Two months after Israel began blocking shipments of food, water and medicine to the Gaza Strip, Palestinian children are beginning to starve. You can watch videos of them writhing on hospital beds, their skeletal frames showing through stretched skin, their eye wide with pain and horror, their mothers looking on helplessly.

With medical supplies dwindling, those hospitals that have survived the bombardments are bracing for the worst.

“Some essential medicines (are) already exhausted,” the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement Monday. “Without urgent replenishment, hospitals will struggle to continue providing much-needed medical care to patients.”

Clean water is scarce because the pipelines were cut off, too, along with the fuel that once powered the lone desalinization plant in Gaza. With a critical sewage truck destroyed as well, health officials are bracing for the inevitable spread of disease among the roughly 2 million surviving civilians, most of them living as nomads, usually in tents, fleeing over and over to escape the bombs or obey military directives.

“There is no life here for anyone in Gaza,” Awad Abib, a 38-year-old Gazan, told the New York Times. The blockade, he said, has caused “hunger to enter every house.”

And now it’s about to get worse. Much worse.

Israel is calling up thousands of reserves, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promising an “intensive” operation to expand Israel’s footprint in the Gaza Strip and try again to dig Hamas fighters out of their tunnels and rescue the 59 remaining hostages, 24 of whom are believed to be alive.

“It’s time to launch the concluding moves,” Netanyahu said.

The people of Gaza are caught between two monsters who don’t seem to care if they live or die. On one side are the maniacal terrorists of Hamas, the men who started this war, and who are now hiding in tunnels, torturing hostages, and still vowing to wipe Israel off the map. It’s a safe bet that they have stocked away more than their share of Gaza’s food and water, as Israel charges. Men with guns take what they want, since the beginning of warfare.

On the other side is an Israeli government whose decision to cut off all humanitarian aid is shocking the conscience even of its former supporters, including me. Amnesty International calls it genocide. Human Rights Watch calls it a war crime. It is, beyond doubt, an act of infamy.

And now, an escalation?

It’s past time to examine Israel’s motives, and to take seriously the belligerent statements of its senior leaders.

Is this really a defensive effort, a legitimate response to the Oct. 7 attacks? Or is the motive something darker — an attempt to make life so miserable for Palestinians that they must leave in order to survive? Is this an ethnic cleansing intended to allow Israeli right-wingers to realize their dreams of expanding Jewish control of all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea?

Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance, told The Times of Israel on Monday that Gaza will be “totally destroyed” in the coming offensive and its population reduced to a submissive nub in a southern corner of the strip near Egypt.

“They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places,” he said.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who supports not just the blockade, but military attacks on food and aid stations in Gaza, has called for “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians there.

If the option is watching your children starve to death, is that really voluntary?

Tom Malinowski is former Congressman from New Jersey who served in President Barack Obama’s State Department, and before that, as Washington director of Human Rights Watch. I asked him about Israel’s motives.

“This has nothing to do with freeing the hostages,” he said. “I think Bibi (Netanyahu) has forgotten about the hostages. His plan is to end Gaza, to create conditions in which the Palestinians feel they have no choice but to leave. . . It’s what senior officials in the Israeli government are saying. They’re not making a secret of it.”

Want more evidence that this is, indeed, ethnic cleansing, and not just a defensive war?

Look to the West Bank. The same aggressive spirit has led to the displacement of Palestinians living in those occupied territories, where Smotrich and Ben-Gvir both play key roles in the Israeli administration. Oxfam estimates that 40,000 Palestinians have been driven from their land since the Oct. 7 attack, and the United Nations estimates that over 900 have been killed. Smotrich this week said that the West Bank will be annexed soon. “We are at a historic opportunity,” he said.

There was a day when Americans were nearly unanimous in their support for Israel. But that’s changing. Gallup polls show that only 46 percent of Americans say they “sympathies” are more with Israelis, dipping below 50 percent for the first time.

And that’s certain to drop further. Americans under 30 years old are now twice as likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, according to Pew Research Center. Slowly, America is switching sides.

I remember feeling great sympathy for Israel, when it fought defensive wars, and when it had prime ministers I could admire, like Yitzak Rabin and Ehud Barak, men who were willing to compromise, to give Palestinians a path to statehood. It was Palestinians themselves who often blew it by rejecting reasonable offers and embracing violence.

We’re dealing with a different Israel today. I got a glimpse of it during a visit there a decade ago, when I saw the horrid repression in the occupied West Bank, where Jewish settlers were gobbling up more and more land.

And now, it seems, Netanyahu’s government is determined to make it even worse, using our weapons, and relying on our political and military protection. This, I fear, is not going to end well — not for Israel, for America, or for the Palestinian people.

Moran is a national political columnist for Advance Local and the former editorial page editor/columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be emailed at [email protected].