Feed the children of Gaza and their tormented and panicked mothers, begs Sir Bob Geldof

What has happened to the Israeli people? Whatever the titanic enormity of your own past and current suffering, what has happened to you that you should allow such suffering, captured in this sickening image, for even one fraction of a second? That you should create and perpetuate the suffering of this tiny little speck of humanity.

What could he ever have possibly done to you that would allow you to approve of this bestiality. Have you become so inured to the similar images of your own historic horror that you cannot feel or see anything anymore? Has the "other" been so de-humanised, as you once so cruelly were, that a similar madness seizes you now and permits such stomach-churning barbarity, such degradation of a great people by a great people?

What has this grotesque endless wanton killing made of your society? Have you become as those who once used their mad logic as an excuse to obliterate? They failed, thank God. And so will you, also thank God. So can you just stop. Really. Just... stop. For all our sakes.

Your government and your army seem to be out of control. Why do you, the people of Israel, tolerate and permit this? Why do you force people into helpless ghettos and then purposely starve them? Or seemingly shoot them randomly as they approach for the scant food you dangle in front of their starving bodies.

It is simply no longer possible to blame the current rhetoric and actions of your Prime Minister, the policies of your government or the actions of your military on the disgusting, barbarous and murderous events of October 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?

That aim surely cannot be the eradication of the Palestinian children through Israeli-imposed starvation and their consequent agonising death?

Has hatred consumed you such that extravagant evil is the permissible norm? 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? What has gone wrong, Israel?

Feed the children of Gaza and their tormented terrified broken and panicked mothers. 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 its abysmal and shameful, disgusting truth. And let me be clear - this is your country, Israel - and, of all countries in the world, I am incredulous it is you doing this.

How did you get here, guys? How did it ever get to be so base? Shame on you.

• Sir Bob Geldof is Live Aid founder and founding patron of the Aegis Trust for Genocide Studies, a branch of the National Holocaust Museum