Two years ago, on October 7, 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups launched the Al-Aqsa Flood military operation to challenge the almost two-decade Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has severely damaged the Palestinian economy and created desperate living conditions for its people. Hamas called it a “necessary step” amid continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, expansion of settlements, and settler violence. Its seismic shockwaves have solidified into a grim, man-made famine in Gaza as Israel greatly intensified its long-standing oppression of Palestine by systematically dismantling Gaza’s ability to sustain life, including its genocidal use of food as a weapon.
In August 2025, UN-backed agencies confirmed what humanitarian organizations had warned for months: famine had taken hold in Gaza City. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) found that “the most extreme category is triggered when three critical thresholds – extreme food deprivation, acute malnutrition and starvation-related deaths – have been breached.” Such a declaration marked the first official confirmation of famine in West Asia, with over half a million people trapped in conditions of starvation, destitution, and preventable death.
he man-made crisis in Gaza occurs within a broader global context of rising hunger and food insecurity. As the world observes World Food Day on October 16, which food sovereignty activists accurately call World Hunger Day, the artificially induced starvation in Gaza underscores how hunger has become a structural issue under global monopoly capitalism. Today, billions of people lack access to food not because of natural shortages caused by disasters, but because they are systematically denied it by those in power pursuing self-serving political or economic goals. Food, a basic condition for survival and a fundamental human right, is now used as a weapon with impunity.
Israel’s deliberate destruction of Gaza’s food system represents one of the most brutal examples of food weaponization in the 21st century, unfolding amidst what activists, human rights advocates, and even international legal experts identify as a genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people. This article examines how Israel has systematically employed starvation as a method of warfare, how this fits within broader patterns of global hunger driven by conflict and imperialism, and how the struggle for food sovereignty remains inextricably linked to the Palestinian fight for liberation.
State of global hunger
According to the 2025 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report, hunger affects more than 8% of the global population, with the highest incidence in Africa (over 20%) and West Asia (almost 13%), where Palestine is located. More than 295 million people across 53 countries and territories face acute food insecurity, a number that has increased for six consecutive years, driven primarily by conflict, including the genocide in Palestine. Nearly 38 million children suffer from acute malnutrition in crisis-affected countries, with Gaza reporting 12,000 acutely malnourished children in July 2025 alone, the highest monthly figure ever recorded.
The 2025 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC) identifies conflict as the dominant driver of acute hunger in the world’s most severe food crises. UN Secretary-General António Guterres characterizes this crisis as “another unflinching indictment of a world dangerously off course,” noting that “hunger is not an emergency confined to certain pockets of the world or periods of time”. Millions of people are trapped in deepening cycles of food insecurity driven primarily by imperialist wars and militarism. The situation in Gaza, a territory where almost the entire population has been pushed into acute food insecurity through deliberate policy, represents the most extreme endpoint of this trend.
Starvation as a war crime
The use of starvation as a method of warfare has a long and troubling history in international relations. For much of modern history, starvation was not considered a criminal act; Western imperialist powers were particularly resistant to banning blockades that could be used against their enemies, particularly in their colonial empires. Historians Nicholas Mulder and Boyd van Dijk noted that “it took a long time for starvation to be recognized as criminal because it is important to blockade tactics implemented in war, widely employed by the Western powers such as the United Kingdom and France, which played a major role in the development of international law”.
This prevailing acceptance of starvation tactics started to change with the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, which explicitly banned the use of “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.” This ban was reinforced in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which designates as a war crime the “intentional use of starvation of civilians as a warfare method by depriving them of vital objects” and includes wilfully obstructing relief supplies.
In 2024, the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I found reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant committed this specific war crime, alleging that “from 8 October 2023 to 20 May 2024, they intentionally deprived Gaza’s civilian population of essential resources such as food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity”. This marked a significant acknowledgment that what was happening in Gaza went beyond collateral damage to deliberate criminal policy.
Legal scholar Tom Dannenbaum argues that blockade-induced starvation should be considered a form of societal torture, a gradual process that “tears gradually at the capacity of those affected to prioritize their most fundamental commitments,” using the victims’ biological needs against them to break their will. This framework helps understand the particular cruelty of starvation tactics: they transform the most basic human need for nourishment into an instrument of subjugation.
Gaza: A blueprint for food weaponization
The situation in Gaza provides a comprehensive case study in how food systems can be systematically dismantled as part of a broader military strategy. The methods that Israel has employed follow a clear pattern of escalation and a comprehensive and organized attack on every pillar of food security.
Systematic destruction of food infrastructure. According to UN agencies, “approximately 98% of cropland in the territory is damaged or inaccessible – decimating the agriculture sector and local food production.” The destruction of agricultural capacity poses a long-term threat to food sovereignty that will persist long after the end of immediate hostilities. The dismantling of local food production has created nearly total dependence on external aid, which has also been systematically restricted.
Humanitarian access blockade. The weaponization of aid access has been perhaps the most visible aspect of the starvation policy. Despite slight increases in food deliveries in recent months, aid remains “vastly insufficient, inconsistent, and inaccessible compared to the need.” The World Food Programme (WFP) notes that while over 1,800 trucks have entered Gaza since the border crossings reopened in May 2025, “this is a tiny fraction of what a population of over 2 million people needs to survive.” To cover basic humanitarian food needs alone, “more than 62,000 metric tons is required every month.”
