‘No one should act surprised,' says UN expert who warned of starvation in Gaza last year
'Israel has built the most efficient starvation machine you can imagine. So while it's always shocking to see people being starved, no one should act surprised. All the information has been out in the open since early 2024,' Michael Fakhri, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, told the Guardian.
'Israel is starving Gaza. It's genocide. It's a crime against humanity. It's a war crime. I have been repeating it and repeating it and repeating it, I feel like Cassandra,' said Fakhri, referring to the Greek mythological figure whose warnings and predictions were ignored.
On 9 October 2023 – two days after the deadly Hamas attack – Israel's then defense minister, Yoav Gallant, declared a 'complete siege' of Gaza and said he would halt the supply of electricity, food, water and fuel. By December 2023, Gazans accounted for 80% of the people in the world experiencing catastrophic hunger, according to UN and international aid agency figures.
Related: The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza
Now, widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease are driving the sharp rise in hunger-related deaths across Gaza, with more than 20,000 children hospitalized for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global initiative that provides real-time data on hunger and famine for the UN and aid groups.
The 'worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out' across the Gaza Strip, the IPC warned in an alert earlier this week.
Fakhri was among the first to warn about the impending famine – and the need for urgent action to stop Israel from starving 2 million people in Gaza.
In an interview with the Guardian published on 28 February 2024, Fakhri said: 'We have never seen a civilian population made to go so hungry so quickly and so completely, that is the consensus among starvation experts … Intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime. Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, simply for being Palestinian … this is now a situation of genocide.'
The following month, the international court of justice recognized the risk of genocide in Gaza and drew attention to the 'spread of famine and starvation'. The ICJ said that Israel must immediately take all necessary and effective measures, in cooperation with the UN, to ensure unfettered access to humanitarian aid including food, water, shelter, fuel and medicines.
In May, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former defense minister Gallant became the first ever individuals to be formally accused by an international court of deliberate starvation, which is a war crime.
In July 2024, a group of UN experts including Fakhri declared a famine after the first deaths from starvation were reported in Gaza. Fakhri also published a detailed report for the UN into Israel's decades-long control over food production and supplies to Palestinians, a stranglehold which meant 80% of people in Gaza were dependent on aid when Gallant announced the current siege in October 2023.
Yet there has been little or no action to stop Israel starving Palestinians, which it has achieved by systematically destroying local food production (greenhouses, orchards, farmland) and blocking aid – in violation of international law.
According to Fakhri, this is why famine has now taken hold in Gaza.
'Famine is always political, always predictable and always preventable. But there is no verb to famine. We don't famine people, we starve them – and that inevitably leads to famine if no political action is taken to avoid it.
'But to frame the mass starvation as a consequence of the most recent blockade, is a misunderstanding of how starvation works and what's going on in Gaza. People don't all of a sudden starve, children don't wither away that quickly. This is because they have been deliberately weakened for so long. The state of Israel itself has used food as a weapon since its creation. It can and does loosen and tighten its starvation machine in response to pressure; it has been fine-tuning this for 25 years.'
Despite stark images of skeletal Palestinians, the Israeli government and some of its allies have continued to insist that the hunger is the result of logistical problems, not a state policy. Last week Netanyahu said: 'There is no policy of starvation in Gaza. There is no starvation in Gaza.'
Unicef is among multiple aid agencies to confirm that malnutrition and starvation have escalated since early March 2025 – when Israel unilaterally violated a ceasefire agreed after Donald Trump returned to the White House. Israel reinstated a total blockade after allowing some aid trucks in during the ceasefire, though UN agencies and charities on the ground said it was never enough to fully meet the needs of the starved, sick and weakened population.
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an opaque logistics group backed by Israel and the Trump administration, began operations in May, with armed security provided by private contractors and the Israeli military. It was authorized to replace 400 UN distribution hubs with just four across Gaza, in response to unproven claims that international aid was being diverted by Hamas.
The UN and hundreds of aid groups condemned the move as a weaponization of aid that violated long-established humanitarian norms. On 1 June, Israeli soldiers killed 32 people at GHF sites, and since then more than 1,300 starving Palestinians have been killed trying to access food. Israel has long sought to discredit and weaken the UN and other international mechanisms including the courts, which it sees as hostile to its ongoing de facto annexation of Palestinian territories, accusing them of antisemitism.
