Starvation by design: How Israel turned food into a weapon of war in Gaza
Wire desk byline Sourced from Xinhua, Dawn, Arab News, Anadolu and Minute Mirror. Translated and abridged by the GSRRA Desk.
Analysis: From destroying calories to ‘re-engineering’ society, data and experts reveal how the hunger in Gaza was not a byproduct of war, but a calculated strategy that reached its deadliest peak in 2025.
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.
Reference Link:- https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2026/2/5/starvation-by-design-how-israel-turned-food-into-a-weapon-of-war-in-ga
Zamir Ahmed Awan is the founder and Chair of the Global Silk Route Research Alliance, a think tank in Islamabad. He studied engineering at Shanghai University in the 1980s, and years later he went back to China as Pakistan's science counsellor in Beijing, from 2010 until 2016, working on science and higher education cooperation between the two countries.…
