Starvation by design: How Israel turned meals right into a weapon of battle in Gaza | Israel-Palestine battle | USAEMALL.com

In the first three months of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in 2023, only four deaths were officially attributed to starvation by health officials in Gaza. By 2024, that number rose to 49.  But it was in 2025 – the year the siege reached its suffocating zenith – that the death toll exploded, reaching 422 deaths in a single year.

This represents a staggering 760 percent increase in starvation deaths in just 12 months.

UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri told Al Jazeera in August 2025 that the global standard for famine analysis, known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), tends to be “conservative”.

“The reality on the ground was unequivocal. We raised the alarm when we started seeing the first children dying,” Fakhri explained, noting that the crisis met the strict technical criteria for famine.

The Health Ministry in Gaza gave the breakdown of the victims: 40.63 percent were elderly (over 60), and 34.74 percent were children. In 2025 alone, cases among children under five spiked from 2,754 in January to 14,383 in August.

Legal experts said that what occurred in Gaza wasn’t just “food insecurity”; it met the strict technical criteria for famine, a designation often delayed by political bureaucracy.

“In the human rights community, we don’t wait as long … we don’t have to focus on measuring pain, suffering, and death,” Fakhri explained. “We raised the alarm when we started seeing the first children dying … because when a parent is holding their child in their arms, and that child is wasting away, that means an entire community is under attack.”

Anatomy of a strategy

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and other parts of the occupied Palestinian territory have accused consecutive Israeli governments of a decades-old policy to use food and aid as a weapon of war.

Suleiman Basharat, a Palestinian commentator and researcher on Israeli affairs, traces this strategy to the blockade of Gaza imposed by Israel in 2007.

“It was based on the idea of starvation and narrowing daily life,” Basharat noted. This doctrine was infamously summarised in 2006 by Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, who said the goal was “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”, adding that the war marked a shift from “management” to “elimination”.

Senior Israeli ministers made their intentions clear at the very start of the genocidal war on Gaza. Former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant had declared a complete siege against “human animals“.  His remarks were quickly reinforced by far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who argued that blocking aid to Gaza was “justified and moral“, even if it meant starving millions.

Israel’s moves to ramp up this policy were thorough. Before the war on Gaza began in 2023, the United Nations said 500 trucks carrying aid and food were needed to keep the people in Gaza sustained.

But during the war, an average of 19 trucks a day were allowed in the Strip – a 96 percent reduction – which some Israeli media have referred to as the “calorie collapse”.

• The Calorie Collapse: Before the war, 500 trucks sustained Gaza daily. During the conflict, this dropped to an average of 19 trucks a day – a 96 percent reduction.
• The Thirst War: Water availability plummeted from 84 litres per person to just 3 litres during the siege.
• Scorched Earth: Israel systematically destroyed infrastructure for agricultural production. By August 2025, 90 percent of agricultural land was razed, 2,500 chicken farms were destroyed (killing 36 million birds), and the fishing port was obliterated.

“If Israel wanted to do it, every child in Gaza could have breakfast tomorrow,” de Waal observed. “All they need to do is to open the gates”.

In addition to food, people in Gaza witnessed a sharp decrease in water releases from Israel. Rights group Oxfam said that, 100 days into the “ceasefire”, Gaza is still deliberately deprived of water as aid groups are forced to scavenge under an illegal blockade.

Israel also employed a “scorched earth” policy, systematically destroying the infrastructure for agricultural production.

By August 2025, estimates suggest that the Israeli army had destroyed 90 percent of agricultural land and 2,500 chicken farms. The army focused its campaign on areas near the security barrier in the north, south and east of the Gaza Strip.

The spokesperson for Gaza’s Ministry of Agriculture, Mohammed Abu Odeh, has warned that the Israeli army’s destruction and control of the farmland will affect the chain of food and supply of vegetables for nearly two million people in the Strip.

The illusion of aid

Palestinian officials and analysts suggest Israel has had a strategy of blocking aid and, at times, manipulating how it is delivered.

Political analyst Abdullah Aqrabawi told Al Jazeera Arabic that Israel and the US have tried to create their own aid-delivering system, such as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), but failed. Hundreds of Palestinians were killed at GHF sites trying to access food.

“The United States came with a pier and contracted companies … and failed,” Aqrabawi said. He noted that these initiatives were attempts to “support criminal pockets” or specific families to distribute aid, “thereby isolating Hamas – the resistance”.

Re-engineering society

Analysts say that the starvation tactics were used, not just for military leverage, but also to create an “anti-resistance” sentiment in Gaza.

“The goal is to break the Palestinian resistance by affecting the social base that embraces it,” Basharat explained. He argues that Israel aimed to “re-engineer the Palestinian human” into a being whose sole cognitive focus is basic survival, rendering them incapable of political thought.

Analysts described a host of policies adopted by Israeli officials to push Palestinians out of Gaza, cloaking them in misleading terms, such as encouraging “voluntary migration“.

Israeli affairs expert Mohannad Mustafa said this was a cynical euphemism for forced displacement. “You starve the people, destroy the infrastructure … and in the end, you ask them: ‘Do you want to emigrate?’” Mustafa told Al Jazeera Arabic Channel. “This is forced displacement, not voluntary migration.”

Israeli rights activists have repeatedly pointed out the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to pressure people in Gaza and the occupied West Bank to leave.

Alice Rothchild, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, described the policies as “humiliating mechanics”. She detailed how the system forced starving civilians to walk miles to feeding centres, “herding them into cages” to receive aid. “It’s all part of this attempt to destroy Gaza,” she said.

Future defined by hunger

Today, despite the ongoing Gaza “ceasefire” – which continues despite Israel’s regular attacks – the destruction of Gaza’s agricultural backbone means the Strip remains entirely dependent on external aid, giving Israel permanent control.

The 475 officially recorded deaths are merely the tip of the iceberg.

For many Palestinians, the war may be “paused” in theory, but for a generation of Palestinians, the man-made hunger, physical and political scars could take decades to heal.