The international system that monitors acute food crises has declared a famine in Gaza City, marking the first official famine to be declared in the Middle East since the global classification system was established.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) on 22 August confirmed that Gaza City has crossed the technical thresholds for famine, with starvation, malnutrition, and mortality rates meeting or surpassing critical levels.
According to its report, more than 514,000 people, roughly one in four of Gaza’s remaining population, are experiencing famine conditions. Projections indicate that the number could climb to 641,000 by late September, with famine spreading southwards into Deir Al-Balah and Khan Younis.
At a press briefing on Friday, UN Humanitarian Chief Tom Fletcher laid bare the depth of the disaster. “Please read the IPC report cover to cover. Read it in sorrow and in anger,” he said. “Be in no doubt that this is irrefutable testimony. It is a famine – the Gaza famine.”
The declaration has intensified scrutiny of Israel’s restrictions on aid access to Gaza and its broader conduct in the nearly two-year conflict.
Since the war erupted in October 2023, Israel has imposed a near-total blockade on Gaza, cutting off the entry of food, water, fuel, and medicine. While the Rafah Crossing with Egypt briefly reopened on 21 October 2023 for limited humanitarian convoys, deliveries were slowed by stringent Israeli inspections.
The Kerem Shalom Crossing, the only one where Israel allows commercial goods and humanitarian aid into Gaza, was reopened on 17 December 2023 under Israeli control, with Israel pledging to allow 100 trucks a day into the Strip. But the flow has remained well below Gaza’s pre-war daily needs of 500 to 600 trucks.
Even when aid trucks have been cleared, their passage has frequently been disrupted. Israeli demonstrators have repeatedly blocked convoys, accusing the Israeli government of “feeding Hamas,” while in November 2024 a convoy was looted near Kerem Shalom after an armed attack.
These interruptions have left UN agencies describing the supply line as unreliable and inadequate.
Every ceasefire agreement or draft since late 2023 has contained clauses on opening the crossings and allowing humanitarian access to Gaza. In November 2023, a temporary truce brokered by Qatar, Egypt, and the US committed to authorising 200 trucks a day to enter Gaza. But the pause began a day late, and only a fraction of the aid reached northern Gaza.
The January 2025 ceasefire deal promised 600 trucks per day, with specific guarantees on tents, fuel, and shelter. The UN confirmed that 550 trucks entered on the first day of the truce, split between Rafah and Kerem Shalom and marking one of the largest shipments since the war began.
Yet, by March 2025, Israel had halted the deliveries again, prompting senior UN officials to accuse it of violating the terms of the truce.
“No food, medicine, water or tents have entered Gaza for more than ten weeks,” one senior UN humanitarian official told the Security Council in May. “This is not a lapse in logistics – it is a deliberate obstruction.”
International law prohibits the use of starvation as a tactic in war. The Fourth Geneva Convention and its Additional Protocols explicitly ban using hunger against civilians and criminalise the destruction of food supplies or the blocking of humanitarian aid.
In March 2024, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk warned that Israel’s blockade of Gaza “may amount to a war crime” under these provisions. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) echoed those concerns in provisional measures ordered in the South Africa vs Israel case, noting that denying food and aid risked “serious bodily and mental harm” to the population of Gaza.
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Among the charges were “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” a first in the court’s history.
At hospitals in Gaza, doctors describe children arriving with arms no thicker than their mothers’ fingers. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has reported that by August 2025 nearly 12,000 children under five were acutely malnourished, the highest figure ever recorded in the territory.
In the first 20 days of August alone, 133 people, including 25 children, died of hunger-related causes, according to health authorities verified by the UN.
The shortages also extend beyond food. Therapeutic milk and nutrient supplements for children are critically scarce. Aid workers in Khan Younis say that they have resorted to crushing animal feed and bird seed into emergency porridge.
Photographs of skeletal infants shared by UN agencies and aid groups have sparked international outrage. UN Secretary General António Guterres called the blocked convoys into Gaza “a moral outrage” and urged the convoys to “flood Gaza with life-saving aid.”
The declaration of famine in Gaza has reverberated internationally. In Western capitals, governments have faced growing public pressure to condition military support for Israel on unimpeded humanitarian access.
Protests against the conditions in Gaza have drawn comparisons between Gaza and previous man-made famines in Ethiopia in the 1980s, Sudan in the early 2000s, and most recently Yemen, where blockade tactics also contributed to mass starvation.
Historians have also drawn parallels to the systematic use of starvation during World War II. Under the Nazi occupation in Europe, food deprivation was employed as a deliberate policy against civilian populations, most infamously in the siege of Leningrad in the then USSR and across occupied Poland, where rations for Jewish communities were cut to starvation levels.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, official allocations were as low as 184 calories per person per day, leading to tens of thousands of deaths from hunger and disease. The Nuremberg Trials later classified these practices as war crimes, helping to shape the post-war consensus that the use of starvation against civilians is prohibited under international law.
Analysts note that while famine has appeared in war zones before, the Gaza case is unique in being the first formally declared famine in the Middle East. The scale of the visibility is also unprecedented: widespread images and videos have circulated in real time through social media, making the crisis far harder for governments to downplay or obscure.
Experts say images of hunger have a singular impact on those viewing them. Unlike battlefield deaths, starvation is slow, visible, and disproportionately affects children. “The sight of malnourished infants cuts through politics,” said one humanitarian analyst. “It becomes impossible to claim civilians are not being targeted when the evidence is etched on children’s bodies.”
Rights groups have echoed this sentiment, warning that hunger operates as both a weapon and a message. By withholding food, a belligerent power signals that survival itself is contingent on submission. This is precisely why international humanitarian law has long outlawed it.
Despite repeated calls, the Kerem Shalom and Rafah Crossings are still only partially open. As of late August, aid flows have not approached the pre-war average, and agencies warn of worsening shortages as autumn approaches. The IPC has cautioned that without sustained, unhindered aid, famine could engulf all of Gaza within weeks.
For families in Gaza, the debate is not about law but about survival. Parents scour empty markets for flour; hospitals ration their last therapeutic feeds; and displaced people burn rubbish to cook scraps of bread.
Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip long precedes its genocide. Since imposing its blockade on Gaza in 2007, Israel has tightly controlled the flow of goods into the Strip, including of food.
Documents released in 2012 under an Israeli Supreme Court order revealed that the Israeli authorities had calculated the minimum daily caloric intake for Palestinians in Gaza and used those figures to restrict the imports of staples.
The Israeli Ministry of Defence was forced to release documents showing that Israeli officials had calculated a daily minimum of 2,279 calories per person in Gaza to guide restrictions on food imports.
Human rights groups have described the policy as an attempt to keep the population “on the brink of humanitarian crisis” without tipping into outright starvation, a precursor, analysts say, to the current crisis in which food deprivation has become far more acute.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 28 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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