Starve, Silence, Disable: New Weapons in Israel's Genocidal War
This is not 'collateral damage'. It is the deliberate, systematic creation of disability.
An injured man is taken to the Al-Ahli hospital following overnight Israeli army airstrikes across the Gaza Strip, in Gaza City, on March 18. Photo: AP/PTI.
"Give me a voice of thunder that I may hurl imprecation upon this cannibal, whose gruesome hunger spares neither woman nor child." – Rabindranath Tagore
In Gaza, the cannibal devours relentlessly – its hunger insatiable, its thirst for blood unquenched. The savagery unfolding is unprecedented, more brutal than anything recent memory can bear. Its crimes are so grotesque that one would be tempted to draw parallels with those tried at Nuremberg.
The thunderous plea of Tagore seems to pale when faced with the indescribable and unsurmountable suffering that Gazans are subjected to.
One must be a heartless monster to remain unmoved by the cries of children undergoing amputations without anaesthesia, lying on blood-soaked floors in overcrowded spaces.
Writing in The Hindu of October 5, 2024, Farhat Mantoo of MSF-Doctors without Borders, South Asia Chapter, narrates the story of 15-year-old Abdul, who ventured out on February 10, 2024, to surprise his mum with some 'salt or flour' amid the devastation in northern Gaza.
As he scoured abandoned homes, he was grievously injured during an Israeli airstrike. Abdul crawled for more than an hour before help arrived and he was taken to a hospital. With hospitals overwhelmed with casualties and critical supplies lacking, doctors were forced to perform surgery on Abdul without anesthesia. The situation has far worsened now.
Denied wheelchairs and other assistive devices and robbed of caregivers, the disabled are forced to flee from one bombardment zone to another on foot – many of them crawling, dragging their bodies maimed by the violence. Homes, hospitals, rehabilitation centres – any building in the path of the Israeli Defence Forces – are reduced to rubble.
This is not "collateral damage." It is the deliberate, systematic creation of disability. As a powerful submission to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD Committee) to its hearing in August 2025, argues, this is the "mass production of disability." The submission, by Women Enabled International (WEI) endorsed by several global organisations, including India's National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled (NPRD), documents an appalling reality:
"Thousands have been made newly disabled due to amputations, traumatic injuries, psychological trauma, and the denial of essential medical care."
According to a UNICEF/WHO update in early 2025, between 3,105 and 4,050 limb amputations were reported since October 7, 2023, in Gaza. Approximately 25% of these victims were children, equating to around 780 to 1,000 child amputees. A May 2025 report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) and Christian Aid Ireland cites the total number of amputations as 4,700, with 850 of those being children.
The bombs maim bodies; the siege prevents treatment; trauma decays the spirit. Disability here is not an unforeseen tragedy – it is an intended outcome, a weapon in the arsenal of genocide.
Oldest logic of genocide: Target the disabled first
What is unfolding in Gaza is not an isolated tragedy – it is part of a grim historical legacy. In 1994, in Rwanda, persons with disabilities were locked in churches and burned alive. In Srebrenica (Bosnia, 1995), the elderly and disabled were abandoned to die.
But the most horrific was what happened in Nazi Germany where disabled individuals were the first to be exterminated, targeted under the concocted logic of racial hygiene. Under Aktion T4, an estimated 2,00,000 disabled individuals were annihilated. This program, which began in 1939, was a precursor to the Holocaust, marking the first phase in the Nazis' campaign of "racial purification". The disabled were considered "unworthy of life', a 'burden on earth' and were sent to gas chambers before the mass slaughter of Jews and other "undesirables".
The submission to the CRPD Committee notes:
'History has shown that persons with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by genocides, yet they remain perpetually excluded from protection, recognition and remembrance.'
In Gaza, disabled bodies are not mere casualties of war – they are actively targeted. Bombs destroy rehabilitation centres; sieges prevent access to wheelchairs; orders to displace people render the disabled incapable of fleeing.
Starvation as a weapon of reproductive genocide
The submission bears witness to horrors that words can scarcely capture:
"Mothers must deliver babies without anesthesia. Doctors use cellphone flashlights to conduct operations. Mothers who are starving cannot produce milk. Babies die prematurely because there is no fuel for incubators."
For women with disabilities, this nightmare is compounded. They are unable to flee, deprived of privacy, and at heightened risk of sexual violence. Reproductive care is denied, amplifying the terror.
The Palestinian Feminist Collective has named this for what it is: 'reproductive genocide'.
