Israel’s manufactured famine is being used, according to Amnesty International, as a “weapon of war.” However, public support for the famine amongst Israelis is also disturbingly widespread. During a speech to a large audience on 28 July, which was streamed live on TVs and social media in Israel, Rabbi Ronen Shaulov said:
All of Gaza, and every child in Gaza should starve to death. I have no mercy for them…even though they are still young and hungry, I hope they starve to death.
Starvation as policy: decades of blockade
Restricting the entry of food and aid into Gaza has been a decades-long policy of the Israeli occupation. And, it has been consciously designed to control and exert pressure over the civilian population.
In 2006, after Hamas’s electoral victory, a senior adviser to the Israeli Prime Minister said that when it came to tightening the blockade that:
The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.
In 2011, under court order, Israel released documents showing it calculated the minimal daily calorie intake required to avoid malnutrition in Gaza, planning aid only for subsistence – not nutritional health.
Restrictions have intensified, reaching a new level of depravity. The humanitarian catastrophe now unfolding was manufactured from day one with the goal of ethnically cleansing Gaza. Crossings have been closed, food and medicine blocked, warehouses and bakeries destroyed, farmland obliterated. Only 1.5% of Gaza’s cropland remains accessible.
According to Gaza’s Media Office, vegetable production has plummeted from 405,000 tonnes to 25,000. On top of that, 665 livestock and poultry farms have been destroyed. Beyond aid prevention, 44 food kitchens and 57 food distribution centres have been bombed. Palestinians queuing for water and food have been continually targeted.
Since March 2 there has been a blockade on aid – initially total, now partial. Despite pressure forcing the occupation to allow the ‘limited’ entry of trucks, on 27 July, more than 430 food items, including frozen meats, dairy products, frozen vegetables and fruits, are still prohibited from entering.
Pre-genocide, 500 aid trucks entered daily. Now at least 600 are needed, but between July 27–Aug 12, only 1,535 trucks entered—92 per day, according to Gaza’s Media Office. This is “a drop in the ocean” , compared to what is needed by Gaza’s starving population. Even those permitted to cross the border still face many problems.
Chaos at the checkpoints: aid access and lawlessness
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA’s) spokesperson in Gaza, Olga Cherevko, said that:
Our convoys continue to face delays at checkpoints, where we have to wait hours for authorisation to move. Once we enter the strip, we find that the routes given by the Israeli authorities are often congested, dangerous or impassable, and roads are severely damaged.
With no organised distribution in most areas, crowds mob the few trucks that cross. Looting is rife amid a deliberately manufactured insecurity created by the occupation arming and protecting criminal gangs in Gaza.
Amjad Al-Shawa is director of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network (PNGO), a coalition that unites over 130 independent Palestinian civil society organisations working in a variety of areas.
He said:
Its an unprecedented situation. We are not only suffering from starvation, but also from engineered chaos, imposed by the Israelis from day one of this war, through the systematic attacks on the rule of law, and the order bodies in Gaza- the Civil Police, the Attorney General, the court system, the jails, the prisons.
Everything was attacked. Also the escorting teams for the aid supplies, the warehouses, the distribution points- all these were attacked. So these things led to such chaos, and also people are starving. Such conditions have led to disputes between individuals, and families.
The battle is how to survive. There is no other option, just to risk your life to get a piece of bread or some flour.
The purpose of this policy of engineered starvation and chaos is fundamentally to turn people against each other. This policy exists to undermine resilience, spread anarchy, and destroy the possibility of a Palestinian state. One way the occupation is doing this is by arming and protecting gangs, such as that led by Yasser Abu Shabab, previously jailed by Hamas, for drug smuggling and theft.
Manufactured famine: aid distribution as deadly trap
Rana Yassin lives in Tel al-Hawa, a neighbourhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Her brother had gone to the flour trucks, to try and get some food. Instead, he came back frightened and empty handed.
Yassin said that:
My brother was feeling very sad because he saw my little sister starving in front of his eyes. She was crying before sleeping, from hunger. So he made the decision to go to the flour trucks at the Kerem Shalom border crossing the next day. He told me it was very crowded and the condition there is crazy. People were fighting to get a packet of flour, but even if you are lucky enough to get something, people will steal it from you. He said the thieves had knives, and randomly shot at people, along with the army. These people aren’t of us.
We didn’t see these people living with us in the days before the war. These are not Gazan people-really! We are very honest people, very generous, very good people. Who are these people? We don’t know. The things they are doing – stealing other people’s food and selling it, are not the principles we have been raised on. We were raised to give our neighbour food, if he is hungry and he is poor. We help each other. These people, of course, are supported by Israel, because they know when the trucks arrive, and they are protected by the army- which shoots other people, but lets them steal.
