Making it official: Famine strikes Gaza City

( Middle East Monitor ) – History shows that famines are, for the most part, engineered.  Be it through carelessness, selfishness or plain malice on the part of officialdom, creating the circumstances under which a population expires to hunger is a matter of construction.  As the economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen so powerfully showed in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (1981), the focus on the cause of famines should be less on the food supply and more on the economic, social and political factors surrounding them.  Food prices might severely spike.  Food distribution systems can fail.  Certain groups in society may lose their means of employment, thereby preventing them from purchasing essential foodstuffs.  

In Gaza, the conditions of famine have been in the making for months.  From March, when the Netanyahu government purposely halted all food from entering Gaza, only to ease the blockade in May through a handful of food distribution points murderously overseen by the Israeli Defence Forces and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the only question was when that ghastly outcome would be realised.  “As was the case for the UK government in Ireland in the 1840s and Bengal in the 1940s, Israel is responsible for this famine because it controls almost all the Gaza strip and its borders,” writes Ilan Noy, an expert on the economics of disasters and climate change.  “But Israel has also created the conditions for the famine.”  

By the end of July, the New York Times, citing data from the Gaza Governorate Chamber of Commerce and Industry, listed a number of basic food items that had become obscenely priced: sugar, costing $106 per kilogram, as opposed to 89 cents prior to the war; flour, costing $12 per kilogram compared with the pre-war price of 42 cents; and tomatoes: $30 per kilogram, a shocking increase from the pre-war level of 59 cents.  Hebrew University academic and economic historian Yanni Spitzer, casting his eye over the soaring food prices, observed that the situation had shifted from the start of the war, given the testimonies coming from the Strip. 

On 22 August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Famine Review Committee (FRC) published a report claiming that 514,000 people – a roughly a quarter of Gaza’s population – faced famine conditions for the period 1 July to 15 August, described in technical terms as IPC Phase 5.  The body defines IPC 5 as “the highest phase of the IPC Acute Food Insecurity Scale, and is attributed when an area has at least 20 per cent of households facing an extreme lack of food, at least 30 per cent of children suffering from acute malnutrition, and two people for every 10,000 dying each day due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease.”  The Committee was satisfied that reasonable evidence was available showing that the IPC Phase 5 conditions were affecting the Gaza Governorate.  It also concluded that “the severity of conditions in North Gaza similar or worse than in Gaza Governorate”, though refrained from an official classification given “limited evidence on the population in this area”. 

The IPC report is also adamant that the central and southern regions, comprising the governorates of Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, will face the same level of catastrophic food insecurity next month, taking the number to over 640,000.  A further 1.14 million in the territory will be in an Emergency (IPC Phase 4) state, with a further 396,000 people facing Crisis (IPC Phase 3) conditions.  “The time for debate and hesitation,” urge the authors, “has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading.”  Any further delays to reverse this “entirely made-made” famine “will result in a totally unacceptable escalation of Famine-related mortality.”

In keeping with other famine-inducing authorities in the past, COGAT, Israel’s military arm responsible for overseeing the distribution of aid, offers a thin gruel of denial.  The report was, COGAT thundered in its published response, “false and relies on partial, biased data and superficial information originating from Hamas, a terrorist organization, often laundered through organizations with vested interests.”  The IPC, in any case, could not be trusted, ignoring Israel’s own information and repeatedly providing “inaccurate” assessments that failed to “reflect the reality on the ground.”  

“Gaza 52,” Digital, Midjourney, 2025

One could only express awe at the unflinching mendacity of the following statements: “The report disregards the fact that in recent weeks we have advanced significant efforts and that the overall trend has shifted”; “Since the start of the war, and specifically over the past several months, COGAT, in cooperation with other Israeli authorities and international partners, has implemented an extensive humanitarian operation in the Gaza Strip.”  There had also been “a sharp decline in the prices of food, which plummeted in the markets.”  Even as this is happening, however, a convenient culprit always looms large: “Hamas has not ceased its attempts to exploit humanitarian aid for its own military buildup.”

Be it willed ignorance or sinister motivation, Israel’s official response sidesteps the fundamental problem: the issue was always whether food would be allowed to reach a hungry Palestinian civilian population through unabridged humanitarian channels.  Given the complete blockade of March and the choking, murderous points of food distribution set up in Gaza after May, the answer is all too clear in its grimness.  As Forensic Architecture and the World Peace Foundation (WPF) plausibly contend, “Israel has effectively dismantled the existing ‘civilian model’ of aid distribution” long used and accepted in favour of a “military model”.  This suggested a pattern, one positively crying out for judicial scrutiny and international sanctions. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

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