Something is shifting. International pressure on Israel has reached a new peak as images of starving Palestinian children shock the conscience of even its longtime supporters. France declared plans to recognise a Palestinian state in September. Britain announced it is ready to follow suit, unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire and commits to a two-state solution.

US president Donald Trump appears to have had a visceral reaction to the photographs of suffering children, dismissing Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s claim that “there’s no starvation in Gaza”, and saying, “Those children look very hungry. … That’s real starvation stuff. I see it, and you can’t fake that.”

Influential Maga voices have sounded the alarm, too, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, who became the first Republican in Congress to call what is happening in Gaza a “genocide”.

Former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon sees a deeper political shift: “It seems that for the under-30-year-old Maga base, Israel has almost no support,” Bannon told Politico, “and Netanyahu’s attempt to save himself politically by dragging America in deeper to another Middle East war has turned off a large swath of older Maga diehards.”

Although this might be overstating the shift, Bannon is right that Israel is haemorrhaging support among conservatives. Even before the starvation crisis broke through in international media, 50 per cent of Republican and Republican-leaning adults younger than 50 said they had an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 35 per cent in 2022.

Trump said the United States would work with Europeans to set up food distribution centres in Gaza. Netanyahu ordered a pause in fighting in three areas of Gaza to allow “minimal” aid to enter.

For thousands of Palestinians, this will have been both too little and too late. Israel’s temporary resumption of aid comes after it cut off supplies in March. Once acute malnutrition sets in, the damage can be long-lasting, particularly in children. Bodies ravaged by hunger struggle to process even basic nutrition. At least 111 people, including 81 children, have died of starvation, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

The priority now must be to prevent more suffering. The only way that can happen is with a durable ceasefire and an end to a war that has taken the lives of more than 60,000 and perhaps tens of thousands more, according to a recent study published in the Lancet.

The problem is that Netanyahu has had strong incentives to prolong the war. By July of last year, top generals determined that Israel’s key objectives had been met. The war’s continuation served no discernible military purpose. Netanyahu pressed on anyway because ending it would have meant political suicide within his own far-right coalition. In other words, 12 months of war — and all the resulting destruction — did not need to happen.

The world is waking up to this perverse reality. Even some of Israel’s fiercest defenders, such as journalist Haviv Rettig, have acknowledged the reality of “desperate hunger” after denying the evidence for months. Amit Segal, chief political correspondent for Israel’s Channel 12, wrote recently that “Gaza may well be approaching a real hunger crisis”.

These are reluctant admissions, filled with caveats. I, myself, am reluctant to commend them for the barest minimum of moral awareness and human decency. But it matters.

I have Palestinian friends who respond, understandably, that the newly outspoken critics of Israel’s conduct are acting in bad faith and that they should have been speaking out when it could have made a difference for the thousands of Palestinians who have already died or who are already starving. They have a point. But at the same time, the pro-Palestinian movement must be a big tent and welcome anyone willing to question their past positions and update them in the face of incontrovertible evidence of Israel’s crimes against humanity.

My hope is that more of Israel’s most ardent supporters will come to see how this war — this genocide — is putting a permanent moral stain on a state that they believe in and have dedicated themselves to defending.

Until now, whenever I provided pro-Israel hardliners with evidence of Israel doing bad things, they would insist that there must be an explanation. Their belief — akin to a faith, really — is that Israel is good, therefore it is not capable of committing something like genocide. It is hard to reason with people whose belief is based on projection, rather than facts.

An anecdote from Shaul Magid, a professor of Jewish studies at Harvard, is instructive here. He recalled: “I once asked someone I casually know, an ardent Zionist, ‘what could Israel do that would cause you not to support it?’. He was silent for a moment before looking at me and said, ‘Nothing.’”

But when does nothing become something? Presumably, there is a red line for Israel’s supporters. And, for many, it is being breached.

Only Washington commands the kind of influence that could meaningfully change Israel’s behaviour. But administration after administration has been unwilling to use that leverage. Those of us who pray for a better future for Palestinians are in the uncomfortable position of placing our faith in Trump’s unpredictability, which is never a good place to be. But it’s where we are.

It’s too little, too late. But it’s also not too late. The dead cannot be brought back, but the living can still be saved. For their sake, we must be willing to take yes for an answer, even when it comes from unexpected quarters. And there is one unexpected quarter that matters most, now: the Trump Administration.

The moral arc of the universe might bend towards justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own — and it doesn’t bend fast enough. If Trump, of all people, can be the instrument of ending this catastrophe, then we must swallow our pride and our doubts and pray that his visceral reaction to hungry children becomes something more than words.

• Shadi Hamid is a Washington Post columnist. He is also a research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary and the author of several books, including The Problem of Democracy and Islamic Exceptionalism