As the Israeli government weighs, once again, expanding its genocidal military campaign in Gaza, the enclave is sliding into a full-scale famine.

“We're seeing a purely manmade famine,” says Bob Kitchen, vice president of emergencies at the International Rescue Committee. “The Gaza Strip is surrounded by very fertile farming territory. All of the countries around Gaza have more than enough food.”

This week on the Intercept Briefing, Intercept reporter Jonah Valdez speaks with Kitchen about what U.N.-backed hunger experts have called a “worst-case scenario.” Kitchen lays out how Israel’s ongoing war, combined with severe restrictions on humanitarian aid and commercial access, has created near-impossible conditions for food and medical supplies to enter Gaza — accelerating a crisis that could soon be irreversible.

“The only thing that's changed is the war, the restrictions on humanitarian aid, the restrictions on the market economy where commercial traffic can't get in,” says Kitchen. “That's the only thing that is driving the hunger right now.”

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Nationwide protests. Racist discrimination. Militarized police. These were the characteristics used to describe America during the long hot summer of 1967, when riots swept through more than 150 cities. They still describe America today, as the government has responded to protests against racist policing and immigration raids with militarized police forces backed by the Marines and the National Guard.

It all sounds eerily similar to the America of more than half a century ago, when a presidential commission diagnosed the country’s problem: racism, particularly in policing, was causing widespread political unrest.

“When a protest becomes that broad-based — cutting across gender lines and ethnic lines — then I think you have the opportunity to realize this is a true political movement,” says Rick Loessberg, an urban historian and the former planning commissioner for Dallas County, Texas, and the author of “Two Societies: The Rioting of 1967 and the Writing of the Kerner Report.”

“This is not just a group or a segment of the population letting off steam,” says Loessberg, “which was what was one of the explanations that was used in the 1960s. This is something else that's much, much deeper and much more significant.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks with Loessberg about what America learned — and didn’t learn — from our history of racist policing and political unrest.

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More than 1,000 Palestinians seeking food have been killed by Israeli forces in just the last few months, according to the United Nations. Israel’s blockade on aid, ongoing bombardment, and the dismantling of independent relief efforts have pushed Gaza to the brink of mass famine. At least 600,000 people are suffering from severe malnutrition, and aid groups warn of a manufactured humanitarian catastrophe.

“It's not about the distribution of food, it's not about humanitarian aid. It's about creating — luring Palestinians who are desperate into the south, putting them into a closed military zone,” says Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jordan Uhl speaks with Hedges about how we got here and what’s at stake. Hedges spent seven years covering the conflict between Israel and the Palestine, much of that time in Gaza. He’s the author of 14 books, the most recent being “The Greatest Evil Is War” and “A Genocide Foretold.”

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