Israel Is Starving Gaza

By Jen Kirby | May 7, 2025 | 11:08am

Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images

Palestine Gaza

Israel has blocked aid from reaching Gaza since March 2. It has cut off new supplies of food, fuel, and medicine to more than 2 million people for more than two months. Israel is starving Gaza as it continues to bombard it, attacking the remaining infrastructure left that people need to survive, and displacing more than 400,000 civilians since Israel broke the ceasefire in March.

Gavin Kelleher, humanitarian access manager in Gaza with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said on a press call with aid workers last week that “we are in a scenario where tens of thousands of people are going to die in Gaza if this siege is not lifted immediately.”

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“Let there not be any doubt that starvation is being used as a weapon of war,” he added.

The World Food Program said last week that it had delivered its last remaining stocks of food. Community kitchens that serve hot meals are shuttering because supplies are depleted. Most bakeries have shut down, too. Food is scarce in markets; what little is left is innutritious or unaffordable. Prices have risen more than 1,000 percent. A bag of flour costs about $350 dollars, said Ghada Alhaddad, Gaza media and communications officer for Oxfam International. Even if families can obtain rice or flour, dwindling fuel supplies make cooking difficult, with aid workers saying people are burning wood, books, and refuse.

The United Nations says about 10,000 cases of malnutrition were identified among children since the start of the year, with about 1,4000 of those being severe acute malnutrition. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, 57 people have starved to death amid the blockade. Amjad Shawa, Director of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network (PNGO) and the deputy of the General Commissioner of the Independent Commission of Human Rights (ICHR), said there is no medication, no supplementary materials to provide to malnourished children even if they go to the hospital.

Israel’s war has also prevented Palestinians from growing, farming or fishing for food. According to the United Nations, about 82 percent of Gaza’s croplands have been destroyed. Israel’s attacks have targeted agricultural and irrigation infrastructure, including wells. The United Nations estimates that 95 percent of Gaza’s cattle have died. About 72 percent of its fishing fleet has been wiped out. Palestinian fishermen have been targeted by the Israeli army, with 200 dying last year.

“Israel is not only preventing food from entering, but has also engineered a situation in which Palestinians cannot grow their own food, they cannot fish for their own food, and they continue to attack or deny access to the little left food stocks in Gaza,” Kelleher said.

Dr. Aqsa Durrani is pediatric ICU physician and board member with Médecins Sans Frontières who recently returned from an assignment in Gaza, where she was working at a trauma field hospital. She said the vast majority of patients they saw were injured in air strikes and shelling. She also saw many children come in for treatment for burns, sometimes as secondary injuries to air strikes, but also kids who had been scalded after getting jostled or bumped in crowded food distribution lines.

“That was another way that we saw this crisis manifest itself,” Durrani said.

Durrani said what help she and her colleagues provided was a drop in an ocean of need. They rationed medications and supplies because they had no other choice, with no replenishments entering Gaza and bombing destroying the available infrastructure and equipment.

“I have been searching for a word that captured the catastrophic humanitarian conditions we face, but none seem to be sufficient,” said Ghada Alhaddad of Oxfam. “The situation in Gaza is beyond description.”

This catastrophe is unfolding as hundreds and hundreds of trucks wait at crossings, ready to deliver loads of emergency food and supplies. Durrani said this was one of the most harrowing realizations. There were trucks an hour away that had food they needed to help treat patients.

“I had mothers coming to me and telling me, ‘we don’t have enough food,” Durrani said. “I have faced hunger, but this is the first time I faced it where we had the supplies and just could not give it to them, and it’s just a clear manifestation of collective punishment.”

Israel is exacting that collective punishment on Palestinian civilians in an apparent effort to pressure Hamas. And now, Israel seeks to further tighten its control over any possible aid distribution.

On Sunday, Israel’s Cabinet approved a measure that would let humanitarian assistance enter Gaza, but only under Israeli control, a move that the United Nations and humanitarian aid groups have said violates the “core principles” of neutral, impartial, and independent aid delivery.

According to reporting from The Washington Post, the proposal would allow some supplies into Gaza each day, but only about 60 trucks, about a tenth of the aid that flowed in during the ceasefire. It is likely far less than what is needed to avert the emergency on the ground.

As part of this plan, Israel will reportedly designate certain sites in southern Gaza as the distribution hubs, likely forcing the displacement of more people who have already been forcibly displaced by Israeli assaults multiple times. United States security contractors will reportedly provide security at the sites using facial recognition technology – and it’s probably not that hard to imagine what might go wrong if the for-hire army is now out doing humanitarian work. (The Israeli Prime Minister’s office did not return a request for comment on this aid plan, or its current blockade.)

“The design of the plan presented to us will mean large parts of Gaza, including the less mobile and most vulnerable people, will continue to go without supplies,” the United Nations and other international organizations working in Gaza said in a joint statement.

“It contravenes fundamental humanitarian principles and appears designed to reinforce control over life-sustaining items as a pressure tactic – as part of a military strategy,” the statement continued. “It is dangerous, driving civilians into militarized zones to collect rations, threatening lives, including those of humanitarian workers, while further entrenching forced displacement.”

Israel is putting these aid groups in an impossible situation, as these agencies are desperate to deliver food, fuel, and medicine into Gaza, but this plan would make these organizations complicit in Israel’s weaponization of aid – something that could have implications far beyond Gaza. Israel is also trying to coerce these groups into compliance by tightening rules on how international and domestic aid organizations can operate in Gaza. It is adding new restrictions, including forcing them to comply with rules such as including details about their Palestinian staff. Israel says this is to make sure Hamas doesn’t access humanitarian aid, but it would ultimately give Israel greater leeway to de-list international NGOs over political or ideological reasons.

“These rules appear designed to assert control over independent humanitarian, development and peacebuilding operations, silence advocacy grounded in international humanitarian and human rights law, and further entrench Israeli control and de facto annexation of the occupied Palestinian territory,” more than 50 international organizations wrote in a joint statement on the new rules.

Israel is also preparing to escalate its war, and by extension, the catastrophe in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that Israel would begin its “forceful entry“ into Gaza, after his Cabinet approved a plan to send in tens of thousands of additional soldiers to seize and occupy territory – though to what end, after 18 months of a brutal war which has failed to dismantle Hamas, or free the remaining Israeli hostages, remains troublingly unclear.

As Axios reported, Israel would seek to push Palestinians to one humanitarian zone, effectively displacing the entire population to one corner of Gaza, and razing what is left. Israel says it still wants a ceasefire deal, and apparently it thinks threatening a full-scale takeover of Gaza will help that. Hamas officials said this week that it sees talks as pointless if Israel continues its “hunger war.” Donald Trump also seems far less interested in solving this war.

All of that will prolong the horror in Gaza for Palestinian civilians. Speaking to people who are working on the ground in Gaza, or who just returned, it is hard to fully capture the scale of what is happening there. “Every day, you know, I think, ‘okay, it can’t get any worse, but every day it actually does get worse for children,’” said Rachel Cummings, the Gaza-based Humanitarian Director for Save the Children. People are trading diapers for lentils. The telecommunications network may blackout because of lack of fuel. 90 percent of people lack access to potable drinking water. There are no tents left to house displaced people. More than 50,000 Palestinians have died, and more will, from bombs and from hunger.

“We’ve been sounding the alarm for over a year and a half, but it’s continuing to get worse and worse and worse,” said Durrani.

“Gaza has just become a mass grave for Palestinians,” she added, “because there is nowhere to go.”