The humanitarian crisis in Gaza has reached a catastrophic scale. Israel is committing crimes against humanity by maintaining a state of famine among the Palestinian people. The impact of these measures is to inflict needless suffering in the short term. They endanger the future of Palestinian society itself for generations to come. Food experts say that the Israeli plan is designed to ensure control of the Palestinian population by weaponizing food. This strategy produces what they call “genocidal humanitarianism.”
Documentation shows that Israel has systematically applied food as a question, even in lulls of traditional warfare. This strategy allows Israel to maintain control over essential resources and actively undermine civil order, even when hostilities temporarily cease. Filling that gap, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) is crucial in this context, since Israel routes food through their sites. Experts from Forensic Architecture have registered severe concerns about the placement and design of these GHF centers. They are hollering that these supposed centers for safety are structurally unsound and situated in zones where the Israeli Defense Forces have told civilians to flee.
For civilians, accessing GHF sites brings clear dangers and hazards. Routes going to any of these stops almost always take people perilously close to Israeli military installations, putting them in direct sight of armed guards who could open fire. International observers are watching very closely. They argue that starvation is not only a biological matter pertaining to the individual but is a social experience rooted in collective trauma.
“Starvation breaks social order and transforms governance into just one issue: who can feed people?” said Nour Abuzaid, highlighting the way starvation shifts power dynamics within affected communities. Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture, discussed the implications of using starvation as a method of warfare.
“Obviously, to intentionally starve people to death is genocidal, and starvation is also used in order to break society. Starvation is the means and starvation is the end.” – Eyal Weizman
International experts have continued to sound alarm after alarm that Gaza is on the brink of crossing a deadly threshold into famine. Under these conditions, it seems apparent that starvation has gone beyond to inflict immediate effects, but rather acts in a structured way to eliminate Palestinian society. The social ramifications are profound. As Alex de Waal notes, “Very often that societal element – the trauma, the shame, the loss of dignity, the violation of taboos, the breaking of social bonds – is more significant in the memory of the experience of survivors than the individual biological experience.”
De Waal makes the point that starvation by design is a scientific decision. It’s not simply a tragic, unintended byproduct of conflict. He states, “You can’t starve anyone by accident; you can shoot someone by accident but … in inflicting starvation [you] have 60 or 80 days in which [you] can remedy the error.” This claim further emphasizes the calculated nature of these actions and their desired impacts on Palestinian communities.
The phrase genocidal humanitarianism is an apt description of how the aggressor is able to weaponize food aid in order to continue exerting control over a vulnerable population. “If you can feed people, you can rule them. Because life has been reduced to a single question: What are we going to eat today?” Abuzaid remarked. Such a disturbing reality serves as a reminder of how food manipulation turns into an instrument of rule in times of war.
The undersigned international observers are extremely concerned about the humanitarian crisis emerging in Gaza. They argue that starvation is more than just avoiding mass death. It is about re-establishing social ties. As Eyal Weizman recently pointed out, the goal of Israel’s strategy is to avoid rapid, visible mass deaths from starvation and disease. In doing so, it seeks to ensure the continued evisceration of Palestinian society.
“This is not about a formal famine declaration or a special number of trucks or meals. It’s about Israel’s attempt to starve Gaza indefinitely without the rapid mass death from starvation and disease we call famine.” – Alex de Waal
The endless cycle of violence and hunger indicates that the present is equally tragic. Each day more than 26,000 people are killed, not just by bullets and bombs, but now increasingly due to the cruel hand of hunger. According to these same reports, even in the best-case scenario of ceasefires, civilians are still under constant threat. “There were over 100 people who were killed during the ceasefire just because they were in proximity to the buffer zone,” Abuzaid noted.