Today I watched one of the most sobering interviews I’ve seen since this genocide began.
My former colleague and boss at The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald, interviewed a man named Alex de Waal — and I need you to know his name.
Alex de Waal is the world’s foremost expert on famine and mass starvation. He has studied, written about, and investigated genocidal starvation campaigns for over 40 years — from Sudan to Ethiopia to Yemen and beyond. He is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and has advised multiple international tribunals on how starvation has been weaponized throughout history.
And what he said about Gaza stopped me cold.
“This is the most intense, most severe, and most minutely engineered act of deliberate starvation that I’ve seen since the Second World War,” he told Glenn.
He didn’t stumble over those words.
He didn’t hedge.
He didn’t say “in my opinion” or “in many ways.”
He said: This is it.
This is the worst.
Let me tell you what it means to hear that from Alex de Waal.
This isn’t a tweet.
This isn’t a political talking point.
This isn’t me shouting into the void.
This is a man who has built his life around studying how governments use hunger as a weapon — and he is telling the world, in no uncertain terms, that Israel and the United States are carrying out the most targeted, precise famine campaign of the modern era.
He said it is more engineered, more intense, more total than anything in the past 75 years.
And when I heard it, I thought of every single child we’ve written about here:
Abdul, who was starved to death at 12
Rahaf, who weighed 11 pounds after once weighing 55
Youssef, just 40 days old, who died because there was no formula
Raheel Rasras, a 32-year-old woman who died after wasting down to half her body weight
The boy in the hospital with ribs showing through his chest, too weak to cry
None of this is random.
None of this is natural.
None of this is inevitable.
This is minutely engineered.
Glenn who has called Israel out for a generation, to his credit, simply let Alex speak.
He didn’t cut him off.
He didn’t try to redirect.
And in doing so, he gave one of the most important voices on this planet the space to say what needed to be said.
Glenn Greenwald recruited and hired me to work at The Intercept and always had my back. He holds power to account, and I respect him even more today for elevating this conversation when so many American media figures are running from it.
Because the truth is this:
We are not witnessing a collapse of humanitarian aid in Gaza. We are witnessing its deliberate destruction.
And for months, we’ve been gaslit.
Told that starvation is the product of chaos, of conflict, of scarcity.
But Gaza has food. It’s just not being allowed in.
Gaza has trucks waiting. They’re being blocked.
Gaza has warehouses, convoys, shipments. But they’re bombed, intercepted, or redirected into cruelty machines like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
We’ve written the names of children who starved in their sleep.
We’ve shown you toddlers too weak to sit up.
And still — the world refuses to act.
This is not an emergency.
It’s a crime.
I’m writing this post not just to inform you — but to beg you to understand what this moment requires.
We cannot treat this as a crisis to survive.
We must treat it as a war to expose.
This is why we built The North Star.
So that people like Alex de Waal can be amplified.
So that truth — fully, fearlessly, without euphemism — can still be told.
And if that matters to you, I need you with us.
We are nearly at 2,000 members — and every new member helps us say more names, tell more stories, and resist the media blackout that enables this genocide to continue.
This genocide will end. One way or another.
But the record we build — the testimony we preserve — that’s forever.
Let’s make sure it’s righteous.
Let’s make sure it’s unflinching.
Let’s make sure it speaks for the starved.
With clarity, grief, and fire,
Shaun
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