By Iain Overton on 14 May 2025
There is no moral defence for the starvation of children. None at all. And if you think you can come up with one, then – rest assured – you are in the realms of immorality when you do so.
And yet, in Gaza today, under the full glare of global attention, Israel is doing precisely that — and they call it policy.
A growing body of evidence now confirms what humanitarian workers, UN officials, and even Israeli military insiders have been warning for months: Gaza is teetering on the edge of famine.
According to the latest UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) assessment, 2.1 million Palestinians — or, to make that clear, the entire population of Gaza — face “critical risk” of famine. Nearly a quarter of them, around 500,000 people, are already experiencing “catastrophic” hunger, with 71,000 children under five projected to suffer acute malnutrition through to April 2026.
Israel’s denialism is wilting under the scrutiny of even its own people. The New York Times reports that Israeli military officials privately admit this: that if the blockade on aid is not lifted immediately, much of Gaza will plunge into outright starvation within weeks.
Even the Israeli agency COGAT — which oversees policy in Gaza — has briefed senior commanders that food and fuel supplies are depleted and humanitarian systems near collapse.
And yet, despite all of this – despite the photos and the evidence and the reports – the siege continues.
In March 2025, Israel intensified its blockade, cutting off all aid — food, fuel, medicine. This was under the pretext of pressuring Hamas to release hostages. And, as the war crept darkly into its 19th month, Israel’s heart hardened even further: they were to dismantle Hamas by starving the population around it.
Theirs is the notion that hunger can be weaponised into compliance, into surrender. That suffering can serve political and ideological ends. Which, to be frank, is exactly what you saw in the emaciated corpses of Auschwitz and Dachau. And I do not write those words lightly.
The World Health Organisation warns that this policy could condemn “an entire generation” of children to lifelong damage.
“I’ve seen a five-year-old that looks two-and-a-half,” said Rik Peeperkorn, WHO’s representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Hospitals across Gaza report daily cases of extreme malnutrition. In Khan Younis, 55 children have already died from starvation-related conditions, with doctors warning that they have nothing left to offer but powdered milk. And they don’t even have enough of that.
Aid agencies are not being ambiguous.
The UN’s humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher has accused Israel of “deliberately and unashamedly” starving Gaza’s civilians. UNICEF’s Jonathan Crickx says their emergency food supplies have all but run out. At the same time, food prices have soared — a kilo of potatoes costs $10, when it’s available at all. Desperation has triggered looting, forced families into scavenging rubbish for resale, and driven already traumatised populations to beg for sustenance.
And what is Israel’s response?
A plan to replace UN-led food distribution with private contractors operating under military escort. One “hub” per several hundred thousand people, watched over by armed guards. Humanitarian organisations have refused to participate, warning this would further displace civilians, reduce access, and dangerously blur the line between relief and surveillance. This is not aid. It is control. It is coercion with calories.
Under international humanitarian law, this is indefensible. There are no two ways to interpret it.
Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited under Article 54 of Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions and is prosecutable under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. When Israeli decision-makers openly admit their goal is to leverage hunger for political concessions, it is no longer a military tactic.
It is a war crime.
Yet the world fails to act decisively and with compassion. At the UN Security Council, all members except the United States have called for an end to the blockade. Washington remains – morally bankrupt on this matter – silent. It was, admittedly, pressure from the US that briefly allowed food trucks into Gaza in April, after an Israeli airstrike killed seven aid workers. But even then, it was too little, too late.
This is not the fog of war.
It is a famine that bureaucrats and soldiers in Tel Aviv have deliberately made possibly before they head home to their own families for meals abundant. Over 52,000 Palestinians have died in Israel’s offensive since October 2023. The survivors are now being starved — deliberately, systemically, and in the full knowledge of the international community.
Starvation is not a military strategy. It is the slow, bureaucratic, publicly documented annihilation of a people.
And the world stands complicit — by delay, by design and by denial.