All That’s Left Is to Boil and Eat Them: Gaza and the Return of Medieval Brutality

In the winter of 1098, after months of besieging the Syrian town of Maʿarrat al-Numan, Crusaders finally breached its walls. The victory should have brought glory to their cause. Instead, it unleashed one of the most grotesque episodes in recorded history.

Starving, diseased, and without provisions, the Crusaders turned not to God — but to the dead. Chroniclers of the time, including the monk Radulph of Caen and the poet Fulcher of Chartres, wrote of the unthinkable: how Crusaders boiled human flesh, roasted Muslim children on spits, and consumed the very Muslim civilians they had conquered.

Almost a thousand years later, the siege of Gaza has brought us back to that same crossroads — starvation as strategy, dehumanisation as policy, and silence as complicity. We are watching, in slow motion, the systematic starvation of over two million people — half of them children — under a blockade so absolute that even flour is treated as contraband.

So one must ask, in brutal honesty:
What remains? What further medieval cruelty is there left to revive — short of boiling and eating the very people you’ve encaged?

Siege as a Sacred Duty

The Crusaders believed their atrocities were sanctified. Their Christian God demanded conquest, and anything — including the cannibalisation of Muslims — was justified in pursuit of it. Today, Gaza’s siege is framed not just as military necessity, but as a holy obligation, defended by messianic rhetoric and military policy alike.

Food is rationed like punishment. Aid convoys are attacked. Children are shot for chasing bread. It is not that Israel lacks precision — it is that starvation is the precision.

Humanitarianism Has a Threshold — And Gaza Passed It

The international community has done what it does best: condemned, concerned, then carried on. Humanitarianism has become theatre, where states drop aid with one hand and supply weapons with the other. The UN counts bodies. The ICC counts years. And Gazans count their dead before they’ve even digested their last meal.

In the age of high-speed data and AI-enhanced targeting, Gaza is still treated with siege tactics last perfected in the 12th century. And yet Israel claims to be a beacon of Western values.
Which Western values, exactly? The ones that ate their Muslim enemies when the bread ran out?

Consuming the Palestinian Body

Let’s be clear: the siege of Gaza is not about security. It is not even about territory. It is about consuming the Palestinian body — physically, politically, culturally.

• Their food is taken.
• Their land is taken.
• Their memory is erased.
• Their children are devoured by airstrikes and bullet fire.

Not flesh, perhaps — but everything else that makes life sacred.

This is cannibalism of a modern kind: economic, military, and symbolic. The Palestinians are not just being killed. They are being digested.

The World with Forks in Hand

The Crusaders at least had the decency to admit their depravity. Medieval accounts did not shy away from describing cannibalism as horror. Today, the violence is hidden behind bureaucratic language: “collateral damage,” “military necessity,” “neutralised threats.” We no longer admit to barbarism — we outsource it to policy analysts.

And what of the world? What of those in power, in culture, in conscience? They host summits. They send their regrets. They issue statements about “both sides.” But they don’t act.

If Gazans were being boiled alive on camera, would they still hesitate? Would they still write UN reports and legal memos while the flesh fell from bone?

Or would they just turn away — forks in hand, appetite intact?

A Future Written in Fire

We are witnessing not just a war. We are witnessing the end of international law, the death of humanitarianism, and the resurrection of a brutality we thought we had buried with the medieval age.
But the Crusades never ended — they just changed costume.
Today, they wear suits in Tel Aviv and silence in Washington.

And unless something changes, unless people rise beyond hashtags and vigils, the siege will continue until there is nothing left to consume.

Except perhaps the ghosts.

And history will record — again — that the world watched, said nothing, and waited for the bones to boil.

A Line in the Sand: Enough Is Enough

There comes a point where history no longer waits. It convicts.

This is not just about Gaza. It is about the world that has allowed Gaza to become a graveyard with street names. It is about systems so addicted to control that they starve children for strategy. It is about leaders so cowardly that they treat genocide as a policy dispute.

So let it be said plainly:
Enough.

• Enough of Western intervention masquerading as order, only to deliver chaos, colonisation, and corpses.
• Enough of occupation, where tanks are called security and stolen land is called peace.
• Enough of Zionism, a settler ideology that cloaks supremacy in the language of survival.
• Enough of silence, the kind that protects careers but buries children.
• Enough of starvation, used not as failure but as a deliberate tool — measured, approved, and exported.

This is no longer a call for aid. It is a call to break ranks.

Humanity — across borders, races, and creeds — must now demand more than relief.
It must demand liberation outside the constructs of the present world order.
It must demand that those with military might — those with fleets, airpower, and alliances — break ranks.

• Break ranks from Western treaties that preserve the massacre.
• Break ranks from arms deals that lubricate genocide.
• Break ranks from the myth that neutrality is noble.
• And break ranks from Arab rulers, whose palaces echo with silence while their people seethe with rage — rulers who shake hands with the occupier and send condolences to the occupied, who normalise betrayal and parade it as diplomacy.

Because this is not neutrality.
This is Crusade 2.0 — and we are watching it in full colour, in real time, with sound.