Israel Is Killing Gazans with Hunger

The people of Gaza are being starved, and they are being starved as part of a deliberate policy.

Human Rights Watch released a new report today that confirms what we have been seeing for the last two months:

The Israeli government is using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the occupied Gaza Strip, which is a war crime, Human Rights Watch said today. Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas, and depriving the civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival.

The Israeli military campaign has killed nearly 20,000 people according to the official count (the real tally is likely much higher), but even greater threats to civilian life right now are hunger and disease. As UN emergency relief coordinator Martin Griffiths said in a recent interview with The Financial Times, “it is disease, hunger that is beginning to be the lead cause of death and deprivation.” It is important to remember that people perishing from hunger and disease are dying because of the Israeli government’s siege. The Israeli government is criminally depriving the population of essential food and water as well as fuel and power critical to providing medical care. The people of Gaza are being starved, and they are being starved as part of a deliberate policy:

“For over two months, Israel has been depriving Gaza's population of food and water, a policy spurred on or endorsed by high-ranking Israeli officials and reflecting an intent to starve civilians as a method of warfare,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “World leaders should be speaking out against this abhorrent war crime, which has devastating effects on Gaza’s population.”

The Israeli government’s use of starvation as a weapon has been clear from the beginning of the war. From the outset, top Israeli officials said that they would cut off supplies of food, water, and fuel to Gaza, and that is what they have done. Many of us have been raising the alarm about it since then.

Many diseases are now rapidly spreading among the nearly two million displaced people in Gaza, and the population is even more vulnerable to contracting diseases because of the lack of food and clean water created by the siege. Hundreds of thousands of people whose homes have been destroyed by the bombing lack proper shelter, and the approach of winter will create even worse conditions.

This is not the first time that a U.S. client has used starvation as a weapon in recent years. Saudi Arabia and its allies have been doing this to Yemen since 2015. The blockade and economic warfare have varied in intensity, but they have driven tens of millions of people to the brink of famine and in some cases pushed people into famine conditions. The siege of Gaza is more comprehensive and even more devastating than that, and it has been paired with a relentless bombing campaign and forced displacement of almost the entire population. Even if we didn’t have Israeli government officials announcing their intention to punish everyone living in Gaza, it would be clear from their actions that this is what they sought to do.

As the report says, the use of starvation as a weapon is a war crime. As long as the U.S. supports this war, our government is enabling that crime against the people of Gaza. Support for this war amounts to support for a creating a famine that will likely result in large-scale loss of life. The U.S. must end its support for the war or be counted as an accomplice in the ongoing starvation of millions of people.

There must be a ceasefire, but the siege also has to be lifted and life-saving aid delivered in huge quantities as soon possible. There can be no adequate delivery of essential supplies while the war is ongoing, and the people of Gaza need more than a trickle of aid in any case. If the war goes on for months, as both the Israeli and U.S. governments say it will, that will mean the deaths of an untold number of innocent people that could and should have been prevented.