Israel is starving Gaza to death, and still the world does nothing
Palestinians gather to receive a hot meal at a food distribution centre in Gaza’s Nuseirat camp on 30 April 2025
Mads Gilbert, Dr James Smith and Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah write in Middle East Eye on 1 May 2025:
Israel is starving the entire population of Gaza – to the point of death, for a growing number of Palestinians.
There is not a single place in the world where starvation is an inevitability: not after major environmental disasters, amid drought and crop failure, or during armed conflict and genocide. Starvation is an act of either intentional violence or indifferent neglect, both of which are made possible by our collective inaction.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Gaza, where Israel’s occupation, blockade and now-total siege were designed to exert full control over the Palestinian population, deliberately depriving them of the most basic means to sustain life.
Starvation is a strategy as old as warfare itself. It is deployed as a weapon of mass destruction to inflict maximal harm, and always with calculated disregard for those who suffer and die as a result.
So horrific is this particular form of violence that it is distinguished as a specific war crime in the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In addition, UN Resolution 2417 condemns both the “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” and the practice of “depriving civilians of objects indispensable to their survival”.
Despite the multitude of legal protections, it has now been more than a year since the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, observed that experts on starvation had never seen a civilian population subjected to hunger so quickly and so completely as in Gaza.
Throughout the early months of 2024, B’Tselem, representatives of Medical Aid for Palestinians, the EU’s foreign policy chief, and many others issued similar warnings that Israel was intentionally and systematically starving the Palestinian population in Gaza.
Persistent risk of famine
These warnings were informed by the first report of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), an initiative established in 2004 to improve evidence-informed projections and targeted responses in situations of food insecurity.
The IPC’s December 2023 report warned of a growing risk of famine as a result of critical levels of food insecurity affecting the entire population of Gaza. More than two million people were enduring “crisis or worse” levels of food insecurity – the highest proportion in a single territory that the IPC had ever identified in nearly two decades of operations.
A piecemeal humanitarian performance ensued as the situation in Gaza continued to deteriorate. By February 2024, the Jordanian government began dropping food aid into besieged northern Gaza, after which the World Central Kitchen – an NGO that participated in the airdrops – declared it was “redefining the boundaries of humanitarian aid”.
Throughout last year, experts continued to describe an extremely grave situation in Gaza, repeatedly warning of either a high risk, or the imminent onset, of famine.
By October, the US government had called on the Israeli regime to increase the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Despite this apparent diplomatic pressure, in December, the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (an initiative comparable to the IPC but funded by the US government) warned that a “famine scenario” was unfolding in northern Gaza. Rather than forcing Israel to end its torturous policies of deprivation and military violence, US officials instead had the report retracted.
Starvation can’t be reversed with food aid alone. Those who starve others must be held accountable for their crimes