By Mariam Jooma Carikci - Crescent International
It is also the second day of a complete electricity cut, including power to what remains of Gaza’s main desalination plant.
To put it bluntly, Israel is deliberately starving Gaza’s civilian population.
Even the Israeli human rights group GISHA, quoted by The Washington Post, describes this as a “conscious trampling on Israel’s obligations as a party to the conflict and as an occupying power.”
For those fixated on statistics, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians has produced some of the most macabre figures in modern history.
The so-called “only democracy in the Middle East” and the self-proclaimed “most moral army in the world” is responsible for the deaths of nearly 70,000 civilians, according to UN estimates.
More than half of these are children, the majority aged between five and nine, killed in their own homes.
Gaza also now holds the grim record for the highest number of pediatric amputees in any modern war—meaning more children have had their limbs blown off in this conflict than in any other. Let that sink in.
While Israeli hasbara (propaganda) continues to push talking points blaming Hamas “terrorism” and the human shields theory, it obscures the fact that the Israeli regime has failed to prioritize saving the Israeli captives, instead seeking to prolong the war at all costs—upending the most recent ceasefire deal to do so.
As recently as two years ago, these talking points would have been consumed without intellectual critique.
The zionist narrative of an ‘existential threat’ on their doorstep was the only lens through which the nearly 80-year war on Palestine was understood.
Never mind that immigrant East European Jews once found refuge in the kindness of Palestinians, who saw them as victims of religious persecution.
However, with social media providing a direct stream of the sadistic, almost ritualized, actions of the Israeli Occupation Forces—using elderly Palestinians as human shields, posing in the underwear of recently displaced or killed Palestinian women, rummaging through the toys of murdered children (one soldier even filming himself sleeping in a Gazan child’s bed in a demolished home)—the credits have rolled on Israeli propaganda.
It is for this reason that Adi Cohen-Hasanov’s piece in the Mail and Guardian, “Response to ‘Israel Uses Water as a Weapon of War in Gaza,’” would be darkly comical if it weren’t so horrifying.
Cohen’s response to Sozarn Barday’s piece, “Israel’s Use of Water as a Weapon of War in Gaza,” claims to “rectify the claims presented in the (Barday’s) article and accurately present the facts.”
Yet, where Barday cites the United Nations and internationally recognized human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch (HRW), Cohen provides only opinion.
There are no verified statistics or documented evidence in her so-called rebuttal.
Her response is broken down into six arguments she claims to refute; however, each of these six claims presents nothing more than the Israeli viewpoint, which has no bearing on the facts on the ground.
The first claim is that “Israel’s conflict is not with the civilian population of Gaza.”
As of February 3, 2025, the Gaza Information Ministry has reported the following figures:
· Killed: at least 61,709 people, including 17,492 children;
· Injured: more than 111,588 people
· Missing and presumed dead: more than 14,222
Israel has been quick to denounce statistics from the Health Ministry, which collated these figures.
However, international experts have affirmed their accuracy, as detailed in an extensive Le Monde article titled, “Why the Gaza Health Ministry’s Death Count is Considered Reliable” (October 2024).
The article outlines how the numbers are calculated and the mechanisms of cross-checking in place to ensure accuracy.
Importantly, it highlights that only 17 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are even partially operational after being bombed by the zionist army, significantly impacting data collection.
According to Le Monde, “The official figures are backed up by several independent analyses.
“British public health specialists found that the mortality rates reported by the Ministry of Health in Gaza followed similar patterns to those of deaths among staff of the UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees.
“Meanwhile, researchers at Johns Hopkins University estimated that there is ‘no evidence of inflated excess mortality by the Gaza Ministry of Health,’ and that ‘difficulties in obtaining accurate mortality figures should not be interpreted as intentionally erroneous data’.”
With 61,000 civilians killed—including the staggering statistic of 83 children bombed to death per day in the first 150 days of the war (Wikipedia)—Cohen’s claim that the “IDF is committed to avoiding harm to uninvolved civilians” is an outright lie.
As part of this argument, Cohen claims the IOF distinguishes itself from Hamas, which she falsely states “took power through a coup and has prevented elections for almost 20 years.”
Clearly, Cohen assumes Mail and Guardian readers are ignorant and unable to conduct a simple Google search, which would show that Hamas won an internationally monitored election deemed free and fair by the EU and the Carter Center in 2006.
Hamas secured 74 out of 132 parliamentary seats, defeating Fatah, the corruption-plagued Palestinian Authority (PA).
