OK, some of Israel’s allies are timidly upbraiding Israel because its finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “It’s not possible in today’s global reality to manage a war — no one will allow us to starve two million people, even though that might be just and moral until they return the hostages.” 

Well the Israelis are working hard to deliberately starve millions of Gaza’s civilians.  Despite the cooing and cawing of Israel-friendly nations such as Canada, the UK, Germany, Egypt and the European Union which call deliberate mass starvation a “war crime”.

In my column here, I reported that many women and children in Gaza are living on fewer than 300 calories a day.  They also have little to no fresh water to drink or to wash in.  Raw sewage and mounds of garbage line all the streets, and take up space around the few hospitals still open.  Most sewage treatment centres and waste disposal trucks have been destroyed.

By comparison, I want to compare the food and sanitary conditions in all of Gaza with the same in Auschwitz I’m well aware that no one – unauthorized by the establishment Jewish Canadians — is allowed to mention Jews, World War II and the concentration camps.  I understand only too well that by comparing anything – any torture, any humiliation, any harm done to Gazans today cannot be measured against what the Jews went through in the Holocaust.  But let me try in two areas: 

	Intake of Calories per day	Skin & other illnesses
In Auschwitz	Auschwitz: some prisoners were gassed when they got there, esp. women and children. Most were kept for labour and fed less than 1,000 cal. a day Less than 1,000 cal/day	Broken limbs and suppurating sores on the buttocks, usually after flogging. The winter, saw numerous cases of colds, pneumonia, and frostbite which developed not infrequently into gangrene. The dreadful sanitation conditions caused skin diseases, and above all scabies.Almost all prisoners suffered from boils, rashes, and abscesses that resulted mostly from vitamin deficiency and infections.Many prisoners suffered from typhus, tuberculosis, ague (malaria), meningitis, pemphigus, dysentery, and Durchfall, a disorder of the digestive system caused by improper and inadequate food.
In Gaza	Average intake is 300 Cal/day	More than 150,000 Gazans have contracted scabies, chicken pox, lice, impetigo and other debilitating rashes. WHO says that there are more than 485,000 cases of diarrhea. Polio has been found in the waste water. source: here

Of course death camps like Auschwitz were set up for the systematic murder of millions of Jews; yet it also functioned as a concentration camp which abused and tortured prisoner labour. Due to illness, beatings, and starvation not many Jews survived the camp. 

The ostensible reason for the utter destruction of Gaza is to root out Hamas and kill them. So far The Lancet claims more than 186,000 Gazans have been murdered. But we know there are not 186,000 members of Hamas, unless you include all women and children from babyhood to elderly people over 75 years. I’m not arguing that Auschwitz is worse than Gaza, or vice versa. I am arguing that conditions for the 2.2 million Gazans are totally inhumane and offer a slow path (or not so slow path) to death. 

Image at the top: By Jose Mesa.  CC BY 2.0