'This is using aid not for humanitarian purposes, but to control populations, to move them, to humiliate and weaken people as part of their military tactics. The GHF is so frightening because it might be the new militarized dystopia of aid of the future,' Fakhri said.
In a statement, GHF rejected the reports of Palestinian deaths as 'false and exaggerated statistics' and accused the UN of not doing enough. 'If the UN and other groups would collaborate with us, we could end the starvation, desperation and violent incidents almost overnight. We could scale up, add more distribution sites and ramp up direct-to-community delivery which GHF is piloting now,' a spokesperson said.
The Israeli government did not respond to request for comment.
The deaths from starvation and aid-hub massacres come on top of at least 60,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli bombs and tanks. Studies have concluded that the real death toll is almost certainly much higher, and Israel has continued to deny international researchers and journalists entry into Gaza.
Fakhri and other UN experts have repeatedly urged member states and corporations to act to stop the bombs and famine by cutting financial and military aid and trade with Israel, as well as broad-based economic and political sanctions.
'I see stronger political language, more condemnation, more plans proposed, but despite the change in rhetoric, we're still in the phase of inaction. The politicians and corporations have no excuse, they're really shameful. The fact that millions of people are mobilizing in growing numbers shows that everyone in the world understands how many different countries, corporations and individuals are culpable.'
Fakhri argues that in light of the US persistent vetoing of ceasefire resolutions at the UN security council, it is incumbent on the UN general assembly to call for peacekeepers to accompany humanitarian convoys into Gaza.
'They have the majority of votes, and most importantly, millions of people are demanding this. Ordinary people are trying to break through an illegal blockade to deliver humanitarian aid, to implement international law their governments are failing to do. Why else do we have peacekeepers if not to end genocide and prevent starvation?'
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The challenge in expanding aid to Gaza
'FAMINES HAVE MOMENTUM' — President Donald Trump signaled a subtle shift within the White House last week, publicly recognizing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Trump acknowledged 'real starvation' in Gaza, while Vice President J.D. Vance urged Israel to increase humanitarian aid access. Other top U.S. officials visited Gaza to witness the humanitarian crisis for themselves before devising an aid plan for the area. The recalibration reflects mounting pressure from both Democrats and Trump allies to let more humanitarian aid into Gaza, as over 1000 people have been killed by Israeli forces while trying to receive aid, and international watchdogs warn of a widespread famine. Globally, U.S. allies such as the United Kingdom and Canada have announced that they will recognize a state of Palestine in September if a ceasefire agreement is not reached or if the Palestinian Authority commits to reforms and elections, respectively. But despite an increased willingness from Trump officials to confirm the existence of a humanitarian crisis, the administration has been light on actual details. Malnutrition remains a widespread problem, even as Israel has started daily pauses in military operations in parts of Gaza and Israel and the U.K. have airdropped aid. Special envoy Steve Witkoff and U.S. ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee — the two officials who visited Gaza 't o help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza' — have also yet to share specifics on what that plan could look like. The silence may in part be because increasing aid is a complicated task — especially in a conflict-ridden area like the Gaza Strip. To better understand the state of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza and the challenges to delivering humanitarian aid, Nightly spoke with Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International and former director of USAID's Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance and former executive of the agency's Covid-19 task force. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. At the moment, most aid being distributed in Gaza is organized by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is designed to replace the United Nations aid operation. Since Israel announced this plan in May, many aid organizations refused to work with the organization. Why are aid groups against GHF, and what has changed since they took over aid operations? There's three main complaints that the traditional aid apparatus — the UN-led and NGO-organized aid system that has operated pretty effectively throughout much of the war — have. First, GHF was very much pitched not as additive, but as a substitution, as an alternative. At the same time, the Israeli government is facilitating and really working kind of hand in glove with GHF. GHF even seems to operate like an extension of the IDF and the Israeli presence; they coordinate very, very closely with the IDF in Gaza. That is also being used then as a rationale by the Israeli government for suppressing the rest of the humanitarian system in Gaza. The GHF just has orders of magnitude less capacity and less reach than the traditional aid architecture had. It's not in any meaningful way, a replacement or substitution. It's run by people who are not humanitarian