What led them to him was a trail of blood, and there he was, lifeless and slumping against a wall, still hugging a bag of flour that had turned dark pink. Two bullets had struck him in the back, and he had bled to death, alone, just seventeen years old.

Mutaz was my cousin. He was killed during the flour massacre in February 2024.

That day, thousands of starving Palestinians gathered around humanitarian aid trucks in northern Gaza, desperately seeking food. At least 112 people were killed and hundreds injured amid Israeli gunfire and chaotic scenes around the convoy.

I recently came across an article by pro-Israel advocacy organisation HonestReporting, originally posted in October 2025, disputing accounts of the massacre.

The organisation depicted the massacre as one of 25 alleged media falsehoods about Israel's war in Gaza. It argues that the overwhelming majority of victims were crushed in a stampede or run over by aid trucks, while approximately ten were killed by Israeli gunfire after approaching military positions. It also accuses the media of uncritically repeating Hamas's account and falsely portraying the incident as an Israeli massacre.

I would have let it slide, had it not been for something far more disturbing than the familiar exercise of defending Israel. The article effectively dismissed our lived experience, my family's tragedy, and the grief of Mutaz's mother, who wept over her son's body, cursing all the flour in the world.

One would expect an advocacy group to engage in ideological framing. But behind HonestReporting's account lies a broader mechanism that reduces human catastrophes to isolated technicalities through reframing, omission, and causal attribution. Together, these shape not only which facts enter the account, but also how responsibility for an event is assigned. I call this mechanism "reductive advocacy."

Evading accountability

By claiming that most victims died in a stampede or beneath aid trucks, HonestReporting makes the manner of death the central issue, narrowing the scope of responsibility to the circumstances of their deaths rather than the conditions that brought them there.

The significance of this reduction is heightened when set against the evidence. Alongside field medical reports, there’s been a UN Commission of Inquiry analysis identifying horizontal tracer rounds and gunfire in footage of the incident, and a CNN investigation that examined dozens of videos, 22 eyewitness accounts and forensic evidence.

Nevertheless, for us, the funerals on our street spoke louder than any report or commission. My family's neighbour’s teenage son was also shot dead in the massacre. He was brought home that very day, drenched in fresh blood, unlike Mutaz, whose body lay undiscovered for longer, his blood drying to dark brown.

Israel rejects such findings and has regularly dismissed international criticism as biased or antisemitic.

One need not pull the trigger to cause death. Circumstances can be deliberately engineered to produce it, while obscuring or diluting responsibility for the outcome. The past offers many examples, and Jewish history bears witness.

After sealing the Warsaw Ghetto in November 1940, Nazi authorities confined more than 400,000 Jews to approximately 1.3 square miles, imposing drastically inadequate food rations. Overcrowding, malnutrition and disease became endemic, and approximately 83,000 Jews died between 1940 and 1942.

The Nazis killed those Jews without shooting or gassing them. In Gaza, too, Israel set the stage for the tragedy long before the first truck arrived, turning starvation into the tinder for a deadly scramble for survival.

Deliberate starvation

Two days after 7 October 2023, Defence Minister Yoav Gallant ordered that Gaza be cut off from food, water, electricity and fuel. Aid restrictions and the bombardment of bakeries followed. By November, all five flour mills in Gaza had fallen silent. On 27 February 2024, the UN warned that 576,000 Palestinians — one-quarter of Gaza’s population — stood on the brink of famine.

Around that time, I began hearing a word from my family over the phone that I had never heard from them before: hunger. Desperate, Mutaz set out with two cousins towards Gaza City’s border, hoping to bring food home. He never returned. My uncle would say, "he never told us he was going," only to repeat, "Our hunger sent my son to his death."

Even if gunfire and deliberate starvation were not decisive factors in the massacre, HonestReporting’s reductive advocacy still erases the long-winded structural conditions that made it possible.

Israel occupied Gaza in 1967, extending its control over a population most of whom it had rendered refugees following its establishment in 1948. Although it withdrew its settlements and army from the Strip in 2005 because of unsustainable costs and security concerns, it maintained substantial control over the territory’s crossings, maritime access, population registry, and movement and trade.

Furthermore, the blockade imposed in 2007 placed Gaza under siege within an ongoing occupation, only a year after Tel Aviv effectively put Gaza’s population “on a diet,” by setting the threshold of consumption without triggering a visible humanitarian crisis.

The cumulative effect was a gradual erosion of the productive, economic, and logistical capacity needed to sustain Palestinians and their ability to withstand emergencies.

Such constraints create structural fragility that may remain partly concealed during periods of lower tension, only to escalate catastrophically fast when tensions rise. We have seen it in every major Israeli assault on Gaza since 2008; bombardment rapidly deepened the humanitarian crisis, while Israel’s control over the flow of goods has made basic necessities a parallel weapon against a population it tightly controls.

An unnatural occurrence

Mutaz was born into a besieged Gaza, his life shaped by the cumulative vulnerabilities that decades of occupation and successive Israeli assaults had imposed on his family and society. By the time famine came, those vulnerabilities were already deeply entrenched.

Reductive advocacy obscures this history by treating Gaza’s vulnerability as a natural occurrence. Once that condition is accepted as a given, tragedies appear as isolated crises, and the deaths can be attributed to the immediate conduct of those struggling to survive.

Taken together, the three layers of dismantlement show how fragments of factual truth can assemble into a misleading whole, obscuring the political agency and historical conditions needed to account for suffering.

Yet HonestReporting claims to defend consistent journalistic standards while selectively deciding which criticism of Israel is legitimate and which constitutes delegitimisation.

Like with the flour massacre, it recasts the victims of a system of domination as responsible for their own circumstances. In doing so, it helps normalise the conditions from which it seeks to absolve Israel, making dehumanisation part of the work of exoneration.

The HonestReporting’s broad claims, therefore, must be tested against what it scrutinises, what it omits, and whose accounts it treats as credible.

To my family, Israelis and their allies can reductively dispute the massacre and many others, but none of these fragments can erase the blood of Mutaz and thousands like him. Nor can any rearrangement of facts absolve those who manufactured the conditions that have dispossessed four generations of Palestinians.

We’re constantly grieving, a feeling deepened by the fact that responsibility can even become a matter of debate when one people occupies and controls the lives of another.

Our fifth generation won’t need to be taught that. They are already seeing this firsthand, at least those who have survived so far.

Dr Emad Moussa is a Palestinian-British researcher and writer specialising in the political psychology of intergroup and conflict dynamics, focusing on MENA with a special interest in Israel/Palestine. He has a background in human rights and journalism, and is currently a frequent contributor to multiple academic and media outlets, in addition to being a consultant for a US-based think tank.

Follow him on Twitter: @emadmoussa

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.