The Most Preventable Famine in the World

In the modern world, famine doesn’t just “happen.”

The head of the World Food Program, Cindy McCain, acknowledged the famine in Gaza in an interview on Meet the Press:

"What I can explain to you is — is that there is famine — full-blown famine — in the north, and it's moving its way south," she said.

McCain called for a ceasefire to allow for humanitarian relief to reach the population. That is what humanitarian agencies have been demanding for the last six months to no avail. All of them could see what would happen to the people of Gaza if the war was allowed to continue, and they have been shouting from the rooftops that famine was coming. This famine was the most readily foreseen and most easily prevented famine in decades, and that makes the shame of failing to stop it all the greater. The international response to these warnings has been pitiful, and the response from our government has been downright criminal.

Faced with the mass starvation of more than two million people, our government paid lip service to providing aid and engaged in various bits of humanitarian theater while it rushed to arm the government responsible for causing the starvation. The administration has wanted to be seen making some minimal effort to provide assistance, but averting famine was never one of their priorities. The U.S. could have prevented this famine from occurring if its leaders had been willing to put significant pressure on Israel, but the president and his appointees chose to sit back and watch it unfold.

At another point in the interview, McCain said, “things happen in a war, famine happens,” but this is not an accurate description of how the famine in Gaza was created. The famine there didn’t just “happen” as a side-effect of conflict. In the modern world, famine doesn’t just “happen.” In this case, it was the result of Israel’s deliberate use of starvation as a weapon. That has been documented and confirmed by human rights organizations, humanitarian relief groups, and U.N. experts. McCain is right when she said that “nobody should starve” for any reason, but it is still important to identify why the starvation is happening and who is responsible for causing it. It is necessary to identify the culprit, because without doing this it isn’t possible to offer an effective remedy to the crisis. The Israeli government did this with its siege and its aid restrictions, and it did this with its destruction of Gaza’s local food production.

An official from UNICEF, James Elder, recently wrote about the horrors he had witnessed in Gaza:

On 31 October, Unicef called Gaza a graveyard for children. Last month I saw new graveyards in Rafah being constructed. And filled. Every day the war brings more violent death and destruction. In my 20 years with the United Nations, I have never seen devastation like that I saw in the Gaza Strip cities of Khan Younis and Gaza City. And now we are told to expect the same via an incursion in Rafah.

An Israeli attack on Rafah seems increasingly likely. The Israeli military is already ordering evacuations from parts of the city, but there is nowhere safe for the people to go. It has been obvious for months that an assault on Rafah would be catastrophic for the population. It is guaranteed to worsen the already horrible conditions for civilians throughout Gaza. It will wreck most of what little remains of the humanitarian relief effort, and it will intensify the famine as a result. Displacing more than a million people in the middle of a famine will be a death sentence for many of them. Failing to stop this attack will compound the earlier error of permitting a famine, and tens of thousands more innocent people will pay the price for that failure with their lives.

There must be an immediate and lasting ceasefire and an immense relief effort in Gaza. Half-measures and stunts will do nothing to stave off mass starvation. The famine in Gaza has already claimed the lives of many young children who could have survived if the war had been brought to an end months ago. Every day that the war is allowed to continue, the more preventable deaths from hunger and disease there will be.