Aid restrictions
The latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Alert tells us that the worst-case scenario of famine is now unfolding in Gaza. Two famine indicators – acute malnutrition and severely reduced food consumption – are already surpassed in parts of the enclave. Namely, more than one in three people now regularly go days without food, and over half a million are in famine-like conditions, while the rest suffer emergency-level hunger. Gaza is at Phase 5 ’catastrophe’, where food vanishes and communities fall apart. Warnings, issued as early as December 2023, went unheeded.
To enable the ethnic cleansing and genocide to continue, the occupation has not permitted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to bring any aid into Gaza since March 2. That’s in spite of the fact that the organisation have operated with great efficiency in Gaza since 1950. Instead, the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), run by US mercenaries and the Israeli military, has replaced UNRWA’s four hundred decentralised aid points with just four heavily militarised ‘aid distribution sites’.
GHF has nothing to do with providing aid, and everything to do with control. Armed guards patrol these sites, while the biometric data and digital IDs of the starving population, who have turned up in the hopes of some food, are collected to identify those of interest to the occupation. These checkpoints are nothing more than death traps for desperate, starving Palestinians. People have no choice but to risk death for a piece of bread, or some flour.
GHF aid distribution sites: ‘Bloodbaths’
Al-Shawa said that:
Israel is trying its best to paralyse the humanitarian structure- the UN, and international and national NGOs, who are committed to the humanitarian principles. If this will continue, there will be total collapse of the humanitarian system in Gaza, where people will be left with nothing, and at the same time it will be a step forward to issue the forcible deportation of the people, through the establishment of a concentration camp in the south.
This is the real plan of the Israelis, through the GHF and through these attacks on the Palestinian civilians, wherever they are. Now all ages are suffering from starvation. It has appeared now, on the faces, and the energy of everyone. Myself, my children- everyone is affected.
Through their new report, Human Rights Watch (HRW) spoke with a whistleblower – a former contractor that worked with GHF. They also interviewed multiple witnesses who saw violence at aid distribution sites. HRW also spoke to humanitarian workers and doctors who treated those that were injured or killed during aid distributions to understand more about how GHF operates.
What it found was a deeply flawed and problematic method of aid distribution, which lead HRW to accuse GHF of turning its sites into regular “bloodbaths”.
Israel’s deliberate massacres at GHF aid sites
Omar Shakir is the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch (HRW). He investigates human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. And, he explained that:
We are able to confirm that Israeli forces are routinely opening fire on starving Palestinian civilians seeking aid at these sites, and we determine that those acts amount to wilful killings and are therefore war crimes. But our findings aren’t just limited to the killings.
These companies are operating in militarized areas on land that has been largely raised by the Israeli army and ethnically cleansed of Palestinians. So Palestinians are forced to trek many, many kilometres over many hours to reach these aid sites. Because of the nature of how desperate the situation is – because Israel is deliberately starving civilians- there are many thousands of people, while the Israeli army uses live ammunition, essentially as crowd control. We’ve talked to people who’ve gone to, in some cases, scores of aid distributions, often coming back empty handed, witnessing friends and relatives that have been gunned down.
Even if all the sites were to operate at full capacity, they would not be able to even bring in one tenth of the food, the number of trucks worth of food that was being brought in during the ceasefire by the UN mechanism.
By reviewing GHF’s Facebook posts, which is where they make their official announcements, HRW also learnt that GHF’s four sites are only open for an average of 11 minutes. Even then, they’re not even open every day. Sometimes, they announced that sites were closed at the end of distribution. But they had not even announced when distribution had begun, making it impossible for Palestinians to know when aid was being distributed.
Shakir said:
So basically it’s a free for all. Suddenly the site is open. People run, they sprint. They’re being fired on by contractors using lethal and non lethal use of force. We also corresponded with these contractors, and they have acknowledged using live fire. They say they fire in the air or at people’s feet, but the evidence suggests that they’re firing on the crowd. So it’s a scenario where only the strong and powerful are able to, if they’re lucky, get food.
As of 14 August, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, since 27 May, 1,881 aid seekers have been killed, and 13,863 injured. Deaths from famine and malnutrition total 239, including 106 children. Huge numbers of injured people have been flooding into Gaza’s hospitals, because of repeated attacks and the targeting of aid seekers.