professionals and don't, frankly, have a background, or qualifications, or knowledge or expertise to really do that effectively. The second complaint would be that the model of the GHF puts Palestinians at enormous risk. In order to seek aid from GHF, Palestinians have to run this militarized gauntlet down [the coastal road] and then down the Morag Corridor in order to get to the aid sites. That has produced almost daily massacres. The third is that it's also just wildly inadequate relative to both the scale and the scope of the humanitarian needs in Gaza today. Gaza today is going headlong into a famine. The way you fight famine is not only with food, and this is a well-established humanitarian doctrine that when a population is moving into famine, you need to provide food, yes, but the type of food needs to be appropriately fortified and nutritious and adequately cover the full range of nutritional requirements. The GHF distribution boxes don't really do that. If you're distributing dried food aid that still needs to be prepared, then people need cooking fuel to prepare that. They need shelter and kitchen sets and places to prepare that and the goods with which to prepare it. They need clean water, both for their own drinking, sanitation, hygiene, and of course, to prepare the food. They need really specialized nutritional support, including inpatient malnutrition treatment therapies for people who reach an advanced stage of malnutrition. The pictures that have been coming out of kids in an advanced state of severe, acute malnutrition, those kids can't eat the food that GHF is distributing. Their bodies would not tolerate it at this point. And then finally you need robust health care because we know from famines past, that sometimes a majority, and certainly a large share of the people who die in famines die of disease before starvation takes them. Last week, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said that GHF delivers more than a million meals a day. Does this align with what you're hearing on the ground, and what is in these dried food packs? There's not a lot of transparency about how they're reaching that number, about what's in the food packs, and about how they're calculating what constitutes a meal, even if you take that entirely at face value. I don't know, for example, what's the denominator of what they consider a meal. Is that 800 calories? How much food are they considering constitutes a meal? Of course, normally, a person needs three meals a day, and there's around 2 million people in Gaza. If you look at it that way, a million meals a day, even at face value, is maybe a sixth of the food needs that Gaza has. So, it's not remotely sufficient. It has been widely reported that thousands of aid trucks are waiting outside Gaza. What are the obstacles stopping that aid from reaching Gazans? The principal obstacle is Israeli government policy. During the ceasefire, the Israeli government would allow aid groups to drive trucks across the border directly to the where their warehouses inside Gaza through multiple points of entry around Gaza. There was enough aid that was getting in through that channel that no one had much of an incentive to try and pillage those convoys because there was sufficient aid getting in. Convoys get pillaged when people are so desperate, and they have been so deprived that they're fearful that if they don't get what's on the convoy in front of them, they don't know when or where the next round of aid will be coming from. The bottom line is, there was a system that was working. It was working well, and the Israelis shut it down when they when they were trying to put pressure on Hamas in March, they shut that system down. The variable there, what toggles that on and off, is Israeli government policy. You can just look at the difference between the aid that was going in during the ceasefire, and then what happened in March and April when nothing got in. What needs to happen to alleviate the starvation and malnutrition in Gaza? What needs to happen is a massive scale up of humanitarian access and humanitarian delivery across every part of Gaza. One of the core principles of humanitarian response is you want to bring the aid as close to where the people are as possible. You don't make the people traverse a combat zone in order to get to an aid distribution site. You bring the aid to where they are. That's very possible. Gaza is not a big place. I've overseen U.S. government responses to hunger catastrophes in Yemen, in South Sudan, in Ethiopia, in northeast Nigeria, and in my NGO career in Somalia with the 2011 famine as well. Those were all large, logistically complicated places with huge populations. Gaza is a tiny place with 2 million people. If humanitarian groups had access and were not being impeded from doing their work, they could scale up a very robust response, really rapidly. But the limiting factor is political obstruction of their ability to do that. If that were removed, what they would then ramp up the distribution of appropriately nutritious food and alongside that, you scale up nutrition support programs. And of course, sanitation and hygiene are really important. If no significant changes are made, what do you see as the trajectory of the humanitarian crisis? It will continue to get worse. Famines have momentum. The more malnourished, the more vulnerable a population gets, the more of them become vulnerable to dying. When you have a huge swath of the population that is in a state of significant malnutrition, and you've got a huge population of people who are succumbing to disease, succumbing to injury, the risk to them grows and grows the longer that they're in that in that situation. I think the further someone deteriorates into a state of severe malnutrition, the harder and more expensive and more time consuming it is to return them to health. What happens in a famine situation, is because as you go further down that trajectory, the number of people at risk and the amount of effort it takes to stabilize them grows exponentially, thereby, too, the risk of mortality grows exponentially the longer that it is allowed to progress. The fear that I have is that what we're seeing now in Gaza, with these daily clusters of deaths from starvation is kind of the leading edge of that exponential trajectory. