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alex de waal
Report Details Israel's 'Architecture of Genocidal Starvation' in Gaza
The new report comes as the world's top authority on hunger crises officially declared a full-blown famine in the Palestinian territory.
Aug 22, 2025
As the world's leading authority on hunger crises officially declared a catastrophic famine in Gaza, a report published Friday details how Israel has dismantled the time-tested civilian aid distribution model and replaced it with a military-based system in which many Palestinians are not only dying from starvation but are also being killed while trying to obtain food.
Forensic Architecture (FA)—a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London—and World Peace Foundation (WPF), a philanthropic organization affiliated with the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts—published The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation in Gaza, March-August 2025, "revealing how... Israel has dismantled the proven and internationally-backed 'civilian model' of aid distribution, replacing it with a 'military model' which furthers Israel's military and political objectives in Gaza while starving the region's civilian population."
"Aid can be lethal when used in a manipulative way," an introduction to the report states. "We have unpacked the architecture of starvation imposed by Israel in Gaza. It is composed of acts of construction and destruction: the destruction of Palestinian agriculture and food sovereignty, the destruction of Palestinian civil society, and the construction of death traps."
A report by @forensicarchi.bsky.social & WPF examines two models for aid in #Gaza, showing how Israel has dismantled the internationally-backed ‘civilian model’, replacing it with a ‘military model’ which furthers Israel’s objectives while starving civilians.Read more here: shorturl.at/DYpkA
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— World Peace Foundation (@worldpeacefdtn.bsky.social) August 22, 2025 at 5:07 AM
The report opens by noting a March 2024 provisional order by the International Court of Justice in The Hague—a product of the tribunal's ongoing genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa—directing the Israeli government to allow desperately needed humanitarian aid into Gaza. Israel ignored the order and ramped up its forced starvation of Gaza.
"In Gaza, under the Israeli system of aid distribution, intentional mass starvation is happening on two levels, the biological starvation of individuals through the provision of starvation rations, or no rations at all," the report's authors wrote, as well as "the destruction of the group as a whole, through collective dehumanization, separating the population from its land, and the disintegration of a functioning Palestinian society in Gaza."
According to the report, Israel has dismantled the "civilian model" of aid distribution by:
- Attacking essential aid infrastructure like warehouses, distribution points, kitchens, and bakeries;
- Restricting the supply of aid into Gaza by international humanitarian organizations; and
- Creating the conditions for aid diversion, including attacking groups tasked with securing aid routes, and failing to intervene in the diversion of aid in areas controlled by the Israeli military.
The report says Israel has implemented a "dangerous and deadly" system in which there are only four ration stations run by the US-based Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), "all located in military zones."
Described by many as "death traps," GHF's aid points have been the sites of regular Israeli massacres of desperate Palestinian aid-seekers. Thousands of Palestinians have been killed or wounded while trying to obtain aid in Gaza, including more than 850 people slain at or near GHF centers. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) whistleblowers have said they were ordered to fire live bullets and artillery shells into crowds of desperate aid-seekers, even when they posed no security threat—accounts corroborated by a former US special forces colonel who resigned from GHF.
The new report found at least 64 incidents of Palestinian civilians "being attacked by the Israeli military while seeking aid, including 25 incidents at and around GHF ration stations," as well as dozens of attacks on aid infrastructure, humanitarian workers, and police.
Gaza's Government Media Office said earlier this year that more than 1,500 humanitarian workers were killed in Gaza since October 2023, including medical and civil defense personnel. The United Nations humanitarian affairs office said this week that 181 aid workers were killed while working in Gaza last year—accounting for nearly half of all such fatalities worldwide. Israel has baselessly accused many of these slain aid workers—especially employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)—of being members of Hamas or other militant groups.
The new report also notes that "airdropped aid landed in active combat zones, or in densely populated areas, where airdrops have killed people, and destroyed shelters." Palestinians have also drowned while trying to reach aid airdropped into the Mediterranean Sea, which the IDF has prohibited Gazans from entering under penalty of death.
Furthermore, the report's authors found that Palestinians must walk an average of more than three-and-a-half miles to the nearest GHF aid point, with such centers being open for an average of just 10 minutes at a time between June 19 and July 4.
The publication also highlights the 58 evacuation orders to which Gazans have been subjected. Critics have called "evacuation" a euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Israeli operations, including Gideon's Chariots and the newly launched Gideon's Chariots 2, are aimed at conquering Gaza and ethnically cleansing its residents to locations including a proposed concentration camp that would be built over the ruins of the southern city of Rafah.
The report concludes that Israel is "instrumentalizing aid" in order to:
- Enforce displacement and reconcentration;
- Make reaching aid deadly and dangerous;
- Undermine civil order, dismantle the social fabric of Palestinian society, and dehumanize Palestinians; and
- Permit and enable the diversion of aid.
"The dehumanization of Palestinians, the stripping of basic dignity, and the tearing apart of the fabric of the community are not accidental byproducts of the mass starvation inflicted on the people of Gaza," the report's authors assert. "There is every reason to believe that these are what Israel intends through its militarized ration system."
The report's publication adds to the body of research on Israel's weaponized starvation—one of the alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Earlier this week, Amnesty International—one of a growing number of human rights defenders around the world accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza—said the country's government is "carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation in the occupied Gaza Strip, systematically destroying the health, well-being, and social fabric of Palestinian life."
