“In Palestine, over 1 million people – half of the population of the Gaza Strip – is expected to face death and starvation by mid-July.” Even the staid UN FAO-WFP, ever striving for apolitical ‘neutrality,’ began their annual Hunger Hotspots report in June 2024 with this staggering announcement. Millions of people in Gaza face catastrophic food insecurity—with over half their population suffering mass starvation—even as food aid trucks idle and food aid rots at the militarized border crossings. Scores of children have died of lethal hunger and dehydration—and yet the major food security institutions and academic programs and news media in the United States barely mention the horror—or its perpetrators: the Israeli government, military forces, and settlers, alongside US government and elite accomplices. How has the fastest and most ferocious deliberate famine in modern history happened, hidden by dominant media and yet circulated widely via independent sources? Who and what are accountable? These questions burn with urgency.
There exists a universal ethical consensus against starving people. A unifying imperative connects the world’s diverse religions and Indigenous cosmologies: the call to feed the hungry. In Islam, like Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and the diverse religious Hindu and Indigenous traditions and beyond, helping feed the poor and oppressed reigns as a perennial urgency and virtue. Providing nourishment to those in need helps anchor and connect the pillars of charity (zakat) and fasting (sawm); it thus fulfills spiritual duties, protects the fabric of society, and actualizes humanity personally and collectively. As such, when practiced, it helps prevent as well as reverse widespread hunger.
Yet, people continue to go hungry despite the global moral unanimity to stop it. In the twentieth century, liberal international institutions—like the United Nations Food & Agricultural Organization—arose to counter famine. Rife with the hypocrisies of the coloniality of modernity, these institutions posited as ‘post-colonial’ though they carried on Eurocentric power dynamics; the hegemony of the modernist nation-state as dominant scale of reference became further solidified. Nevertheless, over generations, UN agencies expanded to include expertise and perspectives from around the world. Thousands of people with genuine intentions to feed the hungry joined the bureaucratic ranks. Accordingly, in 2018, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2417 Condemning the Starving of Civilians as a Method of Warfare and the Unlawful Denial of Humanitarian Access to Civilian Populations. This was a landmark consensus and seemed to herald a new chapter of collective moral commitment.
With Gaza, however, hunger has again been wielded, as tortuous weapon. Two million three hundred thousand humans, mostly children who have lived in a 25 X 3-7 mile outdoor cage-enclosure their whole lives, have been bombed relentlessly day and night for the past nine months—including with white phosphorous chemical warfare. After the October 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel, the Israeli government retaliated with a ‘total siege,’ or total strangulation, depriving millions of Gazans of food, drinkable water, fuel to generate desalinization, electricity for hospitals, medicine, or sewage treatment. It then ordered over a million people to leave their homes, lands, and lives, to flee to the southern half of their outdoor prison. Even as Israeli Forces further bombed their alleged escape routes, along with hospitals, schools, city centers, mosques, churches, and importantly, all major production, storage, and distribution points for food: crops, granaries, bakeries, poultry farms, cafeterias, kitchens, roads, and UN shelters. The Israeli Occupation Forces’ ground invasion pulverized north and now south Gaza, and terrorizes hospitals, which became de facto refugee shelters, feeding stations, and now mass morgues.
Immediately, international food aid agencies and scholars and everyone who has ever been to Gaza or cared for Palestinians knew this would be a mass death sentence, with terrorizing methodology. The physical and psychological torture of hunger and lethal thirst renders what is euphemistically called a ‘war’ to a grinding, desperate slaughter. Parents cannot escape their children’s screams of hunger. The most intimate bonds suffer the cruel calculus of who gets the meager morsels—and who does not.
The Gaza Strip, “outdoor prison” of Israeli de facto occupation, had already endured generations of displacement since the 1948 ‘Nakba’ and subsequent military raids and apartheid via infamous checkpoint violence and ubiquitous surveillance. For seventeen years, Israel imposed a blockade, to curtail and control movement of people, goods, and food in and out of the besieged Strip. Israeli forces have long weaponized food aid against Palestine, but the oppression has reached extreme levels in the past nine months. During the Gaza blockade, Israeli authorities have limited incoming food calories to just above daily minimum requirements in the notorious biopolitical ‘Gaza diet.’ Before the current genocide, two thirds of Gaza’s population depended on the food aid Israel allowed in, held within 500 trucks entering the Strip daily.
From October 2023 to February 2024, average trucks plummeted to ninety per day, and thereafter decreased to a few dozen. The UN World Food Program calculated it needed to bring in at least 40 trucks of food daily to stave off famine, yet only a few were allowed to cross Rafah checkpoint, searched, blocked, and kept only to the south, as a lure for those in the North still trying to retain their homes and lands amidst Israel’s ground invasion and what Israel’s Minister of Agriculture publicly admitted was a “second Nakba.” By December 2023, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) as well as the Famine Early Warning Systems Network both concluded famine was imminent. The White House blatantly ignored the dire warnings.
According to the United Nations (Oct 2023), another Israeli Minister publicly threatened to bomb those attempting to provide humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip—and they made good on their word, bombing the Rafah crossing to further thwart (and terrorize) movement, supplies, egress, and aid. Israel closed Rafah Crossing in early May, leaving only Karem Abu Salem/Kerem Shalom. Thousands of food and medicine aid trucks idle at border, searched by Israeli forces, with most turned away, according to Oxfam, Amnesty International, the United Nations, and Human Rights Watch.
