A quarter of Gaza’s population—over half a million lives—are wasting away under the relentless grip of starvation, their bodies hollowed, their strength stolen day by day. More than a million others hover on the edge of survival, trapped in the merciless conditions of emergency food shortages. This is not a warning of what might come, nor a cry of exaggeration—it is a weaponised famine, unfolding before the world in real time.
The verdict is inescapable. The world’s leading authority on food security, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), has declared Gaza engulfed in a Level 5 famine—the most catastrophic classification. Under the IPC’s stringent standards, famine is confirmed only when three thresholds are met: extreme food deprivation, widespread acute malnutrition, and starvation-related deaths. In Gaza, all three thresholds are tragically, unmistakably present.
Israel has slammed the gates on independent media, barring witnesses to the famine it orchestrates, while rolling out a cynical parade of social media “influencers” to broadcast lies: that the starvation is somehow the fault of the UN, whose primary aid agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, Israel has ruthlessly banned from operating within a territory it illegally occupies.
For a long time, some have been convinced by the narrative that Hamas is responsible for stealing food. However, this propaganda has been thoroughly debunked, even by some of the most pro-Israel, pro-establishment sources.
Last month, The New York Times reported that senior Israeli military officials admitted, “For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid provided by the United Nations and other international organisations.
The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza. But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.”
Similarly, Reuters reported that an internal US government analysis found no evidence of systematic theft of US-funded humanitarian supplies by Hamas, directly challenging the main rationale Israel and the US cite for backing a new private aid operation. Examining 156 reported incidents of theft or loss, the analysis concluded there was no systematic pattern. These mainstream sources—citing Israeli and US officials—make clear that the claim is entirely false.
Photo: Reuters reported that an internal US government analysis found no evidence of systematic theft of US-funded humanitarian supplies by Hamas,
Aid agencies, crying out in a joint letter earlier this month, accused Israel of “weaponising” aid. Israel’s response is cruelty masquerading as bureaucracy: convoy permissions that never arrive, trickle in too late, or fall tragically short. And as if this grotesque charade were not enough, Israel lauds the private Gaza Humanitarian Foundation—a foundation whose sites have become slaughterhouses, where hundreds seeking food and water have been mown down by Israeli gunfire. The malice is methodical. The spectacle of denial is obscene. The moral rot is naked and deliberate.
This is no act of nature. It is deliberately engineered by Israel, a calculated starvation of an entire people. And yet, Western leaders watch, calculate, and equivocate, unmoved as famine is wielded as a weapon against the defenceless. Every major human rights organisation agrees: the people of Gaza are starving because Israel is starving them. From Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch, UN special rapporteurs, and hundreds of NGOs, the conclusion is unanimous. This is a settled matter.
The UN’s top humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, put it plainly, “This is irrefutable testimony… It is a famine, the Gaza famine.” He emphasised, “This is not caused by a natural disaster but by policy: it is a famine within a few hundred metres of food in a fertile land.”
In July alone, more than 12,000 children were recorded as acutely malnourished—six times higher than at the start of the year. More than 200 people have already died from the effects of malnutrition in 2025. This is the first confirmed famine in the Middle East, and it is entirely a man-made phenomenon.
The report is unequivocal, “This famine is entirely man-made. It can be halted and reversed.” But it will not be, unless there is an immediate ceasefire and a massive scale-up of humanitarian aid. Every hour of delay costs more lives.
The architects of this suffering—the very ones who systematically obstruct aid, bomb civilian infrastructure, and deliberately displace entire populations—remain untouchable, indulged, and armed, their impunity absolute. Israel’s military reshapes Gaza into rubble and death zones, while its leaders boast of destruction as strategy, as though annihilation itself were a policy to admire. Israeli Defence Minister Katz speaks casually of Gaza being “Rafah-ised” and “Beit Hanoun-ed”—as if entire cities, now reduced to ruins and ash, were mere chess pieces to be erased at will. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismisses warnings of famine as “lies,” even as his government tightens the siege, escalates bombardments, and expands its ground invasion—ignoring reports that Hamas had agreed to the latest ceasefire.
More chilling still, leaked audio of IDF General Aharon Haliva exposes the genocidal logic driving this carnage, “For every one person on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die… It doesn’t matter if they are children.”
He declares the deaths of 50,000 already in Gaza as “necessary and required for future generations,” framing mass slaughter as a strategic imperative. Haliva openly calls it a “necessary Nakba,” invoking the 1948 expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians as a blueprint for systematic extermination. The cold, calculated inhumanity is staggering—the kind of moral depravity that turns names and numbers into instruments of annihilation.
Where is the outrage? Where is the action? Not from the United States, which greets Gaza’s famine with either cold silence or mocking derision. Not from the UK, which wraps itself in performative concern while continuing to sell arms and provide intelligence to the very military wreaking havoc on civilians.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, sanctions, embargoes, and diplomatic isolation rained down immediately—but Israel, in its decades-long occupation and current devastation of Gaza, faces nothing. Nothing. Scottish First Minister John Swinney stands almost alone in moral clarity, demanding that Parliament reconvene to halt arms sales to Israel and openly calling Netanyahu’s actions genocide.
Yet the British government, like its European and American counterparts, remains unmoved, trading platitudes for policies that might save lives. Their human rights protections have borders drawn by privilege: Palestinians are not fully human in their calculus. Their deaths are not tragedies; their children are not worth saving. And the world, complicit in its silence, watches them starve, bleed, and burn.
This famine is a war crime. Starvation as a method of warfare is explicitly prohibited under international law: Article 54 of the Fourth Geneva Convention forbids targeting civilians’ food and essential supplies; Article 8 of the Rome Statute classifies the deliberate starvation of civilians as a war crime; and customary international law enshrines the same principle. Yet these protections mean nothing when applied selectively. The same Western powers that thunder about international law in Ukraine or Taiwan fall silent and complicit when Israel flouts the very rules they claim to uphold in Gaza. By continuing to trade, arm, and provide political cover for Israel, these governments are not passive bystanders—they are enablers. This famine, this devastation, this systematic displacement is not merely Israeli-made; it is Western-enabled, deliberate, and ongoing.
The time for outrage has long passed. The time for action is now. A ceasefire must be enforced. Humanitarian corridors must be carved through the ruins.
Sanctions must strike those who perpetrate this cruelty. The famine in Gaza must end—not tomorrow, not after more feeble diplomacy, but immediately. Every hour of delay steals another child’s life, gnaws at another family, and erodes the very remnants of hope.
And history will not forgive silence, inaction, or the complicity that allows this horror to continue.