Hospitals are overwhelmed, and deaths are rapidly rising
Dr Atef Al-Hout is the director of Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis, the only major hospital still functioning in Southern Gaza Strip. We spoke with him recently, and were told a mass casualty event had taken place. 287 injured people, and more than 40 martyrs had been brought to the hospital. They had been at what he calls “the inhumane aid distribution area”.
Dr Al-Hout said that:
We have all kinds of cases here, including those resulting from shelling that targeted residential areas, in what are known as ‘safe zones’, and injuries from the aid distribution area. The situation is extremely critical and continues to deteriorate. The number of martyrs is increasing daily. We are treating more than double the number of patients compared to 22 months ago, while medical supplies are critically low: Before the war, our hospital had 342 beds, but today we are treating over 800 patients. We’ve added a 100 bed field hospital, there are tents in the courtyard, and patients are even being treated on the floor in the corridors, because of severe overcrowding.
Supplies are critically low, so patients have to go three to four days without having their wound gauze dressings changed because there is not enough supply, and this can lead to blood poisoning and life-threatening complications. There are also no painkillers, IV fluids or intravenous nutrition, which are essential for patients with injuries and malnutrition.
Stocks of blood and plasma units are also running very low in several hospitals. This is not only because of the growing number of mass casualty events, but also the rise in malnutrition, which prevents a person being able to donate their blood to help the injured.
Malnutrition: ‘tired from the slightest effort’
Dr Mohammed Wael Shaheen is resident orthopaedic surgeon and head of the Medical Delegation Committee at Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Hospital, Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip where he works. He said:
Everyone is suffering from malnutrition here, and there is a shortage of food which contain essential elements that strengthen the blood, such as vegetables, fruits, meat, eggs and other items. These have been missing in Gaza since March, due to the blockade.
Although Al-Aqsa Martyr’s hospital now provides one meal -a small plate of rice, pasta, or a Palestinian dish called Majadra – for its medical staff during their 24-hour shift, Dr Shaheen said:
Of course, this is not enough to even sustain a small child for two days, let alone medical staff throughout their shift. Medical staff, as well as their patients, are suffering from malnutrition and are unable to work continuously. I used to be able to stand in the operating room for ten, twelve, or fifteen hours straight, without feeling the slightest bit of fatigue, exhaustion or lack of concentration, but now I can’t even last two to three hours. After that, you feel a severe headache, dizziness, nausea, and exhaustion. You cannot continue to stand, and you cannot complete your work. You get tired from the slightest effort you make at these times.
One of the most vulnerable groups to malnutrition are children, and UNICEF has warned all under fives – over 320,000 children – are at risk of acute malnutrition, the deadliest form of undernutrition. Dr Al-Hout said:
Children, especially infants are arriving in horrific conditions, as breastfeeding mothers do not have milk to feed their babies, due to their own malnutrition, and milk, though very rare in the local markets, is unaffordable, at more than $100 per carton- which is enough for a child for four days.
The toll on children and families: starvation and trauma
Dr Shaheen confided that:
Malnutrition in children is a terrible thing. It is frightening when you see young children with their thin, emaciated bodies, and their parents and families unable to do anything for them. I mean, it chills the bones.
Even a heart of stone would break. How can the people of the free world not be moved? The scenes are unbelievable. We see children in the wards, their chest bones and hand bones protruding from weakness, emaciation, and humiliation. No one in the free world, the honorable world, can imagine that, God forbid, this could be their child or one of their relatives.
Nine-year-old Maryam used to be a healthy happy child, but is now too weak to move. Doctors have not been able to discover any illnesses other than acute malnutrition from starvation. The number of children in Gaza like Maryam are increasing daily.
Abdulaziz Dawas, Maryam’s father is appealing for help. He said:
We began to notice her weight loss around five or six months ago, especially in the last two months. Although Maryam’s malnutrition is extremely severe, I haven’t been able to find a doctor who can assess her condition because all of her tests are clean. Before the war, Maryam was like a princess and weighed 25kg. She now weighs 9kg, has acute diarrhea and blood in her stools, and is in a critical condition. Her situation is deteriorating daily, in a very serious way. She is dying quickly, and we need to save her life. My message to the whole world is that my daughter needs evacuating, it’s the only solution. Please help us!
You can donate to Maryam’s Go Fund Me here.
Profound long-term effects on Palestinian children’s cognitive development
Childhood malnutrition has mental symptoms as well as physical. It can impair brain development – which can have profound long-term effects. Malnourished children struggle with concentration, memory, and learning. Mental development issues can become irreversible if malnutrition continues through early development.