People in northern Gaza have been forced, by Israeli forces, to survive on an average of 245 calories a day since January, Oxfam reported in April 2024—less than 12 percent of recommended minimum calories. At this time, Israeli government had just informed UNRWA it would block their convoys into the north of the besieged Strip. Drawing on IPC and UNRWA data, Oxfam calculated that an “absolute minimum” of 221 trucks full of food aid alone (with no wastage) would be needed to stave off mass starvation. By April only 105 trucks a day were entering Gaza, with rampant spoilage amidst the heat and delays. The IPC calculated earlier this spring that 1.1 million people were experiencing ‘catastrophic food insecurity’ – category 5 (out of 5, with 5 being the worst). History books will be written about how Gazans have survived thus far—and the miracle of their collective resilience in the face of such atrocities—so well-funded, well-armed, and justified by the US government.
Merely five years after the UN Resolution 2417 to condemn the weaponization of hunger, it falls as a farce. The Resolution decries a litany of specific methods of how food gets weaponized (destroying markets, farms, mills, orchards, processing plants, distribution points, energy grids, municipal water, agricultural wells)—which Israeli forces have since used as a to-do list on what to attack and thus how to starve Palestine most effectively.
Then there’s the deeper questions of how and why a country even has the power to shut off food and water to another people? The Indigenous Arab Berber communities of Palestine have millennia of agrarian history and expertise in the arid lands, riverbanks, oases, and olive, date, fig, almond, citrus orchards, and Fertile Crescent fields comprising a Center of World Origin and Diversity of Wheat, which continued on through the Ottoman Empire, British colonialism, and Israeli settler colonialism. Palestine struggles to salvage its rich seafood traditions, in the Jordanian River and the Mediterranean Sea, amidst Israeli assaults on fisheries, even as it strives to save its legendary land-food traditions of olive tree groves and pastoralism, all under attack by Israeli soldiers and settlements.
Palestinian food sovereignty defies the genocidal attempts to erase it, including Israel’s longstanding herbicidal warfare in Gaza now culminating in an apocalyptic ecocide in Gaza, which even the UNEP describes (in devastating detail) as a disaster of monumental untreated sewage, due to Israeli blockade and relentless bombardment. The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library advances seedkeeping as cornerstone for Palestinian food and land sovereignty. Yet, the obstacles mount exponentially: Palestine is emblematic of geopolitical ecologies of imperialist ecological injustices, extractions, and distraction with such euphemisms as ‘conflict in the Middle East.’ It also embodies the humanitarian contradictions of liberalist aid.
After all, food aid, through a crucial lifeline in famine conditions, has also been weaponized in Palestine. From the notorious ‘flour massacre,’ wherein Israeli forces fired and killed hundreds of Gazans queuing up for flour aid distribution, to the tragedy of undeployed parachutes leading to heavy pallets of food crushing and killing starving Gazans below. From the drowning deaths of desperate fathers swimming into choppy waters to retrieve food aid dropped accidentally at sea, to the actual targeting and killing of food aid workers, such as the World Kitchen staff. The US government boasted of a new temporary ‘pier’ off the Gaza coast to transport food aid in: the multi-million dollar apparatus closed within days due to weather, then re-opened in time for it to be used as a covert military base for Israeli soldiers who then infiltrated Nusreirat refugee camp disguised in humanitarian aid trucks, according to the United Nations. Having just driven from the US floating ‘humanitarian’ pier, they launched an attack that killed more than 274 Palestinians (including 64 children) and injured over 700 more. The US paid for the pier, armed the Israeli forces, then provided diplomatic cover for them after the massacre. This puts the lives of every humanitarian aid worker in danger, not to mention Palestinians desperate for aid. The local hospital, one of the few still functioning in Gaza—and with only one functioning generator, was overwhelmed with the hundreds of mortally injured, and of course, desperately hungry people.
Meanwhile, even the death toll grows exponentially. While official figures report nearly 40,000 Gazans killed by Israeli forces in the first ten months of the war on Gaza, and hundreds more killed in the West Bank, the internationally reputed public health journal The Lancet calculated in early July that once unidentified bodies and persons missing for months under rubble were included into the tally, “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” Yet, the US arms flow to Israel continues unabated, with an additional $18B arms sale to Israel moving through Congress, largely uncontested.
Questions of institutional legitimacy abound. Urgent questions of culpability. As a shared cornerstone of ethics across the world and throughout history, the call to feed the hungry demands that all of us reckon with the deliberate starvation of Gaza. In Islam, the injunction to not ‘help the oppressor’ pertains directly to this question of accountability (Surah Hud 11:113). Meanwhile, people around the world invoke their spiritual, religious, and cosmological traditions to call for a ceasefire in Israel-Palestine and an end to the starvation of Gaza. Jewish Voice for Peace centers Jewish ethics of tikkun olam (repairing the world) in their far-reaching advocacy to stop the genocide against Palestinians. Black Christian communities organize in solidarity with Palestine. Interfaith peacemakers have a particular duty to not look away.
Ending the famine, providing emergency food and medical aid to Gaza is the first, stunningly overdue, step. But even this requires extricating the food aid from the military-industrial apparatus that renders Palestinian humanity and mass death as mere ‘collateral damage.’ Thereafter, the work becomes helping Palestine recover food, water, and land sovereignty for its own freedom and survival, as well as for the foundation for any authentic peace in the region and beyond.
Garrett Graddy-Lovelace is Provost Associate Professor at American University School of International Service’s Environment, Development & Health Department, where she researches and teaches agricultural policy and agrarian geography. She has published widely on agrobiodiversity, land use, and the geopolitics of food and has a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, a PhD in Geography from University of Kentucky, and a longstanding focus on traditional (agro)ecological knowledge for climate resilience and justice.