The hunger war in Gaza against displaced Palestinians: Starvation as a weapon

In Gaza today, a hunger war is unfolding before the world’s eyes — a siege in which starvation is being wielded not by drought or pestilence, but by deliberate political and military design. For months, the people of Gaza have endured a blockade that goes far beyond the fog of war. This is not an accidental by-product of conflict; it is an intentional strategy. Food convoys are obstructed by the Zionist Israeli occupiers or allowed in at a trickle. Agricultural land lies scorched, fishing waters patrolled by Zionist Israeli Military and closed. The breadbasket of a proud people has been smashed, replaced with queues for scraps where very few manage to fill in their food bowls. And now, a secondary assault has emerged: the rise of profiteering middlemen — agent traders — who hoard what little aid arrives, selling it back at impossible prices, effectively turning humanitarian relief into a luxury commodity.

Hunger here is not just a by-product of siege; it is amplified by forced displacement. Whole communities of two million Gazans have been uprooted, driven from their homes, their farms, their orchards, and their fishing boats. Families have been cut off from the very systems that sustained them: their wells, their vegetable plots, their local markets. In displacement camps, survival depends on irregular aid drops or overpriced market stalls, while self-reliance — once rooted in fertile fields and abundant seas — has been severed.

“As long as Hamas holds our captives, not one gram of humanitarian aid should be allowed into Gaza. Not fuel, not water, nothing.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir
(+972 Magazine, “Israeli Ministers Push for Total Ban on Aid to Gaza,” Nov 2023)

The famine literature is unambiguous: starvation in wartime is rarely a natural disaster. Scholars from Amartya Sen to Alex de Waal have shown that most modern famines are engineered through what Sen called “entitlement failure” — people’s loss of access to food — and what de Waal calls “starvation crimes” — the deliberate use of hunger as a weapon of war. Gaza’s current crisis matches these models point for point.

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A swift reading of the historical parallels. In Somalia’s 2011 famine, food aid was diverted by armed actors and sold on black markets while hundreds of thousands starved. In Sudan’s sieges, markets were and continue to be manipulated to keep prices high, ensuring that aid only reached those aligned with the dominant power. In each of these cases, famine mortality was compounded by profiteers — traders who exploited scarcity for gain, often with the tacit or active blessing of political authorities.

Gaza is now trapped in that same cycle. The blockade ensures scarcity; the traders deepen it, often serving the Zionist agenda. Aid, when it arrives, is hidden in warehouses, shielded from the desperate eyes of the hungry. Only slowly does it emerge — in market stalls at prices four or five times the pre-war norm. And for the displaced, even reaching these markets have been deadly. Some food comes in from the sky, in uncontrolled drops, the so-called “killing boxes of aid” — aid packages that fall unpredictably into crowds, injuring or killing those who rush to retrieve them. On the ground, worn-out ferry supplies into cramped displacement zones, their passage through crowded streets sometimes leaving more casualties in their wake. The random killing by the Zionist Israeli snippers against the hungry Gazans striving to get flour bags and canned food is another level of the perpetuated ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

These tactics are not just morally obscene — they are, under international humanitarian law, illegal. The Rome Statute explicitly prohibits “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” (Art. 8(2)(b)(xxv)). Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions ban the destruction or removal of objects indispensable to civilian survival, including food, water, and agricultural assets. Under these laws, both the forces enforcing the blockade and those colluding in aid diversion could face accountability for war crimes.

The ongoing propaganda in the media that famine claims in wartime are exaggerated, that markets adapt, that aid does eventually arrive, is the same defensive narrative deployed in past sieges — a calculated attempt to muddy the moral waters until the crisis passes or the world looks away. But hunger statistics are harder to obscure: UN agencies report acute malnutrition in children, stunting rates climbing, and an ever-shrinking calorie intake across the territory. A population’s physical collapse is not something that can be spun indefinitely.

READ: Over 14,800 patients in Gaza need urgent life-saving treatment unavailable locally

If the international community fails to respond decisively, permitting the Zionist occupier to proceed with their blindly power, Gaza starvation will become a blueprint: besiege, restrict, obstruct aid, displace civilians from their food sources, allow profiteers to manage the scarcity, and deny legal culpability until the famine runs its course and then claim that indigenous people sought to voluntary migrate away from their homes!

The mechanisms of starvation are being actively negated, yet in the 21st century, famine should be an artifact of history—relegated to museum exhibits and textbooks. Food and grains are available, but they are hoarded. People are stripped of their land and water, their food systems severed, aid flows controlled, markets manipulated, and hunger weaponised.

In Gaza, the agent traders are more than opportunists; they are part of the machinery of famine perpetuated by the Zionist Israeli Occupier. Their ability to operate relies on the conditions created by the blockade, and their profit margins swell in proportion to the suffering around them. They thrive on the vulnerability of displaced populations who can no longer grow their own food or draw from clean wells. As scholar David Keen has written on the political economy of famine, “It is a mistake to think of famine as a breakdown; it is also a system — a system from which some people benefit.”

The moral responsibility here is layered. There is the direct culpability of those imposing the blockade and denying their acts and their responsibility, knowing full well its predictable effects on civilian survival. There is the complicity of those diverting and hoarding aid sponsored by the Zionist Israeli occupier. And there is the collective failure of the international system — a failure not of capacity, but of will. We can get food into Gaza. We have the trucks, the ships, the stockpiles. What we lack is the political resolve to enforce humanitarian law when it is most needed.

Ending this hunger war requires urgent action on three fronts. First, a full lifting of the blockade on essential goods — food, water, fuel, medical supplies — with monitored, rapid humanitarian corridors. Second, a crackdown on profiteering networks, dismantling the economic incentives for aid diversion. Third, international legal proceedings to establish that starvation as a weapon, and displacement as a famine amplifier, are prosecutable crimes with real consequences.

Gaza’s children do not have time for slow diplomacy. Famine is a clock that ticks toward irreversible loss — not just of life, but of the social fabric and resilience of a people. Every day that food is withheld, every home abandoned, every well left dry, every aid drop that kills instead of nourishes, is a day closer to collapse.

The famine against Palestinians is deliberately inflicted. That is not a tragedy; it is an atrocity. Gaza’s famine is not an unforeseen humanitarian emergency. It is an orchestrated genocide by the Zionist Israeli decision makers. And until those responsible are held to account, it will remain a precedent — a dark, modern manual on how to starve and displace a population into submission while the world debates semantics.

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