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Vox
3 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
Is anyone going to stop a looming death spiral in Gaza?
covers politics Vox. She first joined Vox in 2019, and her work has also appeared in Politico, Washington Monthly, and the New Republic. Palestinians carrying pans gather to receive hot meals, distributed by a charity organization in Gaza City, where residents are struggling to access food due to the ongoing Israeli blockade and attacks on July 23, 2025. Khames Alrefi/Anadolu via Getty Images Gaza is on the brink of a mass starvation crisis, and once it starts, it will be difficult if not impossible to stop. The Palestinian population of the Gaza Strip has faced various levels of food insecurity throughout the war that Israel has waged on the territory since Hamas's October 7, 2023, attack, fluctuating with the amount of aid Israel has allowed to enter the enclave via checkpoints it controls. In March 2024, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) — the primary organization tracking food insecurity worldwide — issued a warning that every resident of Gaza was at risk of crisis levels of food insecurity, and half were at risk of famine. (Crisis levels are reached when a population has 'food consumption gaps alongside acute malnutrition' or is 'only just able to meet their food needs, resorting to crisis coping strategies like selling off essential livelihood assets.' Famine is the most serious form of hunger, involving a complete lack of access to food and resulting starvation and death.) A famine was never officially declared, and food access peaked during the negotiated ceasefire reached in January. In March, Israel cut off all shipments into the Gaza Strip, including food aid, when the ceasefire expired. Israel justified it as a tactical strategy to get Hamas to release more Israeli hostages as part of continuing negotiations. The flow of humanitarian aid has since slowed to a trickle under the purview of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private group backed by the US and Israeli governments. It began operating in May, and is the sole entity that has been allowed to deliver food. Almost one-third of the 2.1 million people remaining in Gaza are not eating for multiple days in a row, according to the United Nations World Food Programme. Israel has also made it treacherous for hungry Gazans to even access food from the GHF. The UN estimates that the Israeli military has killed more than 1,000 Palestinians trying to get aid in Gaza since May. There are four GHF distribution centers throughout Gaza, three of which are in areas where the Israeli military has issued evacuation orders, and they are often only open for short periods of time, sometimes spurring crowds to rush to get provisions. After enduring more than 21 months in a war zone with inadequate nutrition, the population of Gaza is worn down, and humanitarian groups say that imminent famine will likely cause many to die — not just from hunger, but also from preventable disease that their bodies can no longer fight off. To understand how Gaza got to this point and what happens next, I spoke with Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, an organization that advocates for humanitarian assistance and protection for displaced people. Our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity. How has access to food in Gaza changed throughout the course of the war? What happened from really almost the start of the war through all of last year was a population that was hovering right at the edge of a starvation emergency, but never quite dipping fully into it. The Israeli government had been hugely restricting aid through January and February of 2024. The warning of potential famine came out in early March [2024], and then they subsequently allowed a great deal more aid in in April, and the situation improved. Some of the concessions that the Israelis then made in late March into April, and somewhat beyond that, really did make a meaningful difference. And then the Rafah offensive started in May, and things worsened again after that. The period of the ceasefire [beginning in January 2025] was the best period for aid access since the war began. For six weeks, hundreds of aid trucks were coming in every day. There was relative freedom of movement and freedom of operation for aid organizations who previously had been heavily, heavily constricted by [Israel Defense Forces] operations and permission structures. There was always just enough that would be allowed in to prevent the kind of full-blown famine outcomes that I think we're now beginning to see. Why is the population of Gaza now on the brink of starvation? If you fully cut someone off [from food] when they are otherwise in good health, it's going to take longer for them to deteriorate. If they have spent a year-plus being one step removed from starvation, then they're much more vulnerable. Another shock to their system has the risk to be much, much more damaging. I think that's what we're now seeing, when Israel withdrew from the ceasefire in March and imposed a total, complete, hermetic blockade on Gaza. There was, for a while, enough residual aid that had been brought in during the population could stretch that out and and make do for a while before the deprivation really started to bite again. I would argue what we're seeing is still effectively an extension of that blockade, because the primary aid that Israel has been allowing in is through this Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is not a meaningful factor in terms of the hunger situation in Gaza. The amounts they've been letting in are vanishingly small. This Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is distributing modest amounts of very poor quality aid to, as far as we can tell, a pretty limited number of people: the ones who happen to be able to get to their sites, which is not most of the population. The cost of a bag of flour has gone up from 50 shekels during the ceasefire earlier this year to over 1,700 now. What happens if famine sets in now? When you have a population that is that stressed, whose health has deteriorated that much, or is [already] in such an advanced state of population-level food deprivation and malnutrition, then things can turn bad very rapidly, because there is nothing to stand in the way of starvation. We have seen this kind of a trajectory in other settings before. Once people's coping mechanisms are exhausted, once their food and financial reserves are exhausted, once their bodies are in a very weakened state due to sustained malnutrition over a long period of time, then it doesn't take much to kill someone. It is very hard for your body to fight off disease or survive an injury, or even just survive. In most famines, we see mortality coming from a mix of both outright starvation and opportunistic infections. So people's bodies are greatly weakened, and they can't fight off diseases that would otherwise be very survivable. There is nothing coming on the horizon to improve that situation unless the Israeli government allows the mainstream professional humanitarian community to actually do their fucking jobs, and that is the one thing they will not allow. Famines have a momentum, and the longer that they are allowed to deepen, the harder they are to reverse. You need your standard food aid package distributed at scale. But