Last month, WPF executive director Alex de Waal, a leading global authority on famine, asserted that "there is no case since World War II of starvation that is being so minutely designed and controlled" as Israel is doing in Gaza.
"This is preventable starvation. It is entirely man-made," de Waal added. "And every stage of this has been predicted, and at every stage action could have been taken—by Israel, by the international authorities, [the] international community, those who back Israel—to prevent what is happening now... Those steps have simply not been taken."
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Famine Expert: Israel's Starvation of Gaza Most 'Minutely Designed and Controlled' Since WWII
"This is preventable starvation," said Alex de Waal. "It is entirely man-made."
Jul 22, 2025
A leading global authority on famine on Monday accused Israel of orchestrating a carefully planned campaign of mass starvation in the Gaza Strip, remarks that came amid a steadily rising death toll from malnutrition caused by the 654-day U.S.-backed Israeli siege and obliteration of the Palestinian enclave.
"I've been working on this topic for more than four decades, and there is no case since World War II of starvation that is being so minutely designed and controlled," Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, told Al Jazeera.
"This is preventable starvation. It is entirely man-made," de Waal added. "And every stage of this has been predicted, and at every stage action could have been taken—by Israel, by the international authorities, [the] international community, those who back Israel—to prevent what is happening now... Those steps have simply not been taken."
The Gaza Health Ministry—whose casualty figures have been deemed accurate by Israeli military officials and a likely undercount by multiple peer-reviewed studies—said Tuesday that 15 more Palestinians, including four children, died from malnutrition over the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of starvation deaths in the coastal enclave to at least 101, including 80 children, since October 2023. The ministry said that 21 Gaza children have starved to death over the past three days alone.
When combined with lack of medicine, malnutrition has claimed hundreds of Palestinian lives in Gaza, according to officials there.
"I am so hungry," Ruwaida Amer, a 30-year-old Gaza woman, wrote for +972 Magazine Monday. "We are starving. My body is breaking down. My mother is collapsing from exhaustion. My cousin cheats death every day for a morsel of aid. Gaza's children are dying in front of our eyes, and we are powerless to help them."
Another Gaza woman, Amina Badir, told Amer while clutching her starving 3-year-old: "Tell me how to save my daughter Rahaf from death. For a week she's eaten nothing but a single spoon of lentils each day."
"She's suffering from malnutrition. There's no treatment, no milk at the hospital," Badir added. "They've taken away her right to live. I see death in her eyes."
Gaza medical officials say 17,000 children are severely malnourished in the strip. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, also known as the IPC scale, at least 244,000 people in Gaza are in Phase 5, defined as such "an extreme deprivation of food" that "starvation, death, destitution, and extremely critical levels of acute malnutrition are or will likely be evident."
The "complete siege" imposed on Gaza immediately following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel has fueled widespread starvation and disease, and has been condemned as a war crime. The International Criminal Court last year ordered the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged murder and forced starvation of Gazans. The International Court of Justice is also weighing a genocide case filed against Israel by South Africa.
Amid intense international pressure, Israel partially lifted its siege of Gaza in May. However, de Waal and others say the move is wholly inadequate to prevent the famine taking hold in the strip.
"The partial lifting was not to bring in the kind of humanitarian program that we have been familiar with as humanitarians over the decades," de Waal told Al Jazeera Monday. "It was to bring in a type of rationed program that is simply an arm of the Israeli military."
Israel has also come under intense criticism for its method of delivering aid in Gaza via the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whose distribution points have been the sites of near-daily massacres. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officers and troops say they were ordered to shoot and shell desperate aid-seekers at GHF distribution centers. Officials said at least 10 aid-seekers were killed on Tuesday alone.
"The killing of civilians seeking aid in Gaza is indefensible."
"As of July 21, we have recorded 1,054 people killed in Gaza while trying to get food; 766 of them were killed in the vicinity of GHF sites and 288 near [United Nations] and other humanitarian organizations' aid convoys," U.N. human rights spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan told Agence France-Presse.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said Tuesday that "the killing of civilians seeking aid in Gaza is indefensible," adding that the "IDF must stop killing people at distribution points."
Overall, at least 59,029 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces in Gaza since October 2023, most of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. More than 142,000 others have been wounded, and at least 14,000 more are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed buildings.Other international humanitarian experts also weighed in on the growing Gaza famine, with Michael Fakhri, the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, telling Al Jazeera Monday that the "man-made" starvation in the strip "is a war crime."
"Israel has been using aid as a way to bait civilians and has been killing civilians who have been seeking aid," he said. "What we're seeing now is the most horrific stage of Israel's 20-month starvation campaign."
"What we're seeing now is the most horrific stage of Israels starvation campaign... Israel has been using aid as a way to bait civilians & has been killing civilians who have been seeking aid..."Michael Fakhri, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food
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— Saul Staniforth (@saulstaniforth.bsky.social) July 21, 2025 at 11:10 PM
Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, told Reuters Tuesday that "our last tent, our last food parcel, our last relief items have been distributed. There is nothing left."
"Hundreds of truckloads have been sitting in warehouses or in Egypt or elsewhere, and costing our Western European donors a lot of money, but they are blocked from coming in," he explained. "That's why we are so angry. Because our job is to help."
"Israel is not yielding," Egeland added. "They just want to paralyze our work."
This article has been corrected to state that 244,000 Palestinians in Gaza were in Phase 5 of starvation in May 2025. A previous version incorrectly stated that 85% of the population was in Phase 5.
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