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. 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Senate Republicans and President Donald Trump are once again on opposing sides about a central tenet of Republican orthodoxy: This time, on Israel and Gaza. Earlier this week, Trump directly contradicted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu refuted claims by multiple international groups saying that Gaza was at the point of starvation, calling it a 'bold-faced lie.' Trump responded during a joint press conference with U.K. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer when he finally acknowledged that there is 'real starvation' in Gaza. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right MAGA firebrand from Georgia, jumped in on it and called the war in Gaza a 'genocide,' using language that historically only progressives used to describe the war. And public opinion has largely shifted against Israel despite the brutal Oct. 7, 2023 terror incursion where Hamas squads murdered 1,200 innocent people and took 251 hostages in addition to carrying out acts of depravity on the populace. With Joe Biden exiting the stage, Democrats are having their reckoning with the party's historic support for Israel. But many Republicans feigned ignorance. 'I haven't seen what the president said. So, was it today?' Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana, one of the more MAGA House members who got a promotion last year, responded when asked about Trump's comments by The Independent on Tuesday. The Senate remains one of the last true bastions of Republican orthodoxy on foreign policy, which is to say, support for a strong military and America having a prominent role as the enforcer of the global order. Support for Israel remains a core tenet of this style of support, both because of Christian conservatives' theology about the Holy Land and the critical strategic position of Israel in the Middle East. Republicans historically viewed Israel's placement in an area of the world rife with conflict as another asset for intelligence and security purposes. Trump represented a break from that, focusing more on 'America First' ideology wherein he adopted more isolationist rhetoric, though he still robustly backs Israel and assisted with its war with Iran. That might be why Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told The Independent to contact his office. Sen. Todd Young, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Marine Corps veteran, refused to answer questions. Despite the fact that Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) faces a MAGA primary challenge from Texas' wayward and scandal-ridden Attorney General Ken Paxton, read from the hymnal of the Bush Republicans. 'I think there's definitely a humanitarian crisis, but i think the blame is not Netanyahu, the blame is Hamas,' Cornyn told The Independent. When asked if that's what Trump meant, Cornyn said 'you'd have to ask him.' Despite the fact Trump relocated the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in his first term and continues to support Israel militarily, he clearly views the American relationship with Israel in a far more transactional light than his Senate counterparts. During one point of Israel's war with Iran, Trump famously said 'they don't know what the f*** they're doing.' Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, told The Independent there is 'clearly a humanitarian crisis there,' said people should remember that Hamas caused this. Democrats for their part sought to exploit Trump's remarks on Gaza. Unburdened from having to defend Joe Biden's record on Gaza, numerous Democrats pointed to Trump's record to raise the suffering in Gaza. 'What we can do is continue to call upon President Trump, who now has acknowledged that people are starving to death in Gaza, to call upon Prime Minister Netanyahu to let the UN a delivery system,' Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), told The Independent. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) joined Van Hollen's letter this weekend to cease funding for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and instead resume sending money to the United Nations for food distribution. But Sanders said Trump deserves no credit. 'Look at any newspaper in America today and you see pictures of starving children, this is not a brilliant observation,' he told The Independent. Last week on the Senate floor, Sen. Amy Klobuchar delivered a speech excoriating Netanyahu. This came weeks after she met with Netanyahu during his visit to Congress. But Klobuchar said her remarks were not an about-face. 'The reason I went was to raise the lack of humanitarian aid into Gaza and that they had to have more access points,' she told The Independent. 'I think it's getting worse and worse and I know they've let some aid in but it is not enough. This is a crisis, it's a humanitarian crisis, and people are starving.' 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