Collapse of food distribution systems. The destruction of Gaza’s internal distribution capacity has been equally devastating. With “nine of ten people serially displaced from homes,” cash becoming “critically scarce,” and “most UN trucks looted amid growing desperation,” the mechanisms for getting available food to those who need it have largely collapsed. Even when food enters the territory, it often cannot reach those facing starvation.
Health system implosion. The health impacts of this engineered famine have been devastating. Malnutrition rates are rising at an unprecedented pace, with July 2025 recording “more than 12,000 children identified as acutely malnourished – the highest monthly figure ever recorded and a six-fold increase since the start of the year.” The number of Palestinian children expected to be at severe risk of death from malnutrition by June 2026 has tripled from 14,100 to 43,400. These numbers represent an entire generation of Palestinian children being permanently harmed by this deliberate policy of starvation.
US imperialism’s complicity
The use of food as a weapon in Gaza relies heavily on unwavering US support for the Zionist Israeli regime. This complicity occurs through various channels—military, diplomatic, and economic—building a structure of impunity.
US imperialism continues to supply Israel with vital military funding and diplomatic backing despite increasing evidence of war crimes. This support includes vetoing UN Security Council resolutions aimed at enforcing accountability and opposing measures that would require compliance with international law. The US has also weakened international humanitarian efforts by supporting questionable aid mechanisms like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which the IPC analysis argued would “lead to mass starvation, even if it was able to function without the appalling levels of violence.”
Additionally, US imperialism has also worked to weaken the international legal framework designed to prevent starvation crimes. Scholars observed how geopolitical conflicts in the 2020s “create a permissive normative environment for the perpetration of starvation crimes with impunity and the rollback of international humanitarian action”. They noted that the US, which remains the world’s most powerful country, and other Western imperialist powers, have been “harshly critical when war crimes are committed by rival countries, but when it comes to the Gaza war adopted different views of international law that make it more difficult to reach accountability for starvation crimes.” This selective application of international law represents a fundamental corruption of the global governance system.
Beyond direct military aid, US policies have helped Israel choke Gaza’s economy, keeping the territory dependent on aid and economically unsustainable. The blockade, enforced with US backing, has systematically impeded the reconstruction of agricultural infrastructure, food processing, and other key economic sectors needed for food sovereignty. This prolonged economic warfare has created vulnerabilities that have led to the current famine.
Trump’s peace plan: Permanent subjugation
Amid the man-made famine in Gaza, which US President Donald Trump called “real starvation”, his administration’s 20-point peace plan appears less as a path to liberation and more as a complex tool of imperial dominance that continues to support the use of food as a weapon. The plan explicitly promises that “full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip” and details the rehabilitation of essential infrastructure, including bakeries.
However, this aid is conditional upon a political settlement that would strip Palestinians of their sovereignty, placing Gaza under the temporary transitional governance of a “Board of Peace” to be chaired by Trump himself.
Trump’s so-called peace plan, which critics label a “blueprint for the formalisation of Israel’s illegal occupation,” ensures that the provision of food, the most basic human necessity, remains a bargaining chip, contingent on Palestinian surrender to a US-led security architecture that includes an International Stabilisation Force and continued Israeli “security perimeter” control. Thus, the plan provides only a temporary relief from starvation but ultimately requires perpetual subjugation, positioning US imperialism as the final decision-maker over Palestinian life and death.
Freedom and food sovereignty
The famine in Gaza is obviously a direct consequence of US-Israeli policies that have systematically weaponized food as a tool of domination. The struggle to end the famine in Gaza and assert the food sovereignty of the Palestinian people is therefore inseparable from the broader struggle for liberation and self-determination, as well as justice and accountability from the war criminals.
PAN Asia Pacific (PANAP) and various international and Palestinian groups have initiated a unity statement calling to “end the genocidal famine and stop imperialist complicity in Palestine”. The groups demand to: (1) Implement an immediate, permanent, and unconditional ceasefire to stop the mass killing and enable aid delivery at the necessary scale; (2) Allow unrestricted humanitarian access through the immediate opening of all border crossings for the safe and continuous flow of aid, and an end to all Israeli military obstructions; (3) Terminate all US and global military aid to Israel, including funding and weapons transfers that support this genocide; (4) Boycott, divest, sanction, and hold accountable all enabling and complicit actors, including private and corporate entities, profiting off of genocide, ecocide, the weaponisation of starvation, and the settler colonial occupation of Palestine; (5) Protect agricultural resources and end the destruction of Palestinian farmland and water sources. The right to produce food is a fundamental human right; (6) Impose sanctions on Israel and pursue investigation and prosecution of its top officials, including Netanyahu, through the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). All nations bear the responsibility to fulfill their legal duty to prevent genocide; and (7) Work concretely for the liberation of Palestine, as defined by Palestinians, from Israel’s illegal settler colonial occupation.
The groups are also supporting the upcoming Right to Resist: International People’s Tribunal (IPT) on Palestine that is taking place on November 22 to 23 in Barcelona, Spain, as a platform to further expose the US-backed Zionist occupation, forced starvation, and ecocide in Palestine, and to demand justice and accountability.
While the famine in Gaza highlights the brutal use of food as a weapon, it also highlights the inspiring strength and admirable courage of the Palestinian people who continue to demand their rights to life, land, and self-determination. On World Hunger Day, we must underscore that fighting hunger is really fighting against imperialism, occupation, and the power structures that use food as a weapon rather than a right. Our collective effort to free Palestine requires tearing down the imperialist system of starvation and building a future where food sovereignty is a key part of justice, peace, and liberation. ###
