Starvation in Gaza

Deprived of any nutrients, a previously healthy adult will starve to death in sixty to eighty days. A child will succumb more quickly. On 2 March, Israel imposed a total blockade on the two million Palestinians in Gaza. During the two months of ceasefire, food stocks had been partly replenished, but they are rapidly running out. Without humanitarian aid, without commercial traffic and with only a tiny amount of locally grown food, hunger deepens day by day.

The standard humanitarian ration is 2100 calories per person per day. Depending on how much food there was at the start of the blockade – estimates vary – average food availability in Gaza will at best fall to 1400 calories in the next few weeks, or may have already dropped below that level as early as mid-April. Adults are going hungrier to keep children better fed. The most vulnerable – infants, pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and others needing special diets – are already starving. The very poorest, those unable to call on better-off relatives, those cut off by military checkpoints, are already wasting away as their internal organs suffer irreparable damage.

Between 28 April and 6 May, staff with the World Food Programme, under the umbrella of the UN-accredited Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system (IPC), conducted a phone survey of Palestinians in Gaza. They asked what people were eating, how often, and what they were doing to get food. Several aid agencies also compiled data for how thin young children are – ‘wasting’ or ‘global acute malnutrition’. It was the fifth such survey since the outbreak of war nineteen months ago.

It’s extraordinarily difficult to collect this information in a war zone, and any interpretation of the data is contentious. Did the monitors miss the most desperate people who don’t answer their phones because they can’t use up their last minute of battery life answering humiliating questions? When health workers are measuring children’s upper arm circumference to get a simple indicator of malnutrition, are they missing the worst-off who can’t make it to the distribution centres? Or are their errors in the other direction, missing those whose parents are managing to get by? Humanitarian statisticians can pick through the data and find reasons to query them, but until Israel grants aid agencies access to the stricken people, we have to make do with these gleanings.

The IPC’s results, published in summary form on 12 May, estimated that 925,000 Gazans (44 per cent) were already experiencing ‘emergency’ acute food insecurity – close to the starvation threshold. A further 244,000 (12 per cent) were in ‘catastrophe’, meaning they had fallen below that threshold. That’s consistent with what we know about food stocks and the rate at which they’re being eaten.

Gaza is unique in the annals of starvation because of the simplicity of this calculation. In any other humanitarian calamity, a host of other factors complicate the picture, and overall food availability is a poor guide to levels of hunger. In Somalia or Sudan, for example, when food becomes scarce, people fall back on age-old alternatives such as gathering wild grasses and berries, or modern strategies such as calling for family members abroad to transfer cash. Palestinians in Gaza can’t do any of this. Israel controls every shekel, every sack of flour, every connection to the outside world.

Most common of all, when famine threatens, people move. In the ‘Famine Codes’ of the British Raj in India, colonial officers noted the ‘aimless wandering of the destitute’ as a sign of impending famine. Gaza is starvation under siege. The blockade is also a cordon sanitaire – we haven’t seen communicable diseases such as cholera, which are common in other famines, entering Gaza. And because vaccination rates were so high before 7 October, there have been no outbreaks of potential killers such as measles. In almost every other famine on record, communicable diseases are the big killers. Gaza is an anomaly, a laboratory in which we will discover how much nutritional stress a population can withstand before succumbing en masse.

IPC analysts are accustomed to the uncertainties of poor data and unforeseeable circumstances. Their reports deal with scenarios and degrees of risk. Monday’s ‘snapshot’ report concluded that Gaza is ‘still confronted with a critical risk of famine’. The authors wrote of a possible ‘scenario of protracted and large-scale military operations and continuation of the humanitarian and commercial blockade … under this reasonable worst case scenario, food insecurity, acute malnutrition and mortality would surpass the IPC Phase 5 (Famine) thresholds.’ They could have stated the matter more simply. Mass death through starvation is the certain outcome of Israel’s continued blockade and ongoing military campaign. The only question is when.

Several times over the last nineteen months Israel has turned the aid tap on, blunting the rise in levels of distress. When it allows the trucks to roll in – as it did a year ago, when Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, was required to testify that Israel was not diverting aid, on pain of suspending American weapons supplies; or in January, as part of the ceasefire – the positive impact is quickly evident in the improved nutrition of Gaza’s children. Israel accuses Hamas of stealing aid for its fighters, but hasn’t provided evidence of this happening at scale. Even if it has, it hasn’t prevented aid getting to the children who need it most.

