Walking Corpses

In the last week it has seemed as though everyone in Gaza has been convulsed by terrible hunger. Exhausted Palestinians – including friends and colleagues of mine – can feel their bodies breaking down. They are watching children and the elderly fainting on the streets or writhing in pain. Ruwaida Amer, a journalist I used to work with who is currently in Khan Younis refugee camp, put it simply: ‘I am so hungry. I’ve never meant those words in the way I do now. They carry a kind of humiliation that I can’t fully describe ... we wake up thinking only of one thing: how to find something to eat.’ Social media is filled with images of skeletal infants and crying toddlers begging their parents for food. People are beginning to die from malnutrition, many of them children. Without immediate intervention, numbers are likely to rise sharply in the coming days and weeks.

Famine experts warned that this would happen. In early March, in the middle of negotiations to continue a ceasefire deal with Hamas, Israel blocked all aid from entering Gaza. A couple of weeks later, Israel relaunched its military offensive with even greater intensity. When it partially lifted the blockade in late May, the trickle of aid that it allowed in was directed almost exclusively through four fortified distribution centres run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a dubious US-backed private contractor, under the protection of the IDF. The results were as predictable as they were disastrous: at the GHF hubs, soldiers fired at chaotic crowds, killing dozens every day; desperate civilians trampled one another as they tried to reach boxes of dried food; criminals stole and profiteered from looted goods. Most of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents have seen none of this aid.

This experiment in ‘calibrated deprivation’, as my organisation, the International Crisis Group, describes it, has been proved reckless and catastrophic. Israel seems to believe that by overhauling Gaza’s aid infrastructure and allocating a reduced calorie count for each person, it can keep the weakened population subjugated without plunging them into full-fledged famine. Officially this policy is intended to strip Hamas of its governing capacity and force it to surrender, or at least to accept Israel’s demands. But starvation isn’t static; it worsens with every hour. Time is running out.

Far-right politicians in Israel, many of them in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, have made no secret of that fact that they hope starvation will encourage the ‘voluntary emigration’ of Palestinians from the territory. Netanyahu himself has endorsed this, repeatedly referring to it as the ‘Trump plan’ in a bid to retain US favour. Some officials have been even more blunt, calling for the ‘erasure’ of Gaza. Israeli citizens living in abundance just half an hour’s drive away are mostly reacting to the disaster with indifference, denial or worse, continuing to justify nearly seven hundred days of unprecedented warfare as an appropriate response to Hamas’s assault on 7 October 2023. Few care to hear the International Court of Justice’s warning in January 2024, or those of many experts worldwide, that what is happening in Gaza may amount to genocide.

Other Israeli officials, particularly among the upper echelons of the military, are worried about the political and security consequences of uncontrolled starvation, including the prospect of war crimes investigations abroad. But policies built on myths are hard to revise. The repeated accusation that Hamas had systematically diverted aid is unfounded, according to many agencies with experience in Gaza. Rather, Hamas authorities worked with local clans to crack down on criminal groups looting aid; some of those groups, as Israeli officials admitted, have been quietly supported by the IDF to undermine Hamas from within. And contrary to Israel’s claims, Gaza’s pre-existing system of aid distribution, run by the UN and international NGOs across four hundred hubs, worked efficiently despite tight restrictions.

Governments in Europe and elsewhere have denounced Israel’s starvation policy, insisting that the war must end. France, which is co-chairing a summit with Saudi Arabia to revive the two-state solution, just announced that it will recognise a Palestinian state. But such diplomatic gestures are a far cry from using the material leverage these countries possess. Israel’s allies are still buying time for Israel to change course or come to a deal with Hamas over how many trucks to allow in, as though food were a legitimate bargaining chip. Gazans cannot afford to wait for either. Every day that foreign governments stand by, devastating starvation becomes harder to avert.

The worst is still preventable. After finding it in breach of its human rights obligations under the Association Agreement, the EU struck a deal with Israel earlier this month to allow in more aid. But the divided bloc, which is Israel’s largest trading partner, is still choosing not to exercise its full power – trade suspensions, sanctions, arms embargoes. Arab states decry the war but are also reluctant to apply real pressure, partly for fear of upsetting Washington: none has suspended even part of its normalisation agreement with Israel. The Trump administration repeatedly claims that it wants to broker an end to the war, but defaults to Israel’s side at every turn.

‘People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive,’ an UNRWA worker told the head of the agency, Philippe Lazzarini, yesterday, ‘they are walking corpses.’ It should never have come to this. Thousands of trucks carrying food, fuel and medicine are waiting to enter Gaza. The sea offers further routes if needed. Experienced local and international aid workers are ready to help. But nothing will change so long as Israel is allowed to keep Gaza’s gates shut.