Gaza Is Still Being Deliberately Starved to Death

A U.S.-armed government is openly starving millions of people to death, and the official reaction in Washington is a shrug.

Alex de Waal calls for international action to halt the famines in Gaza and Sudan:

The Gaza figures are particularly shocking because, before October last year, acute malnutrition levels were about 1% and general mortality was just a quarter of the background rates in countries such as Somalia and South Sudan. Many children suffered micronutrient deficiencies, but few were underweight. After 7 October, acute food crisis indicators went off a cliff, with unparalleled speed.

And it’s a near certainty that when the death toll from hunger and disease is finally measured, it will number in the tens of thousands. In my book, Gaza counts as a famine.

The famines in Sudan and Gaza are both human-made. Stopping them requires political and humanitarian action. Justice and humanity demand calling out the men who are making them and the foreign powers that enable them.

The U.S. is the chief enabler of the famine in Gaza. In March, Secretary Blinken refused to acknowledge that Israel was using starvation as a weapon. The administration pretended that Israel was complying with international law when there was a mountain of evidence that they weren’t. Blinken also knew that the Israeli government had been obstructing aid six months ago because U.S. officials had told him as much, but then he lied and claimed that they weren’t. The administration’s fake “deadline” passed last week, and they imposed no consequences on Israel despite the worsening conditions in Gaza. The White House will say and do anything to make sure that the weapons continue to flow.

The famine in Gaza stands out as being the most preventable famine in modern times. As many U.N. experts, humanitarian groups, and human rights organizations have said for the last year, it is the result of Israel’s policy of deliberate starvation that began in October 2023. Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council said this last week:

We who are there who are independent, neutral, impartial, all U.N. agencies, all Red Cross agencies, all nongovernmental agencies, American, European, et cetera, we are unanimous in that Israel is deliberately starving the population and having an indiscriminate, excessive warfare that are killing thousands of women and children.

There is no doubt that this has been documented. Israel is not telling the truth.

Many observers have warned where this policy would inevitably lead, but the relevant authorities have chosen to ignore these warnings and pretend that nothing is amiss. The Biden administration either flatly denies the severity of the humanitarian crisis or congratulates themselves for getting Israel to allow some token amount of food into Gaza. A U.S.-armed government is openly starving millions of people to death, and the official reaction in Washington is a shrug.

There is an effort in the Senate to pass resolutions of disapproval on arms sales to Israel, and the White House is actively lobbying against it. Biden won’t put any pressure on Netanyahu’s government, and he goes out of his way to oppose any effort that others might make to stop weapons transfers. It is as if the president wants to spend his final months in office cementing his legacy as an accomplice to mass starvation and genocide.

No one in Washington can honestly claim not to know what the Israeli government has been doing for the last thirteen months. The evidence of deliberate starvation is staring all of us in the face. Medical workers have borne witness to the children being starved to death. The Biden administration knows what it is enabling, and it doesn’t care. Netanyahu and Gallant are chief among those most responsible for causing the famine in Gaza, but they have been helped in this by Biden, Blinken, Austin, and the rest of this morally bankrupt administration.