Toddlers so thin they look otherworldly as they starve to death. Mothers too hungry to breastfeed them back to life. The injured from bombing too malnourished to heal. The medics, hooked up to drips themselves, too famished to even treat the hungry.
This is Gaza, where a kilo of sugar costs $120 (£90). Where civilians describe being shot and bombed by the Israeli military when they tried to get supplies from aid convoys.
Where one father-of-four told me he ended up under a mound of bodies – some alive, some injured, some dead – when he went to get a single bag of flour from a World Food Programme truck two weekends ago. Flour that he had to abandon in the deadly scrum.
It is unthinkable that in 2025, people – babies born after this nightmare even began – are dying from a famine made by an apparent ally. Nearly 150 people, including 88 babies, have died from malnutrition, according to the Palestinian health ministry. And that number will go up unless there is proper intervention now.
The solution is simple: we need a ceasefire, and for Israel to allow unfettered access of aid to the entire Gaza Strip. Anything less than that will not stop more people from dying.
A real solution is not sporadic air drops (which experts say are dangerous, inefficient and expensive).
It is not temporary humanitarian corridors.
It is not “tactical pauses”.
It is not nebulous “militarised” aid schemes.
It is not corralling civilians into blasted corners of this hell and rewarding them with a bag of pasta.
To treat a famine of this intensity, it needs a multidimensional humanitarian response on a massive scale. It needs specialised therapeutic food, medical intervention, it needs sustained access to supplies. Eventually, it will need Gaza’s agricultural sector, destroyed by Israel, to be rebuilt.
And it will need those responsible for this to be held to account, so it does not happen again.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, echoing his own military bodies, proclaimed on Sunday that there is “no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza”, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
This is despite ferocious criticism from world leaders, including his closest allies like Donald Trump and Sir Keir Starmer, who are both supplying him with the weapons that allow him to do what his army is doing. Trump even said on Monday that it was “real starvation” in Gaza, adding, “you can’t fake that”.
It also contradicts what his own ministers have, at different points, admitted is the policy.
On day two of this war, the then-defence minister Yoav Gallant spelt it out.
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed,” he said, an action which was cited in the International Criminal Court arrest warrant issued last November. “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly,” he added.
Last August, extreme-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich bemoaned that, “No one in the world will allow us to starve 2 million people, even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages.”
Just this week, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir called the recent air drops of food into Gaza “a shame and disgrace.”
“I support starving Hamas in Gaza,” he added on X, an action that impossible to do without also starving the 2.3 million population and of course the remaining living hostages. The largest group representing the families of the hostages are in the streets begging for a ceasefire, so worried are they that their loved ones are also suffering these conditions.
Israel has controlled what goes in and out of Gaza for a long time. As the occupying power it has an obligation to ensure that the civilian population gets food and medical supplies.
It has maintained a substantial and unlawful blockade on Gaza since 2007 military take over by Hamas, according to respected rights groups and legal scholars. This is in part why well before this war erupted, medical officials have repeatedly told me Gaza was already lacking half the essential drugs list.
Since Hamas’s 7 October 2023 bloody attack on southern Israel – during which Israel says militants killed over 1200 people and took 250 captive – Israel has tightened that noose straggling the 2. 3 million-strong population.
Respected groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have concluded that Israel is using hunger as a weapon of war, which is war crime.
Amnesty added in its report that their evidence shows Israel’s continued use of starvation is “part of its ongoing genocide”.
Today two respected Israeli rights groups Physicians for Human Rights – Israel and B’tselem released reports with legal-medical analysis accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, pointing to the decimated of the healthcare system and the strangling of aid.
The Israeli government vehemently denies this or that that Israel has commit any crimes in Gaza. It has rejected claims it has created famine or that there is even a hunger crisis at all.
It maintains it allows aid into the Strip and blames any restrictions on Hamas for allegedly systematically stealing aid (although recent leaks have contradicted that). Netanyahu today accused the United Nations of lying.
But the overwhelming body of evidence and testimony points to different reality.
One that for the sake of humanity must change now.
