Gaza’s People Are Not Just Starving – They Are Being Starved

Photo: UN News

Medea Benjamin

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I worked with the Food and Agriculture Organization, famine swept across large swaths of Africa. Drought and crop failure devastated Ethiopia, Sudan, and the Sahel. Crops withered, herds died, and families walked for miles in desperate search of food. International agencies scrambled to respond, setting up emergency feeding and rehabilitation centers.

I worked in some of those centers. I can still see the wasted bodies of children, their limbs like sticks, their bellies swollen with malnutrition. I remember holding babies as they slipped away, too weak to keep breathing. It is a kind of human suffering that never leaves you. And yet, as devastating as those famines were, they were caused by failed rains and ecological disaster. They were not intentional.

A UN-backed report just declared that famine is currently occurring in Gaza. But unlike the African famines I witnessed, this one is not caused by nature. It is man-made by Israel. It is deliberate.

Two days after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, then–Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” The famine in Gaza today has been building since then.

The results are catastrophic. The UN reports that more than 500,000 people—one quarter of Gaza’s population—are in famine conditions. At least 70,000 malnourished children need immediate therapeutic food, yet most cannot get it. Over 12,000 children under five are acutely malnourished, with more than 2,500 in severe condition. These are not abstract numbers. They are children with names, families, and futures—being starved before our eyes.

For months, hundreds of tons of food and medicine have sat languishing on the Egyptian side of the border while Israel blocked convoys or refused to pause airstrikes to let them through safely. Israel has systematically undermined the institutions that actually could deliver food. UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency mandated by the UN to provide food, education, and healthcare to people in Gaza, has seen its facilities bombed, its staff murdered, its reputation smeared, and its ability to deliver aid blocked.

Under global pressure, Israel resorted to dangerous food airdrops—pallets so inadequate they equaled less than a single truckload, and in some cases, people were injured or killed scrambling for them. Then came the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, promoted by Israel and the U.S., a sham mechanism whose distribution points have become death traps. Over 1,000 people have been killed at these sites, gunned down or shelled by Israeli military or armed international contractors as they lined up for food. Never before have we seen anything like this.

Israel is not failing to feed Gaza. It is deliberately ensuring Gaza cannot be fed. This is the systematic use of starvation as a weapon of war. It is collective punishment. And collective punishment is a war crime.

The United States is a partner in this cruelty. Israel could not enforce this siege without U.S. weapons, U.S. dollars, and U.S. political cover. Every member of Congress who votes for more military aid is effectively voting to starve Palestinian children.

I have seen famine before. I know what it looks like when hunger steals the lives of children. Gaza’s famine can be ended—if we force it to end. That means demanding that Israel open the borders immediately and allow the United Nations to flood Gaza with food and medicine. Not trickles, not fake “foundations,” not publicity stunts—but real aid, now.

It also means demanding a ceasefire so aid can come in and be distributed safely. As the UN report warns: “If a ceasefire is not implemented to allow humanitarian aid to reach everyone in the Gaza Strip, and if essential food supplies, and basic health, nutrition, and services are not restored immediately, avoidable deaths will increase exponentially.”

That warning is critical, because while people are desperate for food, they are also desperate for other basic human rights: clean water, medicine, shelter, and an end to the killing. After all, the right to life is primordial.

History will not remember excuses. It will remember whether we allowed an entire people to be starved–and murdered–when we had the power to stop it.

The time to act is now.