OPINION - Starvation in Gaza: Death by design

When entire populations are made to starve in full view of the world, the legal threshold is not only met but exceeded. This is not just a stain on humanity, but a crime against humanity, and it is occurring with impunity

- The author is the CEO of Action For Humanity, an NGO in the UK.

ISTANBUL

Starvation in Gaza is not a disaster; it is a policy. It is not the result of crop failure, drought, or bad luck. It is deliberate, systematic starvation. Hunger is being used as a weapon of war, and the evidence is visible to anyone willing to see.

Today, over half a million Palestinians face catastrophic food insecurity, the highest classification possible. Parents are boiling salt water to quiet the pain in their children’s stomachs. Women are collapsing in the streets from malnutrition. Doctors are reporting newborns weighing less than 1.5 kilograms, their tiny bodies wasting away because their mothers are too malnourished to breastfeed and infant formula is blocked at the crossings.

At Action For Humanity, our teams in Gaza have watched displacement camps empty overnight under shelling, leaving families to sleep on rubble. Our teams themselves have been displaced multiple times and are struggling to find food. Even aid workers now need assistance themselves — such is the scale of this historic starvation.

We have spoken to mothers rationing a single tin of formula to feed their babies for weeks. We have seen families forced to flee repeatedly, carrying tents on their backs, each move stripping away more of their strength and dignity. These are not isolated tragedies, they are part of a pattern of engineered deprivation.

A systematic denial of humanitarian access

For months, Israeli officials have claimed that food and aid are entering Gaza. Yet UN agencies, including UNRWA and the World Food Programme, have reported that while stockpiles of food exist, they are unable to reach those in need due to restrictions and closures at border crossings. This denial is increasingly hard to conceal. Aid convoys have been bombed, aid workers have been killed, and humanitarian warehouses have been targeted. In May 2024, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to ensure unimpeded humanitarian access. That order has been flagrantly ignored.

This is not a question of logistics. It is a question of intent. The withholding of food, medicine, and water from civilians constitutes starvation as a method of warfare - a war crime under international law and an abomination on any moral compass. When entire populations are made to starve in full view of the world, the legal threshold is not only met but exceeded. This is not just a stain on humanity, but a crime against humanity, and it is occurring with impunity.

And yet, Gaza's people endure with remarkable resilience. In Deir al-Balah, families in one of Action For Humanity’s Hope Camps for displaced people carried their tents through the night to safer ground, determined to survive. In Khan Younis, hospital staff used the last drops of medical formula to keep premature babies alive for just one more day. These are acts of courage and determination, but they should not be necessary. No family should have to fight for their child’s right to eat.

The international community cannot say it does not know. The images of skeletal children, of mothers too weak to stand, of endless queues for bread that never arrives, are impossible to ignore. Silence and delay are choices, choices that will be remembered as complicity.

It may be politically inconvenient for our governments to do all in their power to stop these atrocities, but it is morally unconscionable to stick to the current ineffective course.

What must be done is clear. First, all crossings into Gaza must be opened fully and immediately for sustained, large-scale humanitarian access. Second, aid must flow through neutral and established humanitarian channels - UN agencies and NGOs - not politicized or military intermediaries. Third, governments must enforce international law: through diplomatic pressure, legal mechanisms, and by suspending arms transfers to a state that flagrantly ignores the rulings of the International Court of Justice.

This is a defining moral test for our generation. If we allow Gaza’s children to starve while food sits in warehouses, then international humanitarian law is not worth the paper it is written on.

As a humanitarian, I call for urgent action. Yet, as a father and grandfather, I cannot accept a world where we allow children to die of hunger when the solution is so clear. Starvation in Gaza is not a tragic accident. It is death by design.