you also need specialized, fortified food products, because people are in such an advanced state of malnutrition. You need advanced therapeutic malnutrition treatment, because a lot more people are now going to be coming into an advanced state of malnutrition that requires inpatient malnutrition treatment. You need clean water because the food that's being distributed has to be prepared with water. You need fuel so that people can cook the foods. You need medical treatment because many people who die in a famine die of disease, rather than outright starvation. And you need to improve sanitation, because if people do not have good sanitation, that's what allows the spread of waterborne diseases. None of that's possible right now. Why in your view has the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation been so ineffective? A core principle of humanitarian aid delivery is you want to get the aid as close to where the population is as possible. Gaza Humanitarian Foundation inverts that: They make the people come to the aid, rather than bringing the aid to the people. And they make people come to the aid through a deeply insecure territory, past IDF forces, who have been consistently trigger-happy anytime they see a crowd of Palestinians nearby. I and others warned very early on that this was likely to produce massacres, that this model was a recipe for disaster. Another core principle of humanitarian aid is that you must not provide aid in a way that increases the risk to the population. There's a very strongly ingrained ethos of 'do no harm.' This is a 'do harm' ethos, if anything. You're creating a situation where, in order to access aid, you compel people to cross a military perimeter where they are routinely shot at. That is not humanitarianism. Some advocates have suggested that Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. Do you agree with that? That's indisputable. It's explicit. They want Hamas to relent, and they see the starvation of the population as a pressure point there. Do you think the US is complicit in that? I think the US is certainly complicit in that. I think even the Biden administration bears a degree of complicity in that, because they put somewhat more pressure on the Israeli government than the Trump administration has. But fundamentally, they tolerated the situation that brought Gaza to this point. They tolerated a year-plus of starvation tactics being used, deprivation and illegal blockade tactics being used, and obstruction of aid, including aid provided by the US government. Rather than taking that on with the Netanyahu government, they did gimmick after gimmick. They did air drops. They did that ridiculous pier operation. It wasn't until nearly the very end of the administration that they sent the formal letter to the Israeli government demanding concrete progress. And then, of course, there was no meaningful progress.
Middle East Eye
12-05-2025
- General
- Middle East Eye
Famine imminent in Gaza if Israel doesn't lift blockade, hunger monitor warns
Famine is imminent in Gaza, with half a million people at risk of starvation unless Israel lifts its siege, according to a grim new report released on Monday by a global hunger monitor, marking a major deterioration since its last report in October. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a global network of UN agencies and humanitarian groups, reported Monday that 477,000 people in Gaza, or 22 percent of the population, are facing 'catastrophic' hunger from May to September, the highest classification level. Over one million more are at 'emergency' levels, marked by severe food gaps and high acute malnutrition. 'The current level of human suffering, destitution and harm is extreme and requires urgent action from all parties,' the IPC said in its report. The IPC warned that famine is imminent if the current conditions persist. The ongoing Israeli blockade, in place since 2 March, has severely restricted the entry of essential food and medical supplies into Gaza. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters The blockade, coupled with over 19 months of intense bombardment, has decimated local food production and infrastructure, leaving residents almost entirely reliant on dwindling external aid. Communal kitchens, which have become the primary source of food for many, are rapidly shutting down due to a lack of supplies. Thousands of Palestinians queue daily, hoping for minimal food rations, often leaving empty-handed. The data was gathered by IPC in Gaza between 1 April 1 and 10 May. The IPC, which rarely declares famines, has done so in Somalia, South Sudan and Darfur in previous years. Engineered starvation In reaction to IPC's report, the World Food Programme (WFP) said that over 116,000 metric tons of food, enough to feed one million people for four months, remain blocked at the border. The WFP said on Monday that it had exhausted its food stocks in April, and all 25 WFP-supported bakeries have closed due to shortages of wheat flour and cooking fuel. 'Death of a generation': Gaza infants battle starvation under deepening Israeli siege Read More » 'Families in Gaza are starving while the food they need is sitting at the border,' said Cindy McCain, executive director of the WFP. 'If we wait until after a famine is confirmed, it will already be too late for many people.' Children are among the most severely affected. Save the Children reported that more than 93 percent of Gaza's children, around 930,000, are at critical risk of famine. Unicef said it has treated 11,000 children for acute malnutrition since the start of 2025, with cases climbing dramatically in March. 'Hunger and acute malnutrition are a daily reality for children across the Gaza Strip,' said Unicef executive director, Catherine Russell. Oxfam also condemned the situation. 'Gaza's starvation is not incidental - it is deliberate, entirely engineered - and has now created the largest population facing starvation anywhere in the world,' said Mahmoud Alsaqqa, Oxfam's food security and livelihoods coordinator. 'It is unconscionable and is being allowed to happen.' He described the total siege as a 'manmade famine unfolding in real time,' with scenes of malnourished children too weak to cry and entire communities surviving without food or clean water. 'In one displacement camp, only five of 500 families had any flour left to make bread,' he added. Weaponised aid The IPC said that an Israeli plan announced on 5 May to facilitate aid delivery was 'highly insufficient to meet the population's essential needs'. Israel is starving Gaza to death, and still the world does nothing Read More » Israel maintains that the blockade is necessary to pressure Hamas into releasing the remaining captives and insists on a new aid distribution system under its control. Humanitarian agencies oppose this plan, saying it weaponises assistance. 'Turning aid into a tool of control endangers civilians, erodes the neutrality of humanitarian work, and risks unleashing even greater chaos and suffering across Gaza,' Alsaqqa said. Meanwhile, international leaders have voiced their concerns, including the new pope. Pope Leo XIV, in his inaugural Sunday address, called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and urged the global community to allow humanitarian aid into the strip. Irish Taoiseach Micheal Martin labelled Israel's blockade as a "war crime" and said it is "wholly unacceptable'.
