Great Hunger: Israel Restricting Gaza’s Food Supplies Isn’t New

By Tiernan Cannon  |  September 9, 2025 | 10:31am
Photo by United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near Eas
International Affairs Great Hunger
Great Hunger: Israel Restricting Gaza’s Food Supplies Isn’t New

This is Great Hunger, a mini-series analyzing the political decisions that have led to mass starvation in some of the most food insecure countries on Earth.

That the people of Gaza are today starving to death is not a surprise. For almost two years now, since the October 7 attacks, Israel has strictly restricted food and aid from entering the Strip, and it has made no secret of it. “There will be no electricity,” Yoav Gallant, the then defense minister, boasted on October 9, 2023, announcing a “complete siege” on Gaza and its people. “No food, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” The West duly cheered. The leaders of the U.K., U.S., France, Germany and Italy jointly expressed their “steadfast and united support” for Israel that very same day, noting, “There is never any justification for terrorism,” referring, of course, solely to Hamas’ crimes on October 7. Keir Starmer, not yet Britain’s prime minister, went one better a few days later, plainly declaring in an interview that Israel had “the right” to withhold power and water from Palestinian civilians. “Obviously,” the former human rights lawyer added, “everything should be done within international law.” Some of us may detect a contradiction in both advocating for the purposeful starvation of a population, while, at the same time, staying within the bounds of international law, but, to be fair to Starmer, it can be difficult to realize that Palestinian human rights are being violated when you don’t view them as entirely human to begin with.

It is nearly two years later now, and famine has been declared in Gaza. With it comes the shaking of heads and performative dismay of the Western press and political elite. Starmer now calls the humanitarian conditions in Gaza, created by the very Israeli actions he explicitly supported in 2023, “unspeakable and indefensible.” Emmanuel Macron says France will recognize a Palestinian state. Even Trump has acknowledged “real starvation” in Gaza. As photos of dying children with lolling heads and protruding ribcages are seared into the public’s consciousness, these ghoulish leaders must now strike a balance: still mightily support Israel with all the military, financial and diplomatic backing it could ever need, while also looking rather upset and shocked about all the unfortunate suffering. But it is not shocking. Aid groups were warning of famine’s onset as early as December 2023, and Gaza has teetered on the edge ever since. The situation was eased somewhat during the so-called “ceasefire” of early 2025, which, while systematically violated by Israel, did allow for the flow of a small amount of food into Gaza, thereby preventing the declaration of famine at that point. But once the ceasefire truly broke down, and Israel had again imposed a full blockade, mass starvation was imminent.

Israel has destroyed Gaza’s ability to produce its own food. Cattle, sheep and goat herds have been annihilated, either blown up or starved to death like their human minders. Fishing is banned. Fields, orchards, bakeries and marketplaces have been blown up from the sky. Farmland, according to the London-based research group Forensic Architecture, covered about 47 percent of Gaza before October 7, but U.N. satellite imagery has since revealed that 98.5 percent of it has been destroyed or made inaccessible. Boats, ports and fishers are targeted and bombed, while the sea itself has been poisoned by the hazardous waste flowing into it following Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s sewage network. It is unclear when and if the sea ecosystem will recover.

“It’s been a systematic attack on food security,” Tania Hary, the executive director of Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization, recently told me from Israel, “through both the devastation of the local market, and through restrictions on the entry of aid and goods. Israel has basically made people completely dependent on aid—and then limited that, as well. They have full control over people’s diets.”

The War on Aid

When Trump returned to power earlier this year, he quickly moved to disrupt and reduce the system of global humanitarian aid which, while flawed, nonetheless provided huge numbers of people around the world with just enough to avert disaster. The consequences of America’s rollback of foreign aid, and of the policy being aped by other countries like the U.K., are being felt in many places, but, in the case of Gaza, Hary believes that the main problem, at least in the short-term, is Israel’s refusal to allow already available aid to flow. “We know that there is a ton of aid lined up at the Gaza crossings—in Egypt, in Jordan—from different places around the world,” she said. “The problem is difficulties getting it into Gaza and getting it distributed safely. It’s not necessarily funding that is the main obstacle. If you lifted the restrictions, I imagine that, eventually, funding could be a problem. It goes without saying that for any kind of reconstruction, you’re going to need billions of dollars. But the world is not ready to offer that.”

