Mads Gilbert*, Dr James Smith** and Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah***
May 1, 2025
Israel is starving the entire population of Gaza – to the point of death, for a growing number of Palestinians.
There is not a single place in the world where starvation is an inevitability: not after major environmental disasters, amid drought and crop failure, or during armed conflict and genocide. Starvation is an act of either intentional violence or indifferent neglect, both of which are made possible by our collective inaction.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Gaza, where Israel’s occupation, blockade and now-total siege were designed to exert full control over the Palestinian population, deliberately depriving them of the most basic means to sustain life.
Starvation is a strategy as old as warfare itself. It is deployed as a weapon of mass destruction to inflict maximal harm, and always with calculated disregard for those who suffer and die as a result.
So horrific is this particular form of violence that it is distinguished as a specific war crime in the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In addition, UN Resolution 2417 condemns both the “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” and the practice of “depriving civilians of objects indispensable to their survival”.
Persistent risk of famine
These warnings were informed by the first report of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), an initiative established in 2004 to improve evidence-informed projections and targeted responses in situations of food insecurity.
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*Mads Gilbert is a Norwegian emergency medicine specialist who has made frequent trips to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, the occupied West Bank and Gaza since 1982.
**Dr James Smith is a lecturer in Humanitarian Policy & Practice at UCL, and an emergency physician based in London. He worked in Gaza between December 2023 and January 2024, and April-June 2024.
***Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah is a British-Palestinian Associate Professor of Surgery and a Plastic & Reconstructive Surgeon. He has worked as a war surgeon in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, South Lebanon and during the five wars in the Gaza Strip, including the latest attack. His work was featured by numerous newspapers and media outlets, including La Monde, The Independent, Telegraph, BBC and CNN.
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