In Gaza Hunger is Rampant and Famine Looms

Do Israel's war and restrictions on food supplies amount to genocide?

The evidence of acute hunger, rampant malnutrition, and lurking famine in Gaza has become undeniable. UN affiliates have published detailed reports, and the July 29 assessment by Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) provides up-to-date information. Photographs show wailing children thrusting their bowls forward at distribution points amid the rush of adults, who are also seeking food and more likely to obtain it. Journalists tell of emaciated Gazans trudging for miles each day to reach food distribution stations, of which there aren’t many anymore. Add to this the numerous photographs of distraught mothers cradling their skeletal babies. Many of these starving infants may be beyond saving. Gaza’s hospitals—IDF strikes have damaged or destroyed 94% of them—are overwhelmed by the number of cases and lack sufficient nutritional supplements and medical supplies. What’s more, their doctors and nurses themselves are weak from hunger.

Here's how the hunger and starvation in Gaza reached calamitous proportions. The talks between Hamas and Israel on a political settlement in Gaza started following the January 19 ceasefire, but they collapsed on March 18, just before the scheduled beginning of Phase 2, which was to include discussions on the IDF’s pullback and eventual withdrawal from Gaza, both of which were anathema to the far-right religious parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, whose support was essential to the government’s survival. But before walking away from the talks, Netanyahu demanded that Hamas accept an American proposal to extend Phase 1 of the negotiations. When Hamas refused, Israel banned the entry of all food and other humanitarian aid supplies into Gaza on March 2 and resumed its war on March 18^th. Since May 19, Israel has allowed tightly regulated deliveries but UN agencies and international relief agencies have been largely sidelined. The 400 UN-operated aid distribution points have been reduced to four, all but one bunched together near the Egypt-Gaza border, and are run by the American- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Armed contractors guard these supply centers, which are located close to IDF positions. One thousand Gazans have been shot dead while waiting for food, supposedly because they made threatening moves toward Israeli soldiers. To reach these four supply stations, Gazans, already debilitated by hunger, walk miles, in the midst of a war, to carry home 40-pound aid packages—if they are lucky enough to get there in time given the first-come, first-served arrangement. The number of aid trucks entering Gaza has plunged from a prewar average of 500-600 daily to 70 since Israel approved a renewed but limited flow of aid in May after an 11-week ban.

When Gaza’s famine-like conditions are brought up, the Israeli authorities and their defenders within and beyond Israel offer what by now are predictable defenses.

One is that everything that has happened in Gaza since October 7 can be traced to Hamas’s attack on that day. This argument was repeated as recently as this week by Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, who described Gaza’s predicament as “tough,” a word better applied to the travails of waiting for hours at your local Department of Motor Vehicles. In this account, Israel is blameless.

A second defense has it that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is doing all it can to deliver food to Gaza, is not obstructing deliveries of food and other essential supplies by UN relief agencies and non-governmental organizations, and that Hamas has been pilfering aid deliveries, thereby denying Gazans the bare necessities for human survival. Netanyahu goes so far as to deny that there is any starvation in Gaza, a claim that even President Donald Trump rejected recently despite his unqualified backing of Israel.

A third defense has been that blaming Israel for Gaza’s food crisis amounts to a blood libel given that millions of Jews were killed and starved by Nazi Germany and that the October 7 atrocities were perpetrated by Hamas, whose members are latter-day Nazis.

Let’s take these responses in turn. In the aftermath of Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israel has so far killed at least 55,000people in Gaza—45 times as many as Hamas killed that day. The laws and ethics governing war require proportionality; but Israel’s initial act of self-defense far exceeds any reasonable conception of proportionality, not least because among the dead in Gaza are more than 17,000 children, according to Israeli press reports.

When confronted with these numbers, Israeli officials are wont to say that they are nothing but propaganda put out by Hamas’s Health Ministry. But the Ministry’s data on the total number of violent deaths in Gaza have been corroborated by at least two independent studies (see here and here) conducted in the West, which conclude that its numbers are, if anything, an undercount.

Even if thousands of the dead could be Hamas fighters, the number of non-combatant deaths attests to a vastly disproportionate Israeli retaliation. Those deaths can’t be excused by Israel’s frequent claim that Hamas hides among Gaza’s civilians. Even if that were routinely the case, the ethics and laws governing war require that a state’s wartime goals as well as the means it uses to achieve them be proportional. It is not, therefore, defensible to, for example, bomb residential buildings and clinics and hospitals, as Israel has done repeatedly, and assert that enemy combatants were using them as hideouts. Nor do ethics and law permit withholding food from an entire people because of an attack conducted by their rulers.

Israel is among the states that have not signed the 1977 Additional Protocols I and II, which strengthened the wartime protections provided to civilians by the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Israel does, however, acknowledge that some provisions of these Protocols have become customary law and therefore apply to its wartime conduct and that it is committed to upholding the laws of war. In short, it accepts the principle that self-defense does not equate to carte blanche.

Yes, Hamas bears responsibility for unleashing the whirlwind on the people of Gaza, whom it had a duty to protect. The indignities, harassment, violence, injuries, and deaths Palestinians suffer because of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza cannot justify what Hamas did on October 7: killing 1,200 Israelis, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. Nor can Hamas’s attack be rightly defended by portraying it as part of a struggle for national liberation or by pointing to the comprehensive, suffocating blockade Israel imposed on Gaza from 2007 onward, pushing 53% of its people below the national poverty line and leaving 45% of the workforce unemployed. (The data are from 2022.) Atrocities are not permitted, ethically or legally, during wars of self-defense or resistance to oppression and occupation.

