Starvation is not only killing Palestinians in Gaza one by one, but also destroying Palestinian society and inflicting permanent damage on bodies and minds, experts say.
As hopes for a ceasefire rise, the threat from extreme hunger is particularly acute because Israel has continued to deploy food controls as a weapon against civilians during previous pauses in conventional fighting, and could do so again.
Starvation forces the body to consume its own muscle and organs for energy, which can cause permanent injury, harms children’s futures by stunting the growth of their bodies and minds, and may even damage the heath of survivors’ children.
It also destroys communities by turning people against each other in their desperation for food and forcing them to do shameful, humiliating or violent things to survive.
Even if they recover physically, the trauma of having to choose between children, turn away relatives begging for food, sell their own bodies or a sister or a daughter for food, stays with them for life, famine experts say.
“You can approach starvation as a biological phenomenon experienced by individuals, but it is also a collective social experience,” said Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, and author of Mass Starvation: the History and Future of Famine.
“Very often that societal element – the trauma, the shame, the loss of dignity, the violation of taboos, the breaking of social bonds – is more significant in the memory of the experience of survivors than the individual biological experience.”
“All these traumas are the reason why the Irish took almost 150 years before they could memorialise what they experienced in the 1840s. Those who inflict starvation are aware of this, they know that what they’re doing is actually dismantling a society.”
This “sociology of starvation” was outlined by Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer and Holocaust survivor who coined the word genocide then campaigned for it to be recognised as a crime in international law, de Waal said.
In writings during the second world war, Lemkin “spent a lot of time describing rations, rationing as a way of undermining groups”.
The social impact of starvation means an aggressor can use food controls to create a dynamic that de Waal describes as “genocidal humanitarianism”, where just enough calories are provided to prevent mass death, but extreme hunger “destroys the meaning of their life as a group”.
International experts have warned repeatedly during the war that Gaza is approaching the internationally recognised threshold for famine, measured by factors including rates of death and malnutrition.
Chris Newton, senior analyst at International Crisis Group and an expert in famine and starvation as a weapon of war, said that even if that line was never crossed, the effect of spending long periods in a state of extreme hunger could not be fully reversed.
“This is not about a formal famine declaration or a special number of trucks or meals. It’s about Israel’s attempt to starve Gaza indefinitely without the rapid mass death from starvation and disease we call famine,” he said. “This experiment cannot last for ever, though the consequences of starvation can.”
One of the most visible signs of social breakdown in Gaza is the regular looting of aid trucks entering the territory, and the near daily shootings of people trying to get limited supplies from distribution centres operated by the secretive US and Israeli backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
“Starvation breaks social order, and transforms governance into just one issue, who can feed people?” said Nour Abuzaid, senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, an agency that investigates human rights violations.
“If you can feed people, you can rule them. Because life has been reduced to a single question: What are we going to eat today?”
Forensic Architecture has documented the structural features that make GHF centres so deadly by design, including their location in areas where the Israeli military has ordered civilians to evacuate, and routes to reach them that take civilians close to Israeli military outposts.
Israel can continue to restrict food and channel it through GHF sites even during a pause in fighting with conventional weapons. “This is exactly what happened during the previous ceasefire, which was still in place when Israel cut aid on 2 March,” Abuzaid said.
If it does, the location and architecture of GHF sites mean killings can be expected to continue, she said, citing repeated shootings of civilians who approached a “buffer zone” established by Israeli forces.
“There were over 100 people who were killed during the ceasefire just because they were in proximity to the buffer zone,” Abuzaid said. “So if the model based on (GHF) ration stations placed in or near the buffer zone continues [to be used] we should expect civilian casualties to continue.”
Controls on food also mean Israel “can actively destroy civil order even during a ceasefire”, she added.
De Waal said Israel’s control of land and sea borders meant it had full oversight of how much food entered the territory, and UN data providing detailed information about malnutrition among Palestinians meant its leaders could not say starvation there was an unforeseen outcome.
“You can’t starve anyone by accident, you can shoot someone by accident but … in inflicting starvation [you] have 60 or 80 days in which [you] can remedy the error,” he said.
Forensic Architecture has concluded that Israel’s restrictions on food entering Gaza are genocidal in two different ways, said its director, Eyal Weizman.
“Obviously, to intentionally starve people to death is genocidal, and starvation is also used in order to break society. Starvation is the means and starvation is the end.”
“If this system remains in place during any upcoming ceasefire, with control over every calorie and anyone entitled to it, Israel will continue to break Palestinian society,” Weizman said. “The genocide might continue during a ceasefire.”
