Starvation as a Weapon

After 470 days of war, the January 15 ceasefire between Israel and Hamas allowed humanitarian aid trucks to resume their regular routes in the Gaza Strip. Vehicles now move through the area without delay, attack, or looting. However, humanitarian aid arrives at a population that is officially in a food crisis and faces severe shortages of basic goods and services.

Gaza is demolished. An estimated 436,000 homes (92%) were destroyed or severely damaged. Only 11 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are partially functioning, and the lack of electricity and drinking water further exacerbates the situation. In its most recent report, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global system for assessing and classifying levels of food security, estimated that 91% of Gazans, or 1.9 million people, are at risk of malnutrition. At the same time, 345,000 people suffer from acute malnutrition, and almost all children under the age of two (96%) are malnourished.

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and the leader of Hamas’s military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, Mohammed Deif, for war crimes. Deif, who is accused, among other things, of ordering the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in July of 2024.

The Court’s statement on the Netanyahu-Gallant arrest warrants states, for the use of starvation as a weapon, that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the lack of food, water, electricity and fuel, and specific medical supplies, created conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the civilian population in Gaza, which resulted in the death of civilians, including children due to malnutrition and dehydration.”

In the first four days of the ceasefire, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) shipped as much food as it had delivered in all of December 2024. However, the blame game between Israel and Hamas continued, with both sides blaming the other. “All actors use starvation. It’s cheap, it usually seems to be effective, it’s often easy to deny, ” says Alex De Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, tells iMEdD. “The UN and Western countries are usually more concerned with the question of providing aid to the starving than the actions that cause them to be starving in the first place,” he adds.

The chronicle of the famine in Gaza

“It is clear that there has been a political decision to minimize the provision of food, water, and medical assistance to this population,” Nicholas Papachrysostomou, Head of Emergency Coordination and Humanitarian Operations at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), tells iMEdD. He remained in southern Gaza until December 2023, coordinating MSF operations amid constant bombings

In the months that followed, the Israeli army struck targets in northern Gaza, displacing tens of thousands of residents to the south. Supplies from the south almost never reached the north. “The lack of humanitarian aid has killed people, not only because it was lacking, but also in the process of trying to get it there,” Georgios Petropoulos, Head of Sub-Office for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Gaza, tells iMEdD, speaking from Rafah.

Before the war, at least 500 trucks of goods, fuel, and humanitarian aid entered Gaza daily. In October, that number dropped to one-third.

Despite appeals from the international community, “even at the end of last year, no trucks were coming in with supplies. Two weeks [before the ceasefire], they took from us six of our eight oil trucks. We only had 4,000 liters of diesel, and we needed 400,000 liters a day just for the humanitarian workers,” Petropoulos adds.

He notes that as the famine intensified, so did the looting of humanitarian convoys by gangs taking advantage of the chaotic conditions, as well as attacks by the Israeli army on humanitarian missions and warehouses.

On February 29, 2024, at least 118 Palestinians were killed and 760 injured when Israeli forces opened fire on civilians who had gathered to collect food from a humanitarian aid convoy near Gaza City. “IDF troops did not fire at the humanitarian convoy, but did fire at a number of suspects who approached the nearby forces and posed a threat to them,” the Israeli army stated after the incident. In the spring of 2024, Petropoulos’s team reached out directly to local communities to guard the convoys. However, as he explains, Israeli airstrikes have resulted in the deaths of at least 30-40 people in each mission.

Lack of data and doubts about a crime

For those on the ground, the food crisis in Gaza is due to the collapse of an entire support system for an already exhausted population. However, the lack of statistical data and access to northern Gaza has fueled doubts about the existence of the famine. In an article in Haaretz, Alex de Waal stressed that the questioning of the available data is done with the intention to “conceal and justify crimes of starvation”. “The international community has established humanitarian information and early warning systems over the last decades. The impartial, independent, effective and credible functioning of these mechanisms is essential for humanitarian response,” de Waal tells iMEdD.

Translation: Evita Lykou

Read all articles and analyses of the Special Report: “Armories of the Middle East” here.

This article was first published on Feb. 22 by the weekend edition of the newspaper “TA NEA”.