The Journal
12-05-2025
- Politics
- The Journal
Entire population of Gaza at 'critical risk' of famine as Israeli aid blockade continues
ISRAEL'S BLOCKADE ON humanitarian aid entering Gaza has put the entire population at 'critical risk of famine', with roughly half a million Gazans facing starvation, a global hunger monitor has warned. The latest report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) found that Gaza's entire population of around 2.1 million people is at risk of a food crisis 'or worse' by September, adding that there has been a 'major deterioration' since October 2024. 'Nineteen months into the conflict, the Gaza Strip is still confronted with a critical risk of famine,' the IPC report said. Israel's humanitarian aid blockade on Gaza recently entered its third month, amid renewed bombardment and ground offensives across the territory. The UN and aid groups have rejected Israel's aid distribution moves. Border crossings into Gaza have also been closed for over two months – the longest the population has ever faced – causing food prices in markets to spike to astronomical levels, putting what little food is available out of reach for most families. The Palestinian Authority has already declared the strip to be in famine. 'Goods indispensable for people's survival are either depleted or expected to run out in the coming weeks. The entire population is facing high levels of acute food insecurity, with half a million people – one in five – facing starvation,' the IPC report said. The IPC analysis projected that 470,000 people, or 22% of the population, would fall into the catastrophic category by the end of September, with over a million more at 'emergency' levels. 'Urgent action is needed to save lives and avert further starvation, further deaths and a descent into famine. 'Goods indispensable for people's survival are either depleted or expected to run out in the coming weeks. The entire population is facing high levels of acute food insecurity, with half a million people – one in five – facing starvation,' the report said. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation called for the 'immediate' lifting of the Israeli blockade. 'Families in Gaza are starving while the food they need is sitting at the border,' said the UN World Food Programme's executive director, Cindy McCain. 'It's imperative that the international community acts urgently to get aid flowing into Gaza again. If we wait until after a famine is confirmed, it will already be too late for many people.' Advertisement 'There is nothing' A number of Irish aid organisations have demanded an 'immediate end' to the Israeli aid blockade. Oxfam Ireland CEO Jim Clarken said that the blockade has led to 'unimaginable suffering', with families and children facing starvation and severe malnutrition. 'The international community cannot allow this to continue,' Clarken said. 'Oxfam staff and partners are witnessing scenes that defy belief: families wasting away from hunger, malnourished children too weak to cry, and entire communities surviving without food or clean water. 'In one displacement camp, only five of 500 families had any flour left to make bread. We distributed our last food parcels weeks ago.' Palestinians receive food from a distribution center in Gaza City. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo Karol Balfe, ActionAid Ireland CEO described the IPC report findings as 'a stain on humanity's conscience', She added that the high risk of famine comes as 'little surprise amid the Israeli authorities' ongoing and deliberate refusal to allow any food or other life-saving aid into the territory'. 'Our colleagues, partners and the women and girls we work with in Gaza tell us that the food situation is already utterly catastrophic and that even finding one meal a day is increasingly difficult.' Speaking to ActionAid Ireland, a mother living in Gaza said that pantry supplies and tinned foods are running out. 'Community kitchens have stopped operating. It breaks your heart when a child asks for a piece of fruit, and you can't give them something as simple as a banana or an orange,' the mother told ActionAid. Another woman, who is currently nine months pregnant, told ActionAid that her worst nightmare is giving birth while the borders are closed. 'I have malnutrition so during pregnancy I am supposed to eat a lot of things, but unfortunately there is nothing, neither fruit, nor protein, nor milk, nor eggs, nor cheese,' the woman said. 'All of these things affect me, and I am very afraid that this will affect the baby.' Additional reporting by AFP Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
