Bob Geldof Issues Impassioned Plea to the People of Israel about Imposed Starvation in Gaza

Bob Geldof has made an extraordinary, impassioned plea to the people of Israel to end the starvation and killing of Palestinians. The founder of Band Aid and Live Aid was asked by the Express newspaper to respond to pictures published by them, and by the BBC today, of skeletal, starving children, who have been denied aid by the Israeli government and army.

“What has happened to the Israeli people?” Geldof asks. The question is all the more powerful, coming from a man who has long been active in Holocaust Memorial activities and events.

Bob Geldof is a Founding Patron of the British Holocaust Museums Aegis Trust for Genocide Studies. He was among those who gave the inaugural address in Westminster Hall, for the first National Holocaust Day Memorial in the UK. The lead singer with the hugely successful Irish rock outfit The Boomtown Rats also received the Lyndon Baines Johnson Moral Courage Medal from the Houston Holocaust Museum of the Unites States of America.

"Whatever the titanic enormity of your own past and current suffering, what has happened to you,” he asks of the Israeli people, "that you should allow this for even one fraction of a second? That you should create and perpetuate the suffering of this tiny little speck of humanity?”

The shocking images of starving children in so many ways speak for themselves, as the effects of the genocide – now widely accepted as being perpetrated against the Palestinian people – are shown in all of their appalling barbarity.

"Your government and your army seem to be out of control,” Geldof insists. "Every word from their mouths is a distortion of reality and the truth. Why do you, the sovereign state of Israel, tolerate and permit this? Why do you force people into helpless ghettoes and then purposely starve them? Or seemingly randomly shoot them as they approach for the scant food you dangle in front of their starving bodies?”

It is one of the most powerful indictments yet of a policy that has seen people die in their tens of thousands – and which has now extended to the use of starvation as a tactic – not just of war, but of a thinly veiled campaign to steal the land and 'ethnically cleanse' the Gaza strip of Palestinians.

"It is simply no longer possible,” Geldof charges, "to blame the current rhetoric or actions of your Prime Minister, the extremists in your government, the policies of that government or the actions of your military on the disgusting, barbarous and murderous events of Oct 7. You are way, way past that now.

"Whatever your war aim once was and however justifiable you felt that to be, at what point did the aim become the deliberate starvation of a terrified, tormented, traumatised population?” he asks.

All over the world, there is an increasing awareness of the inescapable truth that what is taking place in Gaza – what is being done there by the Israeli army in the name of hte people of Israel – is utterly beyond the pale, and must be stopped. But the political response is sadly, desperately, behind that of ordinary people.

"Has hatred consumed you such that extravagant evil is the permissible norm?” the Irish rock hero asks. "Has revenge so curdled your moral sense that all pain, all terror, all agony appears as victory? Has a false and foul sense of destiny enabled an equally delusional notion of national prerogative and right?”

There is, of course a solution to the madness. It is staring the world in the face – and yet so many politicians and leaders are being mealy-mouthed in the face of the horrors.

In a tone that is reminiscent of his pleas in 1984, when he responded to the famine in Ethiopia by launching the Band Aid single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ – which went in ti become one of the biggest selling singles of all time, he now has this to say.

"Feed the children of Gaza and they’re tormented terrified broken and panicked mothers,” Geldof pleads. "Do it tonight before you settle into your unthreatened dinners and the latest Netflix soap and your heavily censored news reports and online feeds. There is no argument in the world, no war aim, no imagined future that justifies this photograph and it’s abysmal and shameful, disgusting truth.”

Geldof emphasises finally how impossible it is to believe that the people who themselves suffered the monumental, murderous atrocities of the holocaust should now be responsible for such an appalling degradation of an entire people: the Palestinian people.

"I am incredulous that it is you Israelis that are doing this,” he concludes. "How? How did you get to here guys? How did it ever get to be so base? Shame on you.”

• The full text of Bob Geldof’s statement can be viewed on express.co.uk