Palestine has one of the highest literacy rates in the world. But unless aid and medical supplies are allowed to now flow freely across the borders, to all parts of the Gaza Strip, the occupation’s enforced starvation campaign will lead to a generation of Palestinians suffering from cognitive decline, with a destroyed future.
Parents in Gaza often sacrifice meals so their children can eat. Yassin, who has a two year old son, said:
When we buy food we eat hardly anything, and keep the rest for our son. We say we have eaten enough during our lives, but he is a child and doesn’t deserve to feel hungry. So we always keep the biggest portion for him. Most days we don’t have anything except bread-two pieces of bread- and duqqa made with lentils. Yousef doesn’t like it, so refuses to eat, so keeps crying and sleeps with hunger. He wakes up in the morning hungry, saying mummy can you give me cake? Can you give me egg? I want apple. We have nothing but duqqa again. In the end he eats a little bit, because he is hungry.
Yassin said she is unable to buy Yousef multivitamins because the occupation has blocked their entry into the Strip.
Malnutrition and contaminated water leading to an explosion of infections and diseases
Good nutrition is also essential for older people and those with chronic illnesses, who have weakened immune systems, such as kidney and cancer patients. But in Gaza, these people are not only hungry, thirsty, and malnourished, but also unable to receive dialysis treatment or chemotherapy, and cannot get essential medicines. Dr Al-Hout said that the condition of these patients is deteriorating by the day, and their death rates are rapidly increasing in Nasser hospital. Only 580 of the approximately 1200 dialysis patients being treated at Nasser Hospital before October 2023 are now still alive.
Overcrowding, lack of sanitary conditions, and contaminated water, combined with immune deficiency due to malnutrition and starvation, is leading Palestinians – especially children – to face extremely high risks of severe, and sometimes fatal infections and diseases.
Gaza’s water infrastructure has purposely been targeted by the occupation. That includes desalination plants, pipelines and sewage systems. Effectively, contaminated water has become a critical humanitarian crisis. Water-borne diseases have increased by almost 150%, with diseases such as polio making a comeback after an absence from the Strip of 25 years. Thousands of cases of Hepatitis A are emerging this year, and there is a surge in meningitis cases among children, amid the total health system collapse.
Severe ‘environmental and public health consequences’
Malnutrition and severely polluted drinking water is also spreading a rare neurological condition, called Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), which results in paralysis of the legs, followed by respiratory failure. GBS is treatable, but the destruction of the healthcare system and blockade on medicines means it can now prove fatal. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 30% of GBS patients require Intensive Care Unit (ICU) admission, so their only hope in Gaza would be medical treatment abroad.
Maher Salem, director general of planning, water and sanitation in the Gaza municipality, said much of the population is now suffering from limited or no access to clean water, and this is having a devastating impact. Wells, reservoirs, and pumping stations have all been damaged or destroyed.
Salem said:
In Gaza City there are eight main sewage pumping stations but all have been destroyed since the beginning of the ongoing aggression. As a result, the entire wastewater system in Gaza City has been non functional, leading to severe environmental and public health consequences. Across the Strip, 175,000 metres of sewage network, out of 500,000 metres has been destroyed, and only a limited number of the 66 sewage pumping stations remain partially functional, mostly in the Southern areas- but even those are operating under extreme limitations due to fuel shortages, damage and access restrictions.
Surviving Israel’s famine: Gaza’s struggle for dignity
Wells are used to extract water from the coastal aquifer, the sole groundwater source in the Gaza Strip, but this groundwater is heavily contaminated by untreated sewage and saltwater, making it unfit for direct human consumption without treatment. This is carried out using small desalination units and brackish water desalination plants. But the occupation’s blockade has led to a severe shortage of electricity and fuel, which complicate the pumping and distribution of water from the wells. Only 14 wells remain undamaged, while 49 are totally destroyed, and 20 severely damaged. Before October 2023, Salem said the total production from wells in summer was 80,000m3 daily but is now only 12,000m3, with 60% lost due to leakage.
Ibrahim Al Khalili, a freelance journalist, born, raised, and based in Gaza City, said that due to this destruction, the majority of families are now completely dependent on water tankers. He said:
People wait in long lines with containers, sometimes for hours, and they have been targeted previously, such as in al-Nuseirat refugee camp when the Israeli military targeted the water distribution point where many children were lining up, just to get a gallon of water for their families. They ended up being brutally killed.
The water is often slightly salty tasting, not ideal for drinking, but people have no other choice. Some families survive on as little as two litres of water per person per day, for everything- drinking, cooking, washing and hygiene, and this lack of water, as well as the contaminated supplies, can really impact people’s health. It’s very horrific and heartbreaking, to witness all this.
