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I grew up with stories of starvation at home. Both my parents somehow survived, only just, this horrible fate during the Second World War. My mother was in Stalingrad and my father in a concentration camp in Poland, suffering from that slow and agonizing process of wasting away. Their stories, and those of others who did not survive, exposed me from a young age to this type of cruelty, which one group of human beings is capable of inflicting on another at times of war and conflict. Tragically for humanity, we have completely failed to eradicate it.
Starvation, if it doesn’t kill you, will induce severe long-term mental and other health vulnerabilities and adversely affect one’s life expectancy. Having lived my formative years among those who had suffered from extreme hunger and its consequences, I feel sickened and distressed by the images of starved people in Gaza. It feels personal. Some might argue it evokes a secondary trauma and the inability to reconcile with the fact that no empathy or compassion are being shown by today’s Israeli government, not to the very young or old or anyone else there.
I can already hear the chorus of criticism for comparing what is taking place in Gaza with the Holocaust. I won’t do this, because this is not what matters now and is not my intention. A starved person, especially when their condition is human-made and avoidable, is the victim of a brutality that has no place in a civilized society.
And those who are in a position to stop it but do not do so must be held accountable. For a nation that includes so many of its people who suffered the fate of starvation and either perished as a result or somehow survived, there must be an obligation and an expectation to be particularly sensitive to its recent history and to refuse to be complicit, in any way, shape or form, in causing the starvation of other people.
Alas, this is not the case. The World Health Organization reports that malnutrition in Gaza is on a dangerous trajectory, marked by a spike in deaths in July. “Of 74 malnutrition-related deaths in 2025, 63 occurred in July — including 24 children under five, a child over five, and 38 adults … (and) their bodies showing clear signs of severe wasting.” In the first two weeks of last month alone, more than 5,000 children under five were admitted for outpatient treatment of malnutrition, nearly a fifth of them with severe acute malnutrition.
According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification platform, two out of three famine thresholds have been reached in Gaza: plummeting food consumption and acute malnutrition. There is mounting evidence that “widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease” are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths, which is the third famine indicator, but not yet on levels where famine can be formally declared.
A starved person, especially when their condition is avoidable, is the victim of a brutality that has no place in a civilized society.
Yossi Mekelberg
The Israeli government, and first and foremost Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are denying the fact of starvation or hunger in Gaza, something that has even angered the PM’s close backer, US President Donald Trump. Netanyahu does not sound convincing by first denying that there is a severe shortage of food despite mounting evidence to the contrary and then accusing Hamas of causing these shortages that he denies exist.
In reality, Israel could have prevented this acute shortage of food by flooding, so to speak, the place with food to circumvent anyone who tries to control the food market, for either racketeering or political gain, and by that deprive them of having any leverage over the Gazan population. To meet the basic needs of the 2.1 million people who live in Gaza, there is a need for 62,000 tonnes of food staples monthly. In a decision that represents both extreme callousness and a complete lack of judgment, in the months of March and April, Israel did not allow any food to enter Gaza. Then, under international pressure, a trickle of food was allowed in, but only about a quarter of what was required. This slowed the trajectory of Gaza’s descent into starvation, but it did not stop it.
Moreover, the Israeli decision to declare war on UNRWA and other UN agencies that were best equipped to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza — thanks to their experience and the trust they enjoy with the local population — has backfired. The failed attempt to replace these organizations with the American-backed Gaza Humanitarian Fund resulted in not enough food entering Gaza. And, to make things worse, according to the UN, at least 1,373 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food — 859 in the vicinity of this group’s sites and 514 along the food delivery routes. Supplying humanitarian aid by airdrops was mainly a PR exercise and it has delivered only a fraction of the quantities needed, and at times led to the deaths of those desperate to get food.
Those are the facts and, without an urgent, immediate and substantial increase in the supply of food and medicine, we are likely to see an exponential rise in the number of those dying from hunger — meanwhile, there is heartless political wrangling over who is to blame. As there is mounting evidence of many and various war crimes committed in Gaza, mass starvation is the one that has led the international community, at last, to voice its grave concerns and apply some pressure on Israel, albeit with limited results, to end this inhumane policy and start allowing food in.
It is simply beyond comprehension how this Israeli government could have lost all trace of its humanity and morality, not to mention its basic common sense, and sunk to a new low of withdrawing the most basic needs for subsistence from people who have already suffered immeasurable loss and pain. Nothing has united the world in its criticism of Israel, not before the war and not during it, more than its inflicting of such degrees of hunger and distress in Gaza.
If future historians should look at one single aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that gave the impetus for leading Western countries such as the UK, France and Canada, among others, to recognize the Palestinian state — or for Germany of all countries to impose a partial military embargo — it would most probably be this current Israeli government’s decision that starving the people of Gaza is permissible and might serve Israeli interests. No one else shares this view.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet and Russian author and dissident who was incarcerated in Stalin’s gulag prison system, wrote on this experience in his book “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”: “That bowl of soup — it was dearer than freedom, dearer than life itself, past, present and future.” Those who deliberately deprive people of food do so because they want their total submission, which is Israel’s intention in Gaza.
• Yossi Mekelberg is professor of international relations and an associate fellow of the MENA Program at Chatham House.
X: @YMekelberg