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STARVATION IN GAZA  
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Alex de Waal
May 14, 2025
London Review of Books
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_ Genocide Convention: Article 2(c) prohibits ‘deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about
its physical destruction in whole or in part’. _

Displaced Palestinians line up to receive a meal in the northern Gaza
Strip, May 5, 2025., Ali Hassan/Flash90

 

Deprived of any nutrients, a previously healthy adult will starve to
death in sixty to eighty days. A child will succumb more quickly. On 2
March, Israel imposed a total blockade on the two million Palestinians
in Gaza. During the two months of ceasefire, food stocks had been
partly replenished, but they are rapidly running out. Without
humanitarian aid, without commercial traffic and with only a tiny
amount of locally grown food, hunger deepens day by day.

The standard humanitarian ration is 2100 calories per person per day.
Depending on how much food there was at the start of the blockade –
estimates vary – average food availability in Gaza will at best fall
to 1400 calories in the next few weeks, or may have already dropped
below that level as early as mid-April. Adults are going hungrier to
keep children better fed. The most vulnerable – infants, pregnant
women, breastfeeding mothers and others needing special diets – are
already starving. The very poorest, those unable to call on better-off
relatives, those cut off by military checkpoints, are already wasting
away as their internal organs suffer irreparable damage.

Between 28 April and 6 May, staff with the World Food Programme, under
the umbrella of the UN-accredited Integrated Food Security Phase
Classification system (IPC), conducted a phone survey of Palestinians
in Gaza. They asked what people were eating, how often, and what they
were doing to get food. Several aid agencies also compiled data for
how thin young children are – ‘wasting’ or ‘global acute
malnutrition’. It was the fifth such survey since the outbreak of
war nineteen months ago.

It’s extraordinarily difficult to collect this information in a war
zone, and any interpretation of the data is contentious. Did the
monitors miss the most desperate people who don’t answer their
phones because they can’t use up their last minute of battery life
answering humiliating questions? When health workers are measuring
children’s upper arm circumference to get a simple indicator of
malnutrition, are they missing the worst-off who can’t make it to
the distribution centres? Or are their errors in the other direction,
missing those whose parents are managing to get by? Humanitarian
statisticians can pick through the data and find reasons to query
them, but until Israel grants aid agencies access to the stricken
people, we have to make do with these gleanings.

The IPC’s results, published in summary form on 12 May
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estimated that 925,000 Gazans (44 per cent) were already experiencing
‘emergency’ acute food insecurity – close to the starvation
threshold. A further 244,000 (12 per cent) were in ‘catastrophe’,
meaning they had fallen below that threshold. That’s consistent with
what we know about food stocks and the rate at which they’re being
eaten.

Gaza is unique in the annals of starvation because of the simplicity
of this calculation. In any other humanitarian calamity, a host of
other factors complicate the picture, and overall food availability is
a poor guide to levels of hunger. In Somalia or Sudan, for example,
when food becomes scarce, people fall back on age-old alternatives
such as gathering wild grasses and berries, or modern strategies such
as calling for family members abroad to transfer cash. Palestinians in
Gaza can’t do any of this. Israel controls every shekel, every sack
of flour, every connection to the outside world.

Most common of all, when famine threatens, people move. In the
‘Famine Codes’ of the British Raj in India, colonial officers
noted the ‘aimless wandering of the destitute’ as a sign of
impending famine. Gaza is starvation under siege. The blockade is also
a _cordon sanitaire_ – we haven’t seen communicable diseases
such as cholera, which are common in other famines, entering Gaza. And
because vaccination rates were so high before 7 October, there have
been no outbreaks of potential killers such as measles. In almost
every other famine on record, communicable diseases are the big
killers. Gaza is an anomaly, a laboratory in which we will discover
how much nutritional stress a population can withstand before
succumbing en masse.

IPC analysts are accustomed to the uncertainties of poor data and
unforeseeable circumstances. Their reports deal with scenarios and
degrees of risk. Monday’s ‘snapshot’ report concluded that Gaza
is ‘still confronted with a critical risk of famine’. The authors
wrote of a possible ‘scenario of protracted and large-scale military
operations and continuation of the humanitarian and commercial
blockade ... under this reasonable worst case scenario, food
insecurity, acute malnutrition and mortality would surpass
the IPC Phase 5 (Famine) thresholds.’ They could have stated the
matter more simply. Mass death through starvation is the certain
outcome of Israel’s continued blockade and ongoing military
campaign. The only question is when.