Al Khalili, who told the Canary it is more than ten hours since his last meal, said he will eat in the next two hours:
I will prepare bread, with nothing – that is my dinner.
Working for a month to make two days worth of food
Once looters and gangs have taken over the humanitarian aid, they sell it in the markets for sky high prices. So even people with money in Gaza have been left struggling.
Al Khalili said:
When you find flour, it is very expensive, around $25-$30 a kilo, and this is a problem even if you have the money in your bank account. I get paid electronically, but they don’t deal with electronic payments here – they just receive cash. So when we need to withdraw the cash, we lose 52% of our money just to get the cash in hand, or to buy something to eat. The average monthly income per person ranges between $120-$180 USD. That means if someone is lucky enough to find a job, and works all month, he can just secure 4-5kg of flour to feed his kids – which is not sufficient for two days! For me, I work just to survive. The money that comes in goes straight back out.
Mahmoud Basal, the Palestinian civil defence spokesman in Gaza has, so far, been on hunger strike for 27 consecutive days, and has said on his social media posts:
This hunger is not pain. It is protest, it is mourning, it is love turned into resistance…My body is withering but it has not collapsed—because within it I carry the cry of two million souls, besieged by famine and hunted by death in every alley…Do not speak of human rights while you watch an entire people being starved deliberately. Do not praise “international justice” while you allow us to die slowly under siege. You may not live in Gaza but you are complicit in its suffering through your silence…To the officials of this world, I say: Save Gaza.
Airdrops: a dehumanising distraction from real action
Basal has also spoken out about airdrops. He said aid is not entering Gaza in a humane way, and:
the world still accepts that we receive scraps through the path of humiliation and blood.
Airdrops are expensive, inefficient, dangerous, and undignified. They do nothing to address the real problem of aid entry being blocked at the border. However, multiple countries continue with them, including the UK – which is supporting air drops in co-operation with Jordan.
Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner general of UNRWA, said on X:
Airdrops are at least 100 times more costly than trucks. Trucks carry twice as much aid as planes. If there is political will to allow airdrops – which are highly costly, insufficient & inefficient, there should be similar political will to open the road crossings. As the people of Gaza are starving to death, the only way to respond to the famine is to flood Gaza with assistance.
Israeli occupation forces are now deployed over 88% of the Gaza Strip, with these ‘Red Zones’ out of bounds to Palestinians, so much of the aid airdropped by parachute becomes inaccessible to the starving population. Additionally, airdrops are especially dangerous in one of the most crowded places on Earth. Multiple deaths have resulted from airdrop accidents, as each pallet of food plus a parachute weigh more than 540kg, while ones carrying water bottles weigh more than a tonne.
Al Shawa, PNGOs director, summed up the situation:
People are suffocated in a very limited space of land, with the total Palestinian population crowded into just 12 percent of the land. It’s extremely risky to drop the aid over the heads of the people, over the tents. There are now about 47,000 people over a square kilometre of the Gaza Strip, and there is no space for air drops.
Violations of international law, and the need for accountability
As the occupying power, Israel has obligations under international law to ensure the unhindered entry of essential supplies but it has, instead, carried out a systematic policy of starvation, weaponising aid and using it as a silent tool of genocide, to target those Palestinians who have managed to survive the bombing and bloodshed.
Dr Al-Hout said that:
This is an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, a deliberate systematic killing of two million people in Gaza. What is happening is unlike anything in modern human history-a combination of mass killing and starvation.
Women, children and the elderly are being exterminated by hunger, and the areas they were instructed to flee to are being targeted and bombed. What we are witnessing is not just a famine, but deliberate starvation, systematically imposed by the occupation forces who are preventing aid from reaching the area. The silence of the international community only emboldens the occupation to continue its crimes.
Gaza’s destruction is not an accident, but a calculated assault: a campaign waged through hunger, displacement, and the breaking of bodies and spirits, which is a culmination of decades of dehumanisation.
As life inside Gaza edges ever closer to collapse, and as the world watches – silent, complicit, and distracted – history will remember not only the scale of suffering inflicted but also the choices made by those with the power to stop it.
The demand for action remains as urgent as ever: the immediate opening of all crossings into Gaza, the safe and unhindered delivery of aid throughout the Strip, a permanent ceasefire, investment in local food production, and accountability for the occupation’s many atrocities towards Palestinian people.
Please donate to Maryam’s Go Fund Me page here.
Featured image and additional images via the Canary
By Charlie Jaay
This post was originally published on Canary.