Alex de Waal is director of the World Peace Foundation. Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine was published in 2017.
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.
In her short film, The Food Chain (2002), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay asked Israeli officials whether the people of Gaza and the West Bank were suffering from hunger. ‘The state is humanitarian. The army is humanitarian,’ Lieutenant Colonel Itzik Gorevitch of COGAT (Co-ordination of Government Activities in the Territories) told her. ‘First of all, there is absolutely no...
Seventeen years ago, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the first person to hold the post of prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, decided to push international criminal law to a new boundary. He would make a head of state into a fugitive from justice. His target was the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, for crimes in Darfur. The current ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, has thrown down another gauntlet.
Sudan’s humanitarian crisis is, by numbers, the biggest in the world. Sudan’s population is 48 million, of whom more than 25 million are facing ‘high levels of acute food insecurity’.
The food system in Gaza has collapsed completely. The health system has collapsed. Basic infrastructure for clean water and sanitation has collapsed. According to the Famine Review Committee, the people of Gaza are facing a real prospect of famine: without immediate action, mass mortality from hunger or disease outbreaks is looming.
Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people in North Korea are succumbing to starvation, perishing ‘silently and painfully’ in the words of an aid agency official. Eighty-five...
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