic gymnastics, never placing any blame on the perpetrator in their reporting of the ceaseless slaughter of Palestinians.

On the mass slaughter of the Alawites

In December of 2024, a US funded coalition of reactionary militants, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, evicted Bashar al-Assad from his seat at the head of Syrian society. The government formed in the wake of this internal shift also shifted Syria from the Russian to the American camp; a lateral slide from one imperialist pole, to another.

Assad had centralized power through the elevation of members of the Alawite minority to positions of high authority, within the bureaucracy, the military. Thus, the crimes of the Assad government found themselves expressed most often through Alawite lieutenants – massacres and black-site prison camps. This was a deliberate strategy of divide-and-rule – the righteous fury of the Syrian masses was turned inwards, perverted into ethnic chauvinism. With the strength of the Ba’athist apparatus now shattered, that chauvinism has broken the levies and now pools amongst the fault lines of the Syrian civil war.

Gangs of armed men and boys, dressed in military uniforms absent any insignia, stalk Alawite communities along the front lines, arresting and carrying out summary executions of predominantly Alawite men, women and children.

The new, US-aligned government has done essentially nothing to protect the people of Syria from these roving gangs. A commission was established in March, roughly around the time a UN commission was established for the same purpose. No arrests have been made, no steps taken to defend the Alawites. The reality is that the armed forces of both the al-Sharaa government and the pro-Assad rebels are made up of the jackboots of the former regime – genocidaires who are critical to the consolidation of power in Syria. No relief will come from the new regime in Syria – only the international masses, in particular those of us located in the United States, can defend the Alawite people.

Bolivia Elections

The first round of Presidential elections in Bolivia delivered a dramatic setback to the long-governing Movement For Socialism (MAS), as two conservative political parties headed towards the final round of voting. The MAS first came to power in 2005, led by Bolivia’s first indigenous president Evo Morales who aligned the country with Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and other Latin American “Pink Tide” countries. Morales and MAS were a thorn in the side of US imperialism, denouncing the corrosive impacts of the US in Latin America, standing up for Palestine on the world stage, and reducing poverty in Bolivia while extending representation to the long-neglected indigenous people. With economic gains for the Bolivian masses tied to commodity exports, most notably oil, and a still-extant old elite, the progress under MAS was always tentative, and Morales faced both protests from the workers and peasants who were his supporters and repeated undermining from the US imperialists in league with the old ruling elites who were eager to return themselves to power. In 2019, the Morales government was overthrown by a US-backed coup, with the openly racist Jeanine Añez temporarily becoming president, and Morales forced into temporary exile.

Mass protests by the Bolivian masses forced the coup government to hold new elections, elections that were won by the MAS party under the leadership of Luis Arce. Arce’s presidential term was marked by an economic downturn, a split in MAS between Arce and Morales, and the bizarre events of June, 2024 which was either a poorly planned anti-Arce coup, or a an attempt at a self-coup to ensure Arce’s power. In any case, the result of the Arce presidential term was the shrinking of the MAS social base and the constriction of the governments ability to deliver reforms because of both domestic and international pressures, even with the defeat of the 2019 coup, the threat of US intervention always lingers.

In the first round of the elections, MAS had completely split, with Morales calling on his supporters to spoil their ballots, and the MAS losing a number of seats. While these election results are undoubtedly a setback that raises serious questions, two things remain unquestionably true: that the Bolivian masses are the force that will determine the course of events, and they have risen again and again to defend their country from imperialism and reaction, and that Bolivia and all of Latin America cannot be free and sovereign until the boot of US imperialism is lifted from their necks.

LA Anti-ICE protester found dead

Reporting this week by the Los Angeles Public Press revealed that amidst the draconian punishments being handed down to anti-ICE protesters in LA, one protester was found found dead in her cell on June 18th. The police reported as a suicide, but as with all deaths in custody, people should treat that pronouncement with extreme suspicion. She was facing a number of charges, including 10 which carried enhancements under California’s racist “Three Strikes” laws, and during her hearing the day before she died, was remanded to custody with bail set at $1.33 million. For protesting ICE kidnappings. In addition to being a human tragedy, this death exposes the grotesque collaboration between Trump’s ostensible opponents in city and state governments and the Trump government itself.

When people across Southern California righteously rose up against the ICE gestapo raids, the had to confront the police and sheriff’s of Democratic run LA city and County , not Trump’s thugs. At the same time that Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom (and Brandon Johnson, and JB Pritzker…) are proclaiming themselves the anti-fascist vanguard, their cops were brutalizing protested, and their courts were handing down draconian sentences for righteous protest, like the one that led to this death.