After Hamas’ victory, Israel, the US, and the EU refused to acknowledge the outcome, pressuring Fatah not to agree to a power-sharing agreement.
Israel and the US then backed an armed coup by Fatah’s Mohammed Dahlan to overthrow Hamas.
Hamas responded by expelling Fatah from Gaza, resulting in the split between Hamas-led Gaza and the Fatah-controlled West Bank.
In essence, this was not a coup by Hamas but a response to a foreign-backed coup attempt against a democratically elected government.
Hamas has called for elections on multiple occasions, but Israel’s arrest of Palestinian lawmakers and its blockade on Gaza have made organizing elections nearly impossible.
In 2021, Palestinian elections were canceled after Israel refused to allow voting in occupied East Jerusalem, in defiance of the UN’s designation of Jerusalem as an internationally administered entity.
Moreover, Israel and its supporters falsely portray Hamas as an existential threat, despite Hamas’ 2017 revised charter—which is freely available online—stating that it accepts a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.
Article 20 of the charter explicitly opposes zionist occupation, not Jews as a people, aligning Hamas with other Palestinian factions and exposing the false claims about its legitimacy.
Cohen further claims that “civilians are often used as human shields and their needs neglected to arm Hamas leaders.”
Yet, she provides no evidence to support this, relying instead on preconceived bias.
Meanwhile, multiple eyewitness accounts from IOF soldiers, reported in The Times of Israel, The Guardian, and CNN, confirm at least six cases where IOF troops forced Palestinian civilians as young as 16 to enter unexplored houses and tunnels ahead of Israeli soldiers—a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.
When concerned soldiers reported this to their commanding officer, they were told, “A simple soldier does not need to worry about international law,” and that “your lives are more important.”
The practice is so widespread that it has its own term in the IOF—“the mosquito protocol.” Reporting from Jerusalem in October 2024, CNN’s Jeremy Diamond interviewed an IOF soldier who protested the use of Palestinians as human shields.
When asked about Israel’s claim to have “the most moral army in the world,” he replied, “That’s bullshit! Of course, I don’t believe that.”
Cohen also portrays the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) as a humanitarian entity that ensures water and medical supplies for Gaza.
In reality, COGAT is an arm of the Israeli Ministry of Defense that enforces collective punishment, restricts movement, and limits Palestinian access to water.
Human rights groups like Amnesty International and B’Tselem have identified COGAT as central to Israel’s apartheid policies.
OXFAM’s report Water War Crimes (2024) details how the IOF has systematically targeted Gaza’s water infrastructure, destroying five sites every three days.
As a result, water availability in Gaza has decreased by 94%, well below WHO emergency requirements.
Israel also restricts fuel entry, preventing water pumps and sanitation systems from functioning, worsening an already dire humanitarian crisis.
Cohen uses the term Judea and Sumaria to refer to the West Bank.
These are biblical references and are not internationally recognized terms for the West Bank.
Judea and Samaria are only used by Israeli officials and more particularly by right-wing and settler movements to emphasize historical ties to the land.
The West Bank is not part of Israel even though Israeli politicians advocate for it.
The PA and international bodies outright reject the use of the terms rightly arguing that it attempts to obfuscate and normalize illegal occupation.
Finally, Cohen suggests that Israel is a humanitarian actor simply trying to improve ‘local’ lives with text that read like a corporate social responsibility ad.
It is devoid of the cruel reality of an imposed siege and occupation of an entire people.
She argues without irony that Israel and the IOF are committed to improving the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
Perhaps the deputy chief of mission at the Israeli Embassy has not heard of Yoav Gallant, the former Minister of Defense who on October 9, 2023, infamously announced a “complete siege” on Gaza, saying: “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed.”
He also added that Israel was fighting ‘human animals’.
In the face of such horror, Palestinians continue to resist.
Their ingenuity and resilience, as demonstrated by Inas Al-Ghoul’s solar-powered water filtration system, reaffirm that no amount of Israeli propaganda can justify the continued oppression of the Palestinian people.
Indeed, Cohen’s piece echoes Orwell’s 1984, and I am reminded of his 1943 essay on the Spanish Civil War:
“I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie... I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.’’
For Cohen and her cohort of genocide cheerleaders, time is running out as the world awakens to their naked lies.
Mariam Jooma Çarıkçı is a researcher with the Media Review Network and the author of ‘Kurdistan: Achievable reality or political mirage?’ (2013).
Zionist crimesGaza destructionZionist PropagandaZionist Agentdestruction of hospitals in GazaGaza Killings
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