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michael fakhri
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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UN to Warn Half a Million Gazans Facing 'Catastrophic' Food Insecurity
"The international community must apply relentless pressure to achieve a cease-fire and ensure sustained humanitarian access now," said one advocate.
Jun 24, 2024
More than 1 in 5 people in the Gaza Strip are "facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity" amid Israel's relentless assault and siege against the Palestinian territory, according to a draft report set to be published Tuesday by the United Nations' hunger monitoring system.
The latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Acute Food Insecurity Special Snapshot—which was previewed by various news agencies—says that more than 495,000 Gazans—who already face "an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion"—are expected to suffer the highest level of starvation over the coming months.
The draft report states that while a sharp increase in food aid in northern Gaza in March and April can be credited with "likely averting a famine," the situation is "deteriorating again following renewed hostilities."
"A high risk of famine persists across the whole of the Gaza Strip as long as conflict continues and humanitarian access is restricted," IPC noted.
The IPC draft report also says more than half of all Gaza households had to sell or swap clothing in order to obtain food, and that the majority of Gazan families often "do not have any food to eat in the house, and over 20% go entire days and nights without eating."
"The population cannot endure these hardships any longer."
Kate Phillips-Barrasso, vice president of global policy and advocacy at Mercy Corps, an Oregon-based humanitarian NGO, told The Guardian that "people are enduring subhuman conditions resorting to desperate measures like boiling weeds, eating animal feed, and exchanging clothes for money to stave off hunger and keep their children alive."
"The humanitarian situation is deteriorating rapidly, and the specter of famine continues to hang over Gaza," she added. "The international community must apply relentless pressure to achieve a cease-fire and ensure sustained humanitarian access now. The population cannot endure these hardships any longer."
Although the IPC stopped short of the rare step of declaring a famine in Gaza, it warned that "the recent trajectory is negative and highly unstable."
"Should this continue, the improvements seen in April could be rapidly reversed," the agency added.
The IPC's famine review panel previously said there is not enough data to make a determination on whether there is a famine in Gaza since research was being blocked by "conflict and humanitarian access constraints."
The Geneva-based group Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said Monday that "the Famine Review Committee's inability to declare the current food situation in the Gaza Strip to be a famine does not negate the existence of famine in the strip, as pockets of famine are forming and spreading among different age groups, particularly children, and there is a noticeable increase in deaths from hunger, malnutrition, and related diseases."
"The committee's failure to declare the existence of a famine is solely related to its inability to provide certain technical information because of illegal Israeli restrictions and policies that aim to conceal evidence related to the crimes it commits and prevent criminal investigations into them by independent U.N. and international committees, particularly by preventing these committees from entering the strip," the group added.
U.N. World Food Program Executive Director Cindy McCain said last month that "full-blown famine" had taken hold in Gaza and was spreading south. According to Gaza officials, at least 40 people—mostly children—have died from malnutrition and dehydration during the 262-day Israeli onslaught. Almost all of the victims are from northern Gaza.
Israel began bombing, and later invaded, Gaza after Hamas-led attacks left more than 1,100 Israelis and others dead and over 240 others kidnapped on October 7. At least some of the victims were killed by Israeli forces in so-called "friendly fire" incidents, according to Israeli and international media reports.
Since then, Israeli forces have killed at least 37,626 Palestinians—most of them women and children—in Gaza, while wounding over 86,000 others, according to Palestinian and international agencies. At least 11,000 people, including over 4,000 children, are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out homes and other buildings.
Michael Fakhri, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food and a law professor at the University of Oregon, said in late February that Israel is committing genocide by intentionally starving Gazans. Israel's siege—and Israeli attacks on humanitarian aid shipments, workers, and recipients—are being reviewed by the International Court of Justice as part of a South Africa-led genocide case backed by over 30 countries and regional blocs.
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UN Expert Says Israel's Forced Starvation of Gazans Is Genocide
"Intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime."
Feb 27, 2024
The top United Nations expert on the right to food on Tuesday accused Israel of perpetrating genocide by intentionally starving Palestinians during the relentless assault on Gaza.
Most of Gaza's 2.3 million people—around 90% of whom have been forcibly displaced by Israeli bombardment and invasion—are starving. Israeli forces are bombing food production and distribution centers, destroying crops and killing livestock, attacking fishers, and firing on and blocking aid convoys.
Children are dying, while people desperately trying to survive are resorting to eating whatever they can get into their stomachs, including grass, livestock feed, and horses.
