As Israel’s war on Gaza approaches its one-year mark, one of its most devastating and underreported aspects is Israel’s deliberate starvation campaign that is killing more Palestinians than bombs, according to a recent UN report.

“We’ve never seen a civilian population go so hungry and pushed to malnutrition so quickly in modern history,” said United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri, the author of the report.

The 24-page report, “Starvation and the Right to Food, with an Emphasis on the Palestinian People’s Food Sovereignty,” which will be discussed at the UN General Assembly next month, states that by December 2023, only two months into the war, Palestinians in Gaza made up 80 per cent of people in the world experiencing famine or catastrophic hunger.

In June, UN food security experts declared that 96 per cent of Gaza’s population – some 2.15 million people – face acute food insecurity at “crisis” level or higher, where more than one in five households “go entire days without eating”. By July, this assessment had escalated to the actual arrival of famine across the enclave.

“Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza,” ten independent UN experts including Fakhri said in a statement, warning states and other actors of waiting to act until there is an official “declaration” of famine.

Since the Hamas operation in Israel on 7 October, the Israeli Occupation Forces have imposed a complete land, sea, and air blockade on Gaza, and all Palestinian fishermen have been denied access to the sea.

Israel made its intentions to starve everyone in Gaza explicit, implemented its plans, and predictably created a famine throughout the Strip, confirmed by tracking the geography of Israel’s starvation tactics alongside Israeli officials’ statements, the report said.

“Israel opened with a total siege that weakened all Palestinians in Gaza then used starvation to induce forcible transfer, harm and inflict death against people in the north, pushing people into the south, only to starve, bombard and kill people in newly created refugee camps in the south.”

Before October 2023, the Gaza fishing community was made up of 4,500 regular workers, approximately 1,500 seasonal workers, 1,050 motor boats and 900 rowing boats, and it had five marinas, Rafah, Khan Younis, Deir Al-Balah, Gaza City, and North Gaza, to dock fishing boats.

The war rapidly destroyed 75 per cent of the fishing sector.

This destruction is yet another way that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians, food security experts warn. But this did not start recently, as the report explains.

Israel has been increasingly restricting the flow of people and goods into Gaza since 1991 as part of its occupation strategy. In 2007, Israel imposed a more permanent and acute blockade on Gaza, closing all sea and air routes and severely restricting the movement of people and goods by land.

Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestinians were supposed to be able to fish within 20 nautical miles from the shore. Through the blockade, Israel limited fishermen to about six nautical miles from the shore, where fishing is not easy due to shallow waters with sandy and rocky floors.

They were also regularly shot at and arrested by Israeli forces simply for fishing in Palestinian territorial waters.

Because of these difficulties, the fishermen were pushed into poverty, making only around 500 shekels (about $133) a month. Before the blockade, they could live a middle-class life making approximately 1,400 shekels ($373) a month.

Now, with no fishing allowed at all, they starve.

“The life of fishermen says a lot about a place,” Fakhri said. “In Gaza, it is telling us that the starvation of the Palestinian people isn’t a sudden and unpredictable consequence of the latest aggressions by the occupation forces, but a gradual and deliberate strategy that was set in motion many years ago.”

Israel imposed a full blockade on Gaza in 2007 and before that a military siege in 2005. The Israeli Ministry of Health measured incoming calories to ensure that people in Gaza stayed hungry enough not to trigger a humanitarian crisis.

It’s not just about restricting goods and humanitarian aid, as Israel has been destroying the Palestinian food system for over 70 years, destroying orchards and farms, harassing and killing peasants, fishermen and shepherds.

In Gaza, malnutrition, famine, and disease are killing more people than bombs and bullets. “This personal and social trauma is going to be carried by Palestinians for several generations in the future,” said Fakhri.

Israel’s driving strategy behind these policies is intrinsically connected to its land grab policy, he argued. As such, starvation is often used as a technique of displacement, dispossession, and occupation, the report said.

In 2023, Israel seized more Palestinian land than in any given year in the past 30 years. “Israel wants to erase the Palestinians from their homeland and territory and deny them their right to return to Palestine,” Fakhri added. “Only an immediate ceasefire can begin to address the famine in Gaza.”

“All countries have a duty to end the starvation and genocide. Countries and corporations supplying Israel with money and weapons are complicit,” Fakhri said. “Other countries should impose economic, political, and cultural sanctions, and institutions should divest” from Israel.

Any discussion about a one-state or two-state political configuration must prioritise two things he argued: the Palestinian people’s right to return to Palestine and the full realisation of their human rights and dignity.

This past year Israeli settlers and armed forces have inflicted record rates of violence against farmers and pastoralists in the Occupied West Bank. As a result, the farmers were not able to harvest their olives, which are an important source of food and livelihoods.   

“Just as small-scale fishing is an integral part of a life of harmony with the sea and not only a means to find food, foraging for wild zaatar [herbs] is not just a culinary choice but a practice that retains an inherent connection to the land,” he said.

“Food sovereignty means that the Palestinian people, as a people, have a right to their lands, territories, and resources to compensate for a long history of illegal and unjust dispossession,” Fakhri said.

“The power of food sovereignty does not derive from the political form of a state or a national authority. It arises from people’s long-standing relationship with the land, with the rivers and the sea, and their capacity to feed their own communities, in opposition to the prevailing, yet cracking, international system in place today.”

* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly