Like genocide, allegations that a government or army or whoever is deliberately starving people is controversial. While reports arrive today from the World Food Program that all the bakeries are closed in Gaza due to a lack of flour and fuel, Israeli authorities reply angrily that there is plenty of food in Gaza, but that Hamas has diverted it to the needs of its soldiers and to stir up hatred against Israel. What is the truth? There are also controversies among aid workers and humanitarian researchers about “what is starvation?” Are large numbers of dead bodies necessary before accusations of deliberate starvation are credible? If not, what less dire symptoms might allow us to conclude that deliberate starvation is in progress? Alex de Waal, the director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts College, is the author of one of the most insightful studies on the lack of food, Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine. In this book, he points out that “famine” declined for most of the 20th century, as the world learned through trial and error how to manage dearth and how better to protect harvests. But in the last several decades, he notes, this trend has been reversed, and the incidence of famine or starvation has curved upwards, not because crops are “failing,” but because states at war or engulfed in civil war are using food and the withholding of food as a weapon against “enemy” populations. In a recent article reflecting on the question of famine or starvation in the case of Israel’s war on Gaza, de Waal concludes: So this is where we are today. In the case of Israel and Gaza, we find strong evidence that “the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population,” is clearly underway. We also are learning, as explained in an excellent article by the Israel/Palestine magazine +921 below, that Israel is using deliberate starvation as a means to force the people of Gaza to depend for their survival on their cooperation with the Israeli army (IDF), which is being moved into the position of the sole distributor of food supplies to the civilian population of Gaza. In “Weaponizing starvation, Israel seeks full control over Gaza aid distribution,” the authors – Lee Mordechai and Liat Kozma – write: This week, following a week of artillery attacks and aerial bombing, Israel resumed ground attacks on Gaza. Orders have been given the civilian population in southern Gaza to vacate a large area around the border city of Rafah, displacing most them for yet another time to a “safe area.” This means that the misery inflicted on Gazans by the food blockade are now compounded by the likelihood of death. Dozens of people, the majority being women and children, have been killed by the first phase – bombing and artillery. The second phase – the ground invasions – will kill many many more. (The Gaza Health Ministry puts the number of dead now at more than 50,000; many put the numbers at 300,000 and more.] The end of food supplies and what that means to people living in Gaza is explained in an article published last week by an NPR correspondent: “Food is running out in Gaza nearly a month into Israeli blockade”: To conclude: We began with some thoughts by Alex de Waal about the problems of measuring starvation and famine, from which he concluded that the deprivation of what people needed to live and to flourish was sufficient evidence that a war crime was in progress. The organization that measures the nature and extent of food deprivation publishes its findings as part of The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. In it recent report for the Gaza Strip, the IPC concluded that “about 60,000 cases of acute malnutrition among children aged 6 to 59 months, including 12,000 severe cases, are expected to occur between September 2024 and August 2025 [Link]. It goes almost without saying that the Trump government will do nothing useful to address starvation in Gaza, but this is all the more reason for supporters of Palestinian survival and opponents of genocidal war to speak up and keep the facts of Israel’s war on Gaza in the news and debates about our crisis. Below I’ve linked two additional articles providing useful information about the food situation in Gaza, and an explanatory chart from Aljazeera about the evolution of the food crisis. That’s enough for now. Bread Lines, Empty Shelves, Bombed Farms — This Is How Starvation Feels in Gaza
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Wednesday, April 2, 2025
Israel is starving the people of Gaza
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