No country with the capacity to retaliate after experiencing an attack like the one Hamas carried out on October 7 would have failed to do so. Yet self-defense cannot be invoked credibly to justify Israel’s subjection of 2.1 million people to chronic hunger, even starvation and creating the risk of famine. Nor is it credible to claim that Gaza’s food crisis has been exaggerated, let alone that it does not exist when photographs, reportage by journalists, and assessments by UN agencies and international relief organizations attest to its enormity.

Moreover, Israel’s contention that the pervasive food insecurity in Gaza results from Hamas’s theft of humanitarian aid supplies is not convincing. Hamas could not be simultaneously fighting a war against one of the world’s most lethal war machines and systematically stealing tons of food supplies—something it would have to be doing for the claim that it is causing the famine to be credible. The IDF itself conceded recently that Hamas has not been pilfering food aid routinely and on a large scale. Reviews by the American government have concluded that Hamas has not been engaged in the widespread appropriation of food supplies sent to Gaza.

The root cause of Gaza’s food crisis is actions taken by Israel, the goal of which goes beyond defeating Hamas or, failing that, forcing it to end the war on Israel’s terms. Israel’s restrictions on the food supplies, and its military operations, are aimed at driving Gazans from their homeland so that Israeli settlements, which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon dismantled in 2005, can be recreated and the territory annexed to Israel in whole or part. The Israeli far right, including leading members of Netanyahu’s cabinet, has been open about this goal, which is now being pursued with even greater intensity in the West Bank through continual confiscations of Palestinians’ land, the building of Jewish settlements, forcible evictions, and violent attacks by armed settlers. Israel’s current government and its political allies regard Gaza and the West Bank as an integral part of a Greater Israel. Israel’s war in Gaza and the food crisis it has created there are part of a campaign to make that millenarian project a reality.

Some of Israel’s defenders claim that it is being singled out for blame for something that happens frequently elsewhere and that a double standard reflecting antisemitism is at work. But, as the Columbia University economic historian Adam Tooze demonstrates, Gaza’s food insecurity problem has not been caused, as has been true in several African countries, by civil war, the disintegration of governance, drought, or floods. (He is not alone: Alex de Waal, a noted authority on famines, makes the same case.) The human calamity in Gaza stems directly from decisions taken by the Israeli government in pursuit of its political aims, which extend well beyond defeating Hamas. The Netanyahu government’s conduct is particularly horrifying because starvation was an essential part of the Nazis’ systematic policy of exterminating Jews during the Shoah. If any state should stand opposed to state-directed starvation, it should be Israel.

The worldwide condemnation of Israel does not owe, in the main, to anti-Semitism, but rather to the indisputable culpability of the Netanyahu government for the hunger and starvation that are now common in Gaza. And if many Americans have been particularly outraged about Israel’s use of hunger as a weapon in Gaza, there is a good reason. They cannot separate themselves from Israel’s use of food as a political weapon in Gaza, which would not have been possible without the substantial material support and nearly-unconditional political cover Israel receives from the US government.

The antisemitism defense has begun to wear thin. Several Jewish scholars—some of them Israelis, others Americans who were born in Israel and are working in the US—have concluded that the wartime deaths in Gaza, along with the catastrophic food crisis and the mass expulsion of people from their homes, qualify as genocide as defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (commonly known as the Genocide Convention), which resulted from the efforts of the Holocaust survivor and lawyer Raphael Lemkin. They include Omer Bartov of Brown University, a renowned genocide scholar, Amos Goldberg of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Raz Segal of Stockton University, Itamar Mann of the University of Haifa, and Shmuel Lederman of Israel’s Open University. Two prominent Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, publicly announced the same conclusion in detailed reports.

The Convention’s text supports the verdict of these scholars and organizations, notably Article II (c), which stipulates that genocide includes “deliberately inflicting on the group [defined as “national, ethnical, racial, or religious”] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part.”

Add to this the July 29 open letter in the Guardian signed by 31 prominent Israelis, including former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg, imploring the international community to impose “crippling sanctions” on Israel for “starving the people of Gaza to death and contemplating the forced removal of millions of Palestinians from the Strip.”

Anti-Semitism is an insidious ideology with deep roots in Western history, but it is not what drives the mounting condemnations of Israel for the calamitous food crisis in Gaza, the destruction of the Strip by the IDF, and the killing of tens of thousands of civilians.

For Gaza’s food crisis to end, deliveries of food and other humanitarian supplies must return to prewar levels. Israel’s recent decision to allow air-dropped food packets and to order a daily “tactical pause” in military operations from 10 a.m.-8 p.m. in four parts of Gaza—Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, and Al-Muwasi—isn’t remotely sufficient, though it does belie Netanyahu’s assertion that there is no hunger in Gaza. Nor is it sufficient for Israel to allow a resumption of international aid flows governed by myriad restrictions. UN agencies and private humanitarian organizations must be permitted to operate in Gaza as they did before Hamas’s attack, and the disastrous food distribution arrangement run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation must be scrapped. Given the extent to which Israel depends on the United States, politically and economically, President Trump has the power to compel Netanyahu to make these changes—but don’t expect him to exercise it.