In March 2024, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the world’s leading monitoring initiative, warned that famine was imminent in Gaza.
Today, nearly half a million Palestinians face catastrophic levels of hunger, with the rest of the territory’s population at crisis or emergency levels. Children, the elderly and the sick, along with those who were once physically well, are dying daily from malnutrition, dehydration and entirely preventable diseases.
Babies are being born into a world of precarity and starvation.
This is not a natural disaster. It is the brutal combination of manufactured violence and collective global apathy. The famine in Gaza is not collateral damage, but rather the intentional consequence of policies designed by the Israeli government to maximise suffering and death.
The weaponisation of food and aid more broadly has long been a pillar of Israel’s military strategy in Gaza and throughout occupied Palestine.
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Since Israel imposed its blockade of Gaza 17 years ago, Palestinians have lived under a system of complete control that has choked their economy, crippled their infrastructure, and restricted the movement of people and goods.
In 2012, the Israeli government was forced to release a document produced in 2008, which revealed that its defence ministry had calculated the minimum caloric intake required to avoid outright malnutrition, while continuing to restrict access to food to the greatest extent possible. As one senior Israeli official put it in 2006, Gaza was to be kept “on a diet”.
Opaque restrictions
Over more than a decade, human rights organisations and independent UN experts have repeatedly condemned this blockade as a form of collective punishment. But in the absence of material repercussions, consecutive Israeli governments have continued to deepen and extend the practice of engineered deprivation.
The systematic denial, delay and destruction of water, food, medical supplies and shelter have become defining features of this policy; even water purification equipment, crutches and insulin have been blocked due to Israel’s indefensible and opaque “dual-use” restrictions.
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Palestinian public service providers, civil society networks, and humanitarian organisations have been left unable to meet even the most basic needs of Palestinians living in Gaza. In recent months, as Israel has intensified its current assault, this blockade has been refashioned into a full-scale siege.
The inevitable consequences of this deliberate strategy have been catastrophic. Independent UN experts declared in mid-2024 that famine had spread throughout Gaza.
Children and the elderly are now dying of starvation and dehydration, while the World Health Organization has warned that hunger in Gaza threatens to permanently stunt the growth and cognitive development of an entire generation of children.
Critics of GHF and Israel’s latest plans for aid-driven ethnic cleansing must recognise the occupying power’s long history of instrumentalising and weaponising aid
Amid this deepening crisis, the manipulation of so-called humanitarian aid has intensified. In spring 2024, the US constructed a “humanitarian pier” off the coast of Gaza. Palestinians voiced scepticism, fearing that the pier would be used to mask military operations, while humanitarian organisations argued that its construction simply distracted from Israel’s intentional obstruction of all existing land crossings.
Then, in June, the area surrounding the pier was used in an Israeli raid on Nuseirat refugee camp, disguised as a humanitarian mission. Nearly 300 Palestinians were killed and almost 700 more injured.
UN human rights experts called the attack an example of unprecedented savagery. Still, no meaningful repercussions were directed at Israel or its US ally.
Established humanitarian actors have been repeatedly undermined – most notably the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) – representing another tactic in this war of attrition.
Unrwa has long been central aid distribution and the provision of essential services throughout Gaza. But in recent months, it has been the subject of an intensified misinformation campaign, leading to direct attacks on its staff, the withdrawal of funding, and a ban imposed by the Israeli Knesset – a move that is both illegal and unprecedented in the history of the UN.
‘Starved into submission’
This weakening of civic and humanitarian infrastructure at a time of extreme heightened need has further isolated the Palestinian population of Gaza, reinforcing dependence on externally controlled and largely unaccountable aid schemes.
Israel’s latest such scheme is the newly formed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), backed by Tel Aviv and Washington. The GHF has been created to oversee aid distribution across Gaza, with the intention of sidelining all existing structures, including the UN. A former spokesperson for Unrwa has condemned the initiative as “aid washing” – a strategy meant to obscure the reality that “people are being starved into submission”.
Under the GHF proposal, all of Gaza’s more than two million residents would be forced to collect food from one of four “secure distribution sites”. None of the proposed sites are located in northern Gaza – a region that Israel has attacked and occupied in order to ethnically cleanse – meaning those still living there will be forced to flee south in order to access life-saving aid. The deprivation of aid as a means to forcibly transfer a population is recognised as a crime against humanity.
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The official announcement of the GHF made no mention of Israel’s repeated attacks on pre-existing food distribution centres, bakeries and aid convoys, in which hundreds of Palestinians have been killed while trying to feed their families, or Israel’s intentional obstruction of the pre-existing humanitarian system.
This form of aid control reinforces the siege, rather than alleviates it. Dehumanising and inadequate solutions – such as air-dropped supplies or conditional food parcels – do little more than maintain the illusion of humanitarian concern, while genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing continue. The perpetrators of deprivation play saviour, while continuing to starve a population into displacement and submission.
This is not a fringe critique; the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, Tom Fletcher, has described the plans put forward by GHF as a “fig leaf for further violence and displacement”.
Despite the January 2024 ruling by the International Court of Justice, which demanded immediate protection for civilians in Gaza and the widespread provision of humanitarian assistance, the situation has continued to deteriorate precipitously. A January 2025 survey of 35 humanitarian organisations working in Gaza revealed an overwhelming consensus: 100 percent reported that the approach taken by Israel was either ineffective, inadequate, or had systematically impeded aid delivery.
The international community’s failure to act decisively has enabled this predictable crisis – not a humanitarian crisis, but a political crisis of apathy, indifference and impunity. Warnings about mass malnutrition and the collapse of Gaza’s health and social infrastructure have been ignored for years. That famine now afflicts a population that has been systematically deprived of food should surprise no one.
The weaponisation of aid and food in Gaza is not a tragic accident. It is the foreseeable – and foreseen – outcome of a siege designed to control and displace. The failure of states and multinational bodies to halt this process is not simply the result of a complex political environment- it is a failure of will, of accountability, and of global governance.
Critics of GHF and Israel’s latest plans for aid-driven ethnic cleansing must recognise the occupying power’s long history of instrumentalising and weaponising aid. By doing so, we can pivot away from reformist efforts to ensure a veneer of supposedly ethical humanitarian conduct, and instead expose the totality of ways in which Israel has manufactured decades-long dependence on aid, only to manipulate the humanitarian system as a central pillar of its wider settler-colonial ambitions.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
