What Stage 5 Hunger Looks Like in Gaza

In a scene that can only be described as apocalyptic, a single aid truck breaks through a throng of starved and thirsty people in Gaza. “This is a farce,” a Palestinian man originally from Deir al Balah tells Splinter. “They want you to believe the famine has ended, but how can you see a single truck enter Gaza and believe this is sufficient to feed over 2 million people?” Gaza has now entered stage 5 of Israel’s campaign of starvation, the highest level on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), one which signifies widespread starvation, extreme lack of food, and psychological collapse among large segments of the population.

Currently, at least 20-25 percent of Gaza’s residents (an estimated 470,000–495,000 people) are in this catastrophic zone. UNICEF, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other agencies warn that nearly 100,000 women and children suffer from severe acute malnutrition, with thousands more at risk. At least 122 people, most of them children, have already died directly due to Israel’s siege of Gaza—dying of hunger while aid trucks sit idle at the border, and as Israeli settlers not only destroy bare necessities destined for Palestinians, but also hold barbecues not far from Gaza’s thirsty, hungry, and malnourished native population. Compounding this devastation is the acute food insecurity impacting 96 percent of Gaza’s population, with many enduring days without food, muscle wasting, extreme dehydration, and a collapse in basic resistance to infection and disease. 

In one harrowing case emphasizing the barbarity of Israel’s siege, a 5-month-old Palestinian child—Zainab Abu Haleeb—died weighing just 4.4 lbs (2 kilograms), less than she weighed when she was born. The standard, average weight for a 5 month old female is 15.2 lbs (6.9 kilograms). What is transpiring in Gaza is not a humanitarian crisis in the abstract, but a deliberate instrument of war that has been wielded by a settler-colonial regime which has always required the erasure of the land’s native population. Starvation in Gaza is not a simple by-product of war; it is Israel’s strategy, refined over decades and now being witnessed in real time.

In a video posted by Israeli political activist Hadar Muchtar, she echoes the genocidal sentiment of a majority of Israelis: “If the people of Gaza want food, they should bring the hostages back.” In a radio interview from January, Amichay Eliyahu, Israel’s minister of heritage, emphasized the calculated violence imposed on Gaza, stating in part that “[Israel] needs to find what hurts [the Palestinians], what will vanquish them and break their spirits […] they will not live.” Despite Israeli hasbara designed to create the image of an entity providing a besieged people with aid, a report citing Israeli military sources reveals that occupation forces destroyed vast stockpiles of food, and medicine destined for Gaza. At least 1,000 aid trucks were targeted, destroyed and then buried.

Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon is neither accidental or new. As early as 2006, senior Israeli officials were openly discussing putting Gaza “on a diet” in order to intentionally produce suffering. The Israeli human rights group Gisha uncovered internal government documents detailing how Israel was calculating the exact caloric minimum required to keep Gaza’s population on the edge of survival while simultaneously restricting the flow of goods and aid. This policy of economic warfare continues today in its most grotesque form: the full blockade of food, water, medicine, and fuel from entering a densely populated strip where over 2 million people are trapped under relentless Israeli bombardment.

Today, with Gaza in IPC Phase 5, WHO is warning that famine is “imminent,” while the UN has contended that Gaza is facing conditions not seen since the Second World War. Israel’s control over border crossings and the entity’s continued attacks on aid convoys and even humanitarian vessels—including most recently the Handala ship—have created a man-made famine. 

Even when aid trucks are approved, they are often bombed by Israeli drones or stopped by settlers, who act with full state protection. In this genocidal framework, starvation is not simply incidental, but a calculated part of Israel’s longstanding policy of driving the people of Gaza out of their land and destroying the lives of future generations of Palestinians. Mark Brauner, an American emergency physician who volunteered in Gaza in June, recently told the Huffington Post that many Palestinian children have “already passed the point of no return, where their physiology has eroded to the point where even refeeding could potentially cause death itself. The gut lining has started to auto-digest and it will no longer have adequate absorptive capacity for water or for nutrition. Death is unfortunately imminent for probably thousands of children.” 

As parents are forced to endure the sight of their children wasting away to skin and bone, children begging their parents for food, or sifting through blood-soaked flour, the psychological toll of Israel’s starvation campaign is no less catastrophic. Mental health workers in Gaza describe widespread signs of trauma, disassociation, and collapse, especially among caregivers who can no longer protect or feed their families. Starvation is a cruel and silent killer, and it is being used in Gaza with intent.

The United States, far from being a distant observer, is Israel’s primary enabler. As of July 2025, the United States continues to supply Israel with armaments, diplomatic cover, and direct funding to a regime implementing policies that violated the Geneva Convention and every core tenant of international humanitarian law. American lawmakers talk of “humanitarian pauses” and so-called “aid corridors,” while voting repeatedly to continue arming Israel’s Iron Dome, or voting against UN resolutions trying to restrict Israel’s genocidal campaign. In the words of Fanon, they are accomplices in this crime and the sworn enemies of life itself.