"In my view as a U.N. human rights expert, this is now a situation of genocide."
"Intentionally depriving people of food is clearly a war crime," Michael Fakhri, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food and a law professor at the University of Oregon, told The Guardian.
"Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, simply for being Palestinian," he continued. "In my view as a U.N. human rights expert, this is now a situation of genocide. This means the state of Israel in its entirety is culpable and should be held accountable."
"There is no reason to intentionally block the passage of humanitarian aid or intentionally obliterate small-scale fishing vessels, greenhouses, and orchards in Gaza—other than to deny people access to food," Fakhri added.
Under Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the crime of genocide is defined as killing members of a group, causing serious physical or mental harm, intentionally inflicting on the group conditions meant to destroy it "in whole or in part," imposing measures meant to prevent births, or forcibly transferring members of the group.
The amount of food entering Gaza—which even before the war was under an Israeli economic stranglehold—has fallen dramatically in recent weeks amid Israeli attacks targeting police escorting aid convoys. This has exposed the convoys to attacks and looting by criminal groups and desperate civilians, forcing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to suspend humanitarian deliveries.
Israeli civilians are also taking it upon themselves to block humanitarian aid from reaching starving Palestinians by traveling in caravans to border crossings to prevent aid trucks from entering Gaza. Their actions have sometimes taken on a perversely festive atmosphere; last week, right-wing extremists
set up a giant inflatable bouncy castle where aid trucks are meant to pass through the Kerem Shalom border crossing.
"Get ready, there will be inflatables, cotton candy, popcorn, and slushies," the organizer of an aid blockade announced.
The following day, Mahmoud Fattouh, a 2-month-old baby,
starved to death in Gaza City. He wasn't the only one.
"Unfortunately many kids have died in the past weeks," Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza, told Al Jazeera. "If we don't get the proper aid urgently, we will be losing more and more to malnutrition."
Fakhri said Tuesday that the speed at which malnutrition is spreading among Gaza's children is "astounding."
"The bombing and people being killed directly is brutal, but this starvation—and the wasting and stunting of children—is torturous and vile," he added. "It will have a long-term impact on the population physically, cognitively, and morally... All things indicate that this has been intentional."
As
The Guardian noted:
Intentionally starving civilians by "depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies" is a war crime, according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Indispensable objects include food, water, and shelter—which Israel is systematically denying Palestinians. Starvation is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute. It was also recognized as a war crime and general violation of international law by the U.N. Security Council in 2018.
Experts say an immediate cease-fire is the best and quickest way to avert further catastrophe.
"What's important to point out is, in case of a cease-fire now, we would be saving around 75,000 lives," Zeina Jamaluddine, a nutritionist and epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told Democracy Now! on Monday.
Qatari Foreign Ministry spokesperson Majed Mohammed al-Ansari said Tuesday that he is "optimistic" that a cease-fire can be brokered before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which starts March 10. U.S. President Joe Biden said Monday that he hopes to have a cease-fire by next Monday.
However, Israeli and Hamas officials on Tuesday dismissed reports of an imminent agreement, with Israel blaming "excessive" Hamas demands and Hamas calling Biden's remarks "premature."
The death and suffering in Gaza increase with each passing day without a cease-fire. Gaza's Health Ministry said Tuesday that at least 268 people were killed or wounded by Israeli bombs or bullets over the past 24 hours, with many victims still buried beneath rubble.
Since Israel launched its retaliatory assault on Gaza following the October 7 attacks, Palestinian officials say at least 29,878 Gazans—mostly women and children—have been killed, more than 70,200 have been wounded, and over 7,000 others are missing and feared dead and buried beneath the ruins of bombed buildings.
Last month, the International Court of Justice issued a preliminary ruling in a South Africa-led case that found Israel is "plausibly" committing genocide in Gaza and ordering the Israeli government to "take all measures within its power" to prevent acts of genocide.
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International this week accused Israel of defying the ICJ order.
"Not only has Israel created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, but it is also displaying a callous indifference to the fate of Gaza's population by creating conditions which the ICJ has said places them at imminent risk of genocide," Amnesty regional director Heba Morayef said Monday.
"As the occupying power, under international law, Israel has a clear obligation to ensure the basic needs of Gaza's population are met," she added. "Israel has not only woefully failed to provide for Gazans' basic needs, but it has also been blocking and impeding the passage of sufficient aid into the Gaza Strip, in particular to the north, which is virtually inaccessible, in a clear show of contempt for the ICJ ruling and in flagrant violation of its obligation to prevent genocide."
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