Occupation as a machine of disablement
Even before the current onslaught, Israel's prolonged occupation of Palestine was a monstrous machine producing disability. Settler violence, home demolitions, military checkpoints and apartheid-like healthcare systems have been a form of daily warfare for Palestinians. The current destruction only deepens this crisis:
"Disability-based dispossession is entrenched by the occupation. Impairment is worsened through violence, deprivation, and denial of access to care, education, and freedom of movement.'
In the West Bank, disabled women and girls live under constant threat of settler violence. Hospitals are either blocked or destroyed, further exacerbating the ongoing crisis.
The genocide is not only impacting people with disabilities, especially women, girls and gender diverse people with disabilities, in unimaginable ways, but the genocide has also been a mass disabling event. It has produced large scale disability – both visible and invisible.
An unending mental health crisis
In Gaza, mental health has collapsed under relentless siege. Continuous bombardment, loss of loved ones, forced displacement, and witnessing unspeakable horrors have pushed entire communities into collective trauma.
Children and adults alike wake screaming from nightmares that never end; parents mourn silently, numb with grief. The destruction of hospitals and the shortage of mental health professionals mean that psychological wounds go untreated, deepening despair.
Anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress have become widespread, yet there is no safe space to heal. Here, trauma is not a moment – it is daily life, passed from one generation to the next in an unbroken cycle.
Numbers that the world refuses to see
A report in Al Jazeera, dated July 24, 2025, records the death of over 59,000 Palestinians and injuries to 1,43,000 in Israeli attacks. According to Harvard Dataverse, an estimated 3,77,000 people have "disappeared," buried under rubble and left uncounted. Among them are the disabled, who are left to die because they could not escape.
"Due to the actions of Israel, it is close to impossible to obtain accurate and timely data,' the submission warns. Erasure, too, is a weapon.
Profiting over bodies
The economy of genocide – as described by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese – is built on the dispossession and disablement of Palestinians and disability justice helps us understand and name how war, surveillance, and militarism profit from the destruction of bodies and communities. International arms sales, border militarisation and the blocking of humanitarian aid are capitalist ventures that produce and sustain disability on a mass scale.
Israel's bombardment of Gaza serves as a live testing ground for AI-guided weapons, surveillance technologies and riot control tools – all of which are then exported worldwide including to India. As the submission notes:
"War, surveillance, and militarism profit from the destruction of bodies and communities."
From Nazi doctors conducting experiments on disabled prisoners to modern arms manufacturers boasting of "battle-tested" weapons, genocide and capitalism have always walked hand in hand. Not to speak of the 'Riviera of the Middle East' that someone is dreaming of.
Convention betrayed
Israel ratified the CRPD, thereby obligating itself to protect persons with disabilities, particularly in conflict. The Fourth Geneva Convention demands medical care and protection for civilians. Yet, hospitals are bombed, aid is blocked and disability services are wiped out.
"Non-compliance with these obligations may constitute grave breaches of international law and warrants independent investigation and accountability."
Yet, bombs continue to fall, and words like "proportionality" fill press releases.
How many more?
In Gaza, children wake to find their limbs gone. Mothers bury babies – premature and stillborn. Disabled women crawl across a wasteland where homes and rehabilitation centres once stood. From Aktion T4 to Srebrenica, from Rwanda to Gaza, genocide begins by marking some lives as disposable.
"Persons with disabilities are disproportionately impacted by violence yet are consistently excluded from protection and remembrance."
History asks us: how many more limbs, wombs, and futures must be shattered before we say enough?
The silence that speaks: India's disability movement and Gaza
The Indian disability movement has been strikingly silent on the unprecedented suffering of disabled Palestinians in Gaza. While global disability organisations have condemned Israel's deliberate targeting of persons with disabilities and joined calls for a ceasefire, most prominent Indian disability groups continue to look away.
This silence is disturbing. It not only betrays the foundational principles of the disability rights movement – supposedly built on the rejection of hierarchies of whose lives matter – but also echoes the position of India's current ruling establishment to side with Israel. Many have been unequivocal supporters of the neoliberal trajectory and stand compromised. The disability community, which has historically stood against state violence and exclusion, now risks complicity by omission.
Moreover, by refusing to engage with the mass production of disability in Gaza – children losing limbs in bombardments, denial of assistive devices, starvation used as a weapon – the movement distances itself from global disability justice. In doing so, it inadvertently affirms an unequal valuation of lives: solidarity, it seems, is not extended to Palestinians – disabled or otherwise.
This selective empathy undermines both credibility and conscience, exposing a silence that itself becomes a form of violence and complicity.
Muralidharan is general secretary, National Platform for the Rights of the Disabled (NPRD).
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