There are still humanitarian organizations like UNRWA doing heroic work in Gaza today, but their ability to function is severely limited by Israel, which, with the help of the United States, has sought to replace them with the monstrous organization known as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (G.H.F.). There once were 400 aid distribution points in Gaza, but today, with G.H.F. taking over operations, there are only four, all of which, as Hary explained, are “operating south of what’s called Wadi Gaza, the line dividing central and southern Gaza from northern Gaza.” The G.H.F.’s purpose, then, is to lure people out of northern Gaza with promises of food and to concentrate them in the south. It is a tool of ethnic cleansing.

“The idea is that people need to physically go to these centers to pick up a parcel of food,” Hary said. “The centers are manned by American contractors of the G.H.F.—civilian personnel, and also security personnel. The I.D.F. is in a circle around these sites. What we’ve seen since they began operating is that the I.D.F., and perhaps also some of the security contractors, are firing on the people trying to access the food, based on various accusations of people approaching the soldiers or deviating from the designated routes, things like that.”

Hundreds of people have been slaughtered seeking food at a G.H.F. site, and chaos reigns. “The directions and instructions that people are getting for accessing the sites are completely a mess,” said Hary. “There are announcements made on social media, sometimes minutes before the sites open, sometimes minutes or hours after the sites close. They are usually open for just a number of minutes at a time. They’re sometimes opened in the middle of the night, so there’s a lot of confusion about the operating hours of the site. So people are going to approach at odd hours. They’re not going to know exactly when they open, but they’re going to line up. And, as the situation has become more and more desperate, and people become hungrier and hungrier, they’re willing to take risks that they normally wouldn’t to access food for their families. We’ve seen sometimes tens of thousands of people approaching a site, and they don’t have enough parcels for everyone. So [the situation can become] very, very violent, very undignified, and people are being killed.”

This violent chaos is catching on elsewhere in Gaza, too. “A phenomenon that has also started developing,” said Hary, “is that the I.D.F. is firing on people approaching aid convoys—so not just at G.H.F. sites. Actually, the number of people who’ve been killed approaching aid convoys has now exceeded the number of people killed at G.H.F. sites. It’s a phenomenon that has spread to these other locations.”

Aid has been airdropped into Gaza, but these drops have been labelled a “grotesque distraction” by aid agencies, who point out that they do not provide anywhere near enough supplies and are, in fact, very dangerous, having crushed people to death already—including a 15-year-old boy. What is needed is not more airdrops, but fundamentally an end to the siege. “From our perspective,” said Hary, “the only way, really, to scale up delivery [of aid] would be through a ceasefire. Short of that, our demand is that Israel allow aid to be served into the Strip, that they allow it to reach people wherever they are—so not conditioning it on people going south or being in a certain area. That they lift the restrictions on the organizations that can operate, including UNRWA. UNRWA still has the biggest infrastructure for aid delivery inside of Gaza, and they need to be allowed to fully operate.”

An Old Story

Gaza’s starvation is today at its most appalling extent, but the broad dynamics in play are not new. Israel has controlled the levels of food entering Gaza for a long time, but the idea before October 7 was to, in the words of one senior adviser to the former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, “put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” The difference today is that they’re happy for them to die.