Until now, most aid has been managed by international agencies. Israel wants to shut down the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and shut out other agencies, with the exception of the World Food Programme as a supplier.

Israel is now proposing a new aid scheme that will provide essential rations to screened individuals, who will be notified by cellphone message where and when they should report to pick up food packages, hygiene kits and medical supplies, after their IDs have been verified by face recognition software. Each package would be sufficient for a family for several days, after which the designated family member will be notified by text to return for another ration. The US is now championing the scheme, proposing to use American private military contractors, along with something called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a new agency that is being built from scratch.

This is surveillance humanitarianism, the food-targeting counterpart to the IDF’s algorithms that select whom to bomb. Israel will provide the bare minimum to sustain life to those who show, to its satisfaction, that they’re compliant. It’s also an individualised version of late colonial counterinsurgency, as practised by Britain in Malaya in the 1950s, when the army defeated Communist guerrillas by controlling the entire food supply, feeding those in protected villages and starving those outside.

The UN and liberal humanitarians are horrified. One of the founding principles of humanitarian law is that actual starvation should be prevented, even if it means the controlling power forgoes military opportunity. As Israel moved to suffocate UNRWA, the UN asked the International Court of Justice in The Hague to provide an advisory opinion on Israel’s obligations to co-operate with UN bodies. Public hearings were held in the week of 28 April.

Israel didn’t participate: in its written statement it dismissed the case as ‘patently biased and one-sided’. It claimed that UNRWA staff had participated in the 7 October atrocities, that the agency is hostile to Israel and that Israel is under no obligation to co-operate with any international organisation unless it chooses to do so, because its security requirements are overriding. It dismissed the UN investigations into its allegations and the measures taken to ensure neutrality, impartiality and end-to-end monitoring of relief supplies.

Thirty-nine states made presentations in The Hague, along with Palestine, the UN, the Arab League and the African Union. Only the US and Hungary supported the Israeli case. The US lawyer invoked only the 1948 Geneva Conventions, ignoring all subsequent law and the question of whether Israel had an overriding obligation to prevent Palestinians from starving.

Might Israel’s new aid scheme feed the starving while satisfying its demand for absolute security? The outline plan, shared with journalists, would involve four distribution centres and reach only 60 per cent of the population, all in a small part of the overall territory. (Aid agencies ran about four hundred locations before the blockade.) That might keep enough people fed to avoid the IPC’s arcane threshold for famine – which requires 20 per cent of the population to fall short of certain measurements for access to food, malnutrition and elevated death rates – but it would be gaming the system, not preventing widespread starvation.

Even if scaled up, the scheme doesn’t address needs for healthcare, water, sanitation, shelter and electricity infrastructure – all of which have been reduced to rubble. Nor does it provide specialised treatment for acutely malnourished children, who are already dying.

Twice already during this war, the people of Gaza have pulled back from the brink of categorical famine – both times after warnings from the IPC – but the recovery has been momentary before another plunge. Few humanitarian workers believe this cycle of deprivation followed by partial respite can continue for much longer before there’s rapid and uncontrollable collapse.

The IPC report contains two paragraphs by the Famine Review Committee, an independent group that goes over IPC findings where there’s a risk of famine: ‘The situation remains highly dynamic as food stocks are exhausted, water becomes increasingly scarce, healthcare ceases to function and social cohesion starts to break down.’ Hunger is only part of this breakdown. The Palestinians of Gaza have been driven from their homes, forced to live in cramped, unsanitary and overcrowded camps or in piles of rubble that contain decomposing bodies, unexploded bombs and the remnants of their prior lives.

Last month the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights expressed concern ‘that Israel appears to be inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life increasingly incompatible with their continued existence as a group in Gaza.’ These carefully weighed words evoke the Genocide Convention: Article 2(c) prohibits ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’. Here again, Israel has done its sums, tested its policies and made clear that its permanent security overrides all other obligations. It can have no doubt about the outcomes of its actions. It may do just enough to keep most Palestinians alive. Whether this prevents the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza as a group is another matter.