Palestinians wait to receive food from a charity kitchen amid a hunger crisis, in Gaza City on Monday.Khamis Al-Rifi/Reuters
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute.
From human mousetraps to nearly pointless airdrops, Israel’s idea of how Palestinians in Gaza should be allowed to eat has ranged from the murderous to the bizarre. Pressure now may finally be forcing Israel to relent before a full-scale man-made famine takes hold.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court charged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with using starvation as a weapon of war. But since he breached a ceasefire on May 18 with air strikes that killed more than 400 Palestinians, including almost 200 children, the hunger crisis has greatly deepened.
Israel then imposed a total blockade. Now, a third of Palestinians go days unfed. Lack of diesel for desalination plants has also produced a crisis in potable water, along with medicine.
Death by starvation in Gaza is now readily quantifiable, with a reported 111 Palestinians, including 80 children, having perished in recent days, according to Gaza’s health authority. Aid agencies and even Agence France-Presse say their staff in Gaza face imminent starvation.
International outcry against this entirely preventable tragedy has been mounting. Last week, 25 governments, mostly friendly to Israel, including Canada and the European Union, issued a statement demanding an end to the war and decrying “the drip feeding of aid” to the two million Palestinian civilians in Gaza, creating suffering that has reached “new depths.”
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Even U.S. President Donald Trump, who is no friend to the Palestinians of Gaza and has proposed expelling them en masse to create a “Riviera” for “the world’s people,” promises the U.S. will do more to alleviate this crisis. He is insisting other countries also do more, and even demanded “at least a thank you” for sending millions in aid.
These comments are particularly macabre given that the Israeli government and paramilitary contractors backed by the Trump administration launched a disastrous project on May 26 designed to distribute aid while excluding the UN and all experienced, professional and reputable humanitarian agencies and institutions. Along with a shadowy group of right-wing U.S. evangelical preachers, they established the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation to try to prevent all-out famine while keeping the UN and respectable aid agencies out.
The GHF system rapidly degenerated into a set of atrocious human mousetraps. The Foundation set up four main distribution centres for their aid packages – described as woefully inadequate by many Palestinians and other observers – replacing the more than 400 aid hubs that had been operating. Palestinians were told to come to these hubs at certain dates and times, but Israeli troops and U.S. mercenaries have, by many credible accounts, relied almost entirely on live fire with a huge range of war weaponry against starving Palestinians who approached at the wrong time or in the wrong way.
More than 1,000 Palestinians have been reportedly shot dead at these hubs in an impossible choice between looming starvation and potential violent death since operations began. Reports in Israeli newspapers quote troops as saying they were ordered to use live fire as the first and only means of crowd control. U.S. contractors have reportedly been witnessed joking and boasting about gunning down Palestinian civilians.
Witnessing starvation on the streets of Gaza
Over the weekend, international pressure on Israel to change course to prevent an imminent major famine appears to have made some progress. Israel airdropped bundles of supplies into Gaza – a bizarre decision given Israeli complaints, contradicted by the UN and aid agencies, that Hamas systematically steals or seizes supplies – and announced the suspension of military operations in most of the territory during daylight hours.
That’s certainly an improvement, but the suffering of the people of Gaza must be eased in far more meaningful ways. The Israeli government must allow food, water, medicine and diesel back into the territory and permit the UN and other reputable, experienced international humanitarian agencies to resume their life-saving operations.
Finally, the war in Gaza must end. Obviously Hamas should release all hostages, since kidnapping is never an acceptable stratagem. But Israel needs to withdraw from the territory altogether and allow the region and the world to work with the Palestinian Authority to begin to rebuild Gaza and re-establish law and order there.
Israel’s conduct toward Palestinian civilians during this war will forever stain that country’s reputation. Mr. Netanyahu faces well-founded and now greatly bolstered criminal charges of using food and starvation as a weapon of war. Israel, and of course Hamas, cannot be exceptions to the limitations established by the human family after the Second World War regarding conduct toward civilians during conflicts.
No one knows how many people have really died in Gaza since October, 2023. But each additional civilian death, especially from starvation, is now on the conscience not merely of the government of Israel, but of the whole world.