“In 2007, after Hamas came to power in the Strip, Israel declared what it called economic warfare on the Gaza Strip,” Hary, whose organization Gisha helped to reveal the extent of Israel’s monitoring of Gaza’s food supply, explained. “There was a conscious choice to limit what could enter the Strip as a means of pressure and punishment. Gisha was noticing that [Israeli] officials were making comments like, ‘We’ll put them on a diet, but we won’t starve them. We’re letting in the minimum that’s needed.’ We asked for information about what that means, how did they know what the minimum was, how it was measured, what their methodology was for assessing what people needed. The state was very hesitant to give us this information.”

After several years of legal wrangling, an Israeli court in 2012 ordered the state to release its records. “There were two sets of documents,” said Hary. “One is referred to as the ‘red lines’ document, and there’s another. One of them looks at inventory of goods in the Strip. The other one does a demographic assessment of need—how many calories are required by residents of the Strip? The state did claim that these documents were drafts and that they were never actually used, and that, in fact, more [food] was allowed in than what was in the documents. But according to our assessment, the opposite is true. There were actually periods of time when much less was allowed in.”

Israel’s calculations stated that, in order to provide Gazans with enough food to survive, 106 lorryloads of supplies would need to enter Gaza every day. According to Gisha, the daily average that actually entered was 67. Israel, in other words, worked out how much food was needed to keep people from going hungry, and it gave them less than that anyway. “This economic warfare policy took a lot of forms, [including] limiting input for industry—the agricultural sector, the food manufacturing sector,” Hary added. “They were, during 2007 to 2010, allowing in products but not allowing in raw materials so that these sectors could operate. They were allowing in animal feed, but again, controlling the amounts that were going in. All kinds of inputs for food manufacturing weren’t going in.”

They also controlled what could be exported. “Gaza always was marketing a few trademark products,” said Hary. “They are famous for their strawberries, for cherry tomatoes, peppers. These were products that were sold on the Israeli and West Bank market in the past. But in 2007, when Hamas came to power, the borders were completely closed and these products were barred from exiting. So that also had an impact on the economy writ large, and also on—it’s sort of overlooked—but also on development. It was like Gaza was frozen and left behind by certain agricultural advances.”

The Propaganda Machine

It is important to be aware that Israel had controlled Gaza’s food levels for years before the genocide began, but, clearly, the situation has drastically deteriorated over the last two years. Gaza is in such a mess that discerning the true death toll from the famine at this stage is an impossible task, but, for anyone who has seen the photos, starvation is undeniable—though plenty of pro-Israel voices are still liable to try it. But, while the famine has captured the attention of news outlets and publics around the world, the same, bleakly, cannot necessarily be said for many people in Israel itself. “It’s hard for people outside [of Israel] to imagine it,” said Hary, who is based in the country, “but people really did not see. They were not exposed to what was happening. That’s a choice to a certain extent, because everyone has social media. Everyone can log into foreign media if they want to, but the Israeli mainstream media really was not showing what was happening. That has started to change.” But even as awareness of the famine grows, the “Israeli propaganda machine,” as Hary terms it, has “kicked into overtime.”

“They are,” she said, “working very hard to put out information and lies: ‘There was always enough aid. Hamas was diverting it. It’s not our fault. We’ve been supplying enough. There were enough calories in Gaza.’” Lies like that often work as intended, but, perhaps even more bleakly, some people simply don’t care about the truth. “I would say a large majority of the population is totally desensitized,” said Hary. “They don’t care what’s happening in Gaza. But even the ones who do [are still listening to] the talking points of the Israeli government: that whatever is happening there, whatever you might be seeing, is not our fault… So there’s a narrow section of people who know what’s happening. Unfortunately, it’s a very, very small minority.”

Starvation, as Israel understands well, is an effective, brutal weapon of war. Like its campaign of perpetual airstrikes, Israel is wielding famine as a means to cleanse Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants. It is happening before the eyes of the world, and while so many ordinary people are horrified, the political classes refuse to stop it. Famine has been induced on purpose, and there are no repercussions for the people who did it nor those who supported them. The decision has been made to allow Gazans to starve to death.

 
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