Several times over the last nineteen months Israel has turned the aid
tap on, blunting the rise in levels of distress. When it allows the
trucks to roll in – as it did a year ago, when Biden’s secretary
of state, Antony Blinken, was required to testify that Israel was not
diverting aid, on pain of suspending American weapons supplies; or in
January, as part of the ceasefire – the positive impact is quickly
evident in the improved nutrition of Gaza’s children. Israel accuses
Hamas of stealing aid for its fighters, but hasn’t provided evidence
of this happening at scale. Even if it has, it hasn’t prevented aid
getting to the children who need it most.

Until now, most aid has been managed by international agencies. Israel
wants to shut down the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine
Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and shut out other agencies, with
the exception of the World Food Programme as a supplier.

Israel is now proposing a new aid scheme
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will provide essential rations to screened individuals, who will be
notified by cellphone message where and when they should report to
pick up food packages, hygiene kits and medical supplies, after their
IDs have been verified by face recognition software. Each package
would be sufficient for a family for several days, after which the
designated family member will be notified by text to return for
another ration. The US is now championing the scheme, proposing to
use American private military contractors, along with something called
the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation
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agency that is being built from scratch.

This is surveillance humanitarianism, the food-targeting counterpart
to the IDF’s algorithms
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select whom to bomb. Israel will provide the bare minimum to sustain
life to those who show, to its satisfaction, that they’re compliant.
It’s also an individualised version of late colonial
counterinsurgency, as practised by Britain in Malaya in the 1950s
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when the army defeated Communist guerrillas by controlling the entire
food supply, feeding those in protected villages and starving those
outside.

The UN and liberal humanitarians
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the founding principles of humanitarian law is that actual starvation
should be prevented, even if it means the controlling power forgoes
military opportunity. As Israel moved to suffocate UNRWA,
the UN asked the International Court of Justice in The Hague to
provide an advisory opinion on Israel’s obligations to co-operate
with UN bodies. Public hearings were held in the week of 28 April.

Israel didn’t participate: in its written statement
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dismissed the case as ‘patently biased and one-sided’. It claimed
that UNRWA staff had participated in the 7 October atrocities, that
the agency is hostile to Israel and that Israel is under no obligation
to co-operate with any international organisation unless it chooses to
do so, because its security requirements are overriding. It dismissed
the UN investigations
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its allegations and the measures taken to ensure neutrality
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impartiality and end-to-end monitoring of relief supplies.

Thirty-nine states made presentations in The Hague, along with
Palestine, the UN, the Arab League and the African Union. Only
the US and Hungary supported the Israeli case. The US lawyer
invoked only the 1948 Geneva Conventions, ignoring all subsequent law
and the question of whether Israel had an overriding obligation to
prevent Palestinians from starving.

Might Israel’s new aid scheme feed the starving while satisfying its
demand for absolute security? The outline plan, shared with
journalists, would involve four distribution centres and reach only 60
per cent of the population, all in a small part of the overall
territory. (Aid agencies ran about four hundred locations before the
blockade.) That might keep enough people fed to avoid the IPC’s
arcane threshold for famine – which requires 20 per cent of the
population to fall short of certain measurements for access to food,
malnutrition and elevated death rates – but it would be gaming the
system, not preventing widespread starvation.

Even if scaled up, the scheme doesn’t address needs for healthcare,
water, sanitation, shelter and electricity infrastructure – all of
which have been reduced to rubble. Nor does it provide specialised
treatment for acutely malnourished children, who are already dying.

Twice already during this war, the people of Gaza have pulled back
from the brink of categorical famine – both times after warnings
from the IPC – but the recovery has been momentary before another
plunge. Few humanitarian workers believe this cycle of deprivation
followed by partial respite can continue for much longer before
there’s rapid and uncontrollable collapse.

The IPC report contains two paragraphs by the Famine Review
Committee, an independent group that goes over IPC findings where
there’s a risk of famine: ‘The situation remains highly dynamic as
food stocks are exhausted, water becomes increasingly scarce,
healthcare ceases to function and social cohesion starts to break
down.’ Hunger is only part of this breakdown. The Palestinians of
Gaza have been driven from their homes, forced to live in cramped,
unsanitary and overcrowded camps or in piles of rubble that contain
decomposing bodies, unexploded bombs and the remnants of their prior
lives.

Last month the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
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concern ‘that Israel appears to be inflicting on Palestinians in
Gaza conditions of life increasingly incompatible with their continued
existence as a group in Gaza.’ These carefully weighed words evoke
the Genocide Convention: Article 2(c) prohibits ‘deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about
its physical destruction in whole or in part’. Here again, Israel
has done its sums, tested its policies and made clear that its
permanent security overrides all other obligations. It can have no
doubt about the outcomes of its actions. It may do just enough to keep
most Palestinians alive. Whether this prevents the destruction of
Palestinians in Gaza as a group is another matter.

* Gaza
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* starvation
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* Israel
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* famine
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* food aid
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* international agencies
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