Let me tell you about a spreadsheet that calculates death. Not metaphorically. Literally. Diving into Israeli government data, you’ll find there isn’t just evidence of war crimes, there’s an instruction manual for genocide, complete with calorie counts, mathematical formulas, and bureaucratic efficiency that would make the Nazis proud. And before you clutch your pearls at that comparison, understand we have the receipts. We have their own numbers.
The Bureaucracy of Murder
Israel doesn’t just know how many calories Palestinians need to survive, they’ve been weaponizing that knowledge for nearly two decades. Back in 2006, when the world was busy arguing about other things, a senior adviser to then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said something that should have ended careers and started tribunals: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Read that again. Slowly. They weren’t talking about enemy combatants. They weren’t discussing military strategy. They were calculating the minimum calories needed to keep an entire civilian population hovering just above death. Like cattle. Like inventory to be managed. Their math was precise. 2,279 calories per person per day, delivered through 1.836 kilograms of food. These weren’t estimates. These were policy documents, filed in government offices, signed by officials, and implemented with bureaucratic precision. When Israeli courts forced the release of these documents in 2008, the world had a brief moment of outrage, then moved on to the next news cycle. We should have burned down every embassy. Instead, we forgot.
The Arithmetic of Annihilation
Fast forward to today. Gaza with 2.1 million people, is trapped in what’s essentially the world’s largest concentration camp. Can’t leave. Can’t fish. Can’t farm. Every single calorie has to come from outside, and Israel controls every gram that enters. The humanitarian organizations, the people actually trying to keep humans alive, calculated Gaza needs 62,000 metric tonnes of food monthly for basic survival. That’s barely 1 kilogram per person per day, already below Israel’s own 2006 calculations of what constitutes the starvation threshold. Between March and June this year, Israel allowed exactly 56,000 tonnes of food into Gaza. Total. For four months. Let me spell out this mathematical murder for you.
Gaza needed approximately 248,000 tonnes during that period. They got 56,000. That’s 22.6% of minimum survival requirements. You don’t accidentally starve 2.1 million people. You don’t stumble your way into allowing a quarter of survival rations. This isn’t a logistics failure or bureaucratic incompetence. This is policy. This is intentional. This is genocide by spreadsheet.
The Theater of the Absurd
But here’s where it gets truly obscene, the performative compassion that follows. Airdrops. The great humanitarian gesture of our time. France, Germany, the UK, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE; all of them loading up planes with food packets, dropping them from the sky like some twisted charity display for their domestic audiences.
Want to know what 104 days of airdrops achieved in 21 months of war? Four days’ worth of food for Gaza. Four. Days. At a cost of tens of millions of dollars that could have fed the entire territory for months if used for truck deliveries. But trucks require Israel’s permission. Airdrops provide the illusion of action without threatening the starvation policy. And it gets worse. Twelve Palestinians drowned trying to recover food packages that landed in the Mediterranean. Five more were crushed to death by pallets falling from the sky. We’re literally killing people with our “humanitarian aid,” then patting ourselves on the back for caring. The sick genius of airdrops is that they allow every participating government to claim they’re helping while Israel continues the siege. It’s the perfect cover story for complicity. “Look, we dropped food! We’re the good guys!” Meanwhile, the only thing preventing sufficient land-based aid deliveries are Israeli checkpoints and policies.
Silicon Valley Solutions to Systematic Slaughter
Then there’s the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, because of course Silicon Valley had to get involved in genocide. This US and Israeli-backed logistics startup was supposed to revolutionize aid distribution in Gaza. Think Uber, but for starvation relief. The Famine Review Committee, actual experts who understand how to prevent mass deaths, analyzed the GHF’s distribution plan and concluded it “would lead to mass starvation, even if it was able to function without the appalling levels of violence that has been reported.” A tech startup. To manage the deliberate starvation of 2.1 million people. The dystopian capitalism of it all would be funny if children weren’t dying.
When the Perpetrators Confess
Here’s what should terrify you. Israeli human rights organizations are calling their own government’s actions genocide. B’tselem, one of Israel’s most respected human rights groups, documented what they called an “official and openly declared policy” of mass starvation. When the perpetrators’ own human rights advocates are calling it genocide, what are the rest of us waiting for? A written confession? We have that. Mathematical proof? We have that too. Video evidence of children dying of starvation? There’s plenty of that on social media, when the platforms aren’t busy censoring it. Remember that 2006 quote about putting Palestinians “on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”? Something changed between then and now. The constraint was removed. The guardrails came off. What we’re seeing isn’t the controlled hunger of 2006, it’s the systematic elimination of an entire population through calculated starvation. The mathematics shifted from “how do we make them suffer without international intervention” to “how quickly can we finish this.” When Netanyahu was finally pressured to increase aid shipments as international outrage mounted, his response was telling: “minimal” extra aid. Minimal. Children are eating grass and tree leaves, and the Israeli Prime Minister promises “minimal” relief. That’s not a policy failure. That’s a war crime with a press release.
The Complicity is Universal
Every government sending those useless airdrops knows exactly what’s happening. Every diplomat who speaks about “humanitarian concerns” while continuing arms sales to Israel knows exactly what those weapons are protecting.
Every news outlet that covers this as a “crisis” or “difficult situation” instead of calling it genocide is complicit in the mathematical murder of an entire population. The United States, which provides the weapons and diplomatic cover for this systematic starvation, could end this with a single phone call. Britain, which helps manufacture those weapons, could stop the killing by ending arms sales. Germany, still paying reparations for the last genocide they enabled, could refuse to participate in this one. Instead, they load planes with food packets and call it humanitarianism while the killing continues.
The Historical Record is Being Written
One day, sooner than these governments think, historians will write about this moment. They’ll write about the mathematical precision of genocide. They’ll write about the bureaucratic efficiency of systematic starvation. They’ll write about the international community that had all the evidence they needed and chose silence. They’ll write about the spreadsheets that calculated death. The airdrops that provided cover for killing. The tech startups that gamified genocide. The news outlets that sanitized mass murder with euphemisms and both-sides journalism. Most importantly, they’ll write about all of us. Every person who saw the numbers, understood what they meant, and chose comfort over confrontation. Every individual who prioritized their social standing over speaking truth about systematic slaughter.
The Academic Exercise in Evil
Let’s be precise about what we’re witnessing. This isn’t war. War has military objectives. This isn’t collective punishment, though it violates those laws too. This is the systematic elimination of a population through calculated starvation, textbook genocide. The academic definition of genocide includes “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” That’s exactly what these numbers show. The conditions, starvation below survival levels, are deliberately inflicted. The calculation is mathematical. The physical destruction is documented and ongoing. We don’t need to wait for historians to judge this. We can read the definition and apply it to the evidence. Genocide is happening now, by the numbers, while the world watches.
In a Nutshell
2.1 million people. 56,000 tonnes of food in four months. 248,000 tonnes needed for survival. The math isn’t complicated. This isn’t happening because of logistics failures or security concerns or bureaucratic incompetence. This is happening because genocide is Israeli policy, enabled by international complicity, and hidden behind a theater of humanitarian concern. The doors are open. The numbers are on the table. The evidence is overwhelming. The only question left is what we’re going to do about it. And how we’ll explain our silence to the children who didn’t survive our mathematics.
Behind closed doors, they’re calculating death. In front of open ones, we’re choosing silence. Both choices have consequences that will echo through history.
