Israel is starving Gaza to death, and still the world does nothing

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.

The starvation of the people of Gaza did not begin in October 2023, nor when Israel repeatedly breached and then broke the ceasefire agreement on 18 March 2025.

Throughout Israel’s protracted occupation and blockade of Gaza, babies born with low birth weight, along with stunting in children during the early years of life, have become commonplace. Anaemia and other micronutrient deficiencies are prevalent too. Each of these nutritional indicators is determined by Israel’s tight control over the availability and diversity of food permitted into Gaza.

When Israel intensified its blockade of Gaza in 2007, it implemented a concerted policy of systematic deprivation, ostensibly to turn Palestinians against the elected government.

No attempts were made to disguise this approach; Dov Weissglas, an adviser to Ehud Olmert, then Israel’s prime minister, openly stated in 2006: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

Following a three-year legal case, Israel’s defence ministry was forced to release an official policy document in 2012 that detailed how it calculated daily calorie requirements to reduce the supply of food into Gaza to a “humanitarian minimum”. Today, the Israeli regime has completely abandoned the illusion of respect for even the lowest of humanitarian standards.

Reclaiming political obligations

Last month, more than 3,600 children in Gaza were admitted to health facilities with acute malnutrition, marking a sharp increase from February. Once admitted, many children do not receive the treatment they need, as nearly half of Gaza’s nutrition treatment sites are no longer functioning. 

Since 2 March, the Israeli regime has blocked the entry of all humanitarian aid into Gaza, including food and water. On 16 April, Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz brazenly declared: “In the current reality, no one is going to allow any humanitarian aid into Gaza.” By 25 April, the World Food Programme declared it had run out of its remaining food supplies.

Israel’s military has simultaneously destroyed Gaza’s agricultural production capacity and decimated Palestinians’ livelihood reserves. Gaza’s fragile food basket, bakeries, fishing boats, food storage warehouses, and emergency kitchens have all been targeted. 

At least 82 percent of Gaza’s croplands have been damaged, 75 percent of its olive trees have been destroyed, and 95 percent of cattle have died. Amid Israel’s renewed attacks, even more land has been occupied and may be subject to annexation. At the same time, chemicals released by Israeli missiles, coupled with untreated sewage from destroyed sanitation systems, has polluted the soil and groundwater reserves.

As physicians who have worked in Gaza during Israel’s occupation, blockade, repeated military assaults, and now genocide, we hold complicit every state that continues to actively and passively support Israel. The Israeli regime has resolutely exposed the “logic of elimination” inherent to its settler-colonial ambitions. Only immediate and concerted action will protect the Palestinian people from this latest stage in Israel’s campaign of genocidal eradication.

Evidence of scorched-earth strategies, famine warnings, and declarations of plausible genocide were all designed to provoke action. Despite their grave implications, these terms have been repeatedly manipulated and misinterpreted for political gain.

Rather than invoking concerted action, “risk of famine” warnings have been distorted to imply that the situation isn’t as dire as experts have claimed. Similarly, declarations of “plausible” genocide have been manipulated to obscure the immediate obligations of the international community with drawn-out judicial processes and the seemingly endless pursuit of ever-more irrefutable evidence.

It is not too late to reclaim the political obligations attached to these terms. The imminent onset of famine demands collective action. Starvation can’t be reversed with food aid alone. Those who starve others must be held accountable for their crimes, and those who have been starved must be afforded justice.

It is not too late to protect Palestinians in Gaza from those who continue to orchestrate and celebrate Israel’s depraved policy of extermination by starvation.