Interview| Alex de Waal exposes Israel’s weaponized starvation in Gaza

The United Nations’ declaration on Aug. 22 stating there is famine in Gaza was nothing more than international recognition of previous warnings from aid agencies and experts. Although important for documenting, it has not stopped the continuous crime happening before the eyes of the world by an occupation that uses starvation as a weapon.

About a week after the announcement, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich renewed his call for the genocide of Gaza’s population. He stressed the need to cut off water, electricity and food supplies to the enclave, threatening death to the entire population: “Those who don’t die from bullets will die from hunger.”

Against this backdrop, Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation, offers a stark description of Gaza’s unprecedented famine in an interview over email with Al Manassa. What is happening in Gaza does not resemble any famine de Waal has studied before. In Darfur or Ethiopia there was complexity and competing narratives, he says, while in Gaza, the direct responsibility is clear. The plan is to subjugate the population through hunger.

De Waal is a professor at Tufts University and one of the leading scholars on war, famine and the weaponization of starvation. With decades of experience tracking famines across Africa, he has published numerous books and studies on the politics of hunger.

Murder by starvation

The World Food Program/WFP warned in August that more than a third of Gaza’s residents were going without food for days at a time. Acute malnutrition was spreading, with more than 300,000 children facing severe risk.

At the end of that month, de Waal published a paper that attempted to estimate the number of people in Gaza who had died from hunger. His aim was not to reach a final figure but to highlight the gap between those killed by bombardment and those dying slowly under siege. The numbers matter, he wrote, but more important is recognizing that famine is not an accidental event but the result of a political decision. Here starvation is being used as a weapon of war, in plain sight of everyone.

On Aug. 22, de Waal released a report titled “The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation in Gaza, March – August 2025” produced with the investigative group Forensic Architecture. It includes maps and satellite imagery showing how border crossings and humanitarian aid have been instrumentalized as part of a system of deprivation, turning the flow of relief supplies into a mechanism of control over life rather than survival.

Since May 7, 2024, Israel has controlled the Rafah crossing on the Palestinian side, along with the adjacent Karm Abu Salem crossing, Gaza’s main entry point for aid. Israel has used this control to enforce a comprehensive blockade, while continuing daily bombardments that kill and wound dozens and destroy housing and infrastructure since Oct. 7, 2023.

“In recent decades, all famines around the world have been caused entirely or substantially by war, in which starvation is either the outcome of the reckless pursuit of war goals, or is a deliberate action,” de Waal said. “This has been the case in Ethiopia, northern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Now it is also the case in Gaza.”

He explained that in some cases, the weaponization of starvation took place against a background of extreme poverty, food insecurity, and breakdown of governance—as in Somalia, where the UN Food and Agriculture Organization/FAO reported earlier this year that 4.4 million people could face hunger due to worsening drought, conflict and soaring food prices.

“In Sudan, there has been a repeated cycle of conflict, deprivation, economic and environmental stress, and famine over half a century. In Syria and Gaza, the context was very different. These were middle-income countries where the population had very good nutrition and health indicators before the conflict. In the towns where the al-Assad government demanded people ‘surrender or starve,’ and in Gaza after October 7, the descent into mass starvation was entirely deliberate and was extremely rapid.”

Laws and conventions

De Waal stressed that starvation was first prohibited under international humanitarian law in the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. It was later incorporated into international criminal law through the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of 1998, which defines as a war crime: “Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions.”

Last June, a UN report warned that the populations of five global hunger hotspots face extreme hunger and risk of starvation and death in the coming months unless there is urgent humanitarian action and a coordinated international effort to de-escalate conflict, stem displacement, and mount an urgent full-scale aid response. The report noted that “Sudan, Palestine, South Sudan, Haiti, and Mali are the hotspots that warrant the highest degree of concern.”

De Waal highlighted two key points. First, “objects indispensable to survival” include not only food but also water, sanitation, health care, shelter, fuel and anything else essential, such as maternal care for infants. Second, blocking relief aid is a secondary part of the crime. “So, in both Sudan and Gaza, the primary element of the war crime of starvation is the destruction of agriculture and food, essential infrastructure such as water and sanitation, health services, access to money and banking systems, etc.”

De Waal added that Article 2(c) of the Genocide Convention defines the crime as including imposing destructive conditions of life. This can be interpreted “as creating a context in which a group can no longer exist as a meaningful group, with basic human dignity and social ties. This points to the way that starvation is not just an individual experience, but is the process of dehumanizing a group of people, reducing them to a state of degradation in which they are forced to behave like animals, competing for food, breaking social taboos, stealing and hiding food, even turning away their family members and neighbors when they ask for food.”

The expert on policies of starvation recalled that in 2018 the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2417 on armed conflict and hunger, which prohibited using starvation as a weapon and mandated swift UN action when wars threaten mass food insecurity or famine. “We see all of these elements in Sudan and Gaza,” he said.

A powerless international community

Asked whether the UN and humanitarian organizations are fulfilling their responsibilities, de Waal noted what makes Gaza unique: “The UN and other humanitarian organizations have the resources, capabilities, networks, personnel, skills and readiness to respond at a moment’s notice. They are within an hour’s drive of the victims. This is quite different from (say) Sudan, where those capabilities are much more limited. What is blocking them is Israel and those who back Israel.”

He criticized what he called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation as “an amateur and incompetent alternative. Its mode of operations is amateur and dangerous. It ought to be closed at once and its resources redirected to professional humanitarian organizations that know how to handle these challenges.”

De Waal stressed the immediate need to “activate the humanitarian system that is on standby. This requires unhindered humanitarian access. It requires a massive, immediate scaling up of hospital care to cope with the thousands of starving children who need urgent intensive care, who cannot be saved by food alone. In turn that requires essential services to hospitals and a ceasefire.”

He also emphasized the importance of accurate information: “Israel needs to permit journalists to cover Gaza. It needs to stop its assaults on Palestinian journalists. It needs to permit humanitarian data gathering. Since December 2023, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) has been calling for better data, and Israel has been refusing. When the IPC determined that famine conditions existed in Gaza, Israel criticized it for lack of good data.”

De Waal pointed out that the US government’s Famine Early Warning System (FEWS NET) had reached the same conclusion as the UN: famine is now occurring in Gaza. “I note that while PM Netanyahu called the UN’s famine determination a lie and a ‘blood libel,’ he didn’t say anything about the US government coming to the same conclusion.”

Famine without precedent

In comparing historical cases, de Waal observed: “Sudan is currently the largest, widest and deepest famine. About half the population needs emergency assistance, and about a million are in famine conditions.” However, “Gaza is the most intense. The highest proportion of the population has been reduced to extreme hunger and deprivation, and this has been done systematically. This compares with Syria, but it is being inflicted on a larger scale and even greater destruction.”

The author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine” stated, “We have not seen a famine on this scale for many decades. The famines of the mid-20th century were, however, larger and more deadly. In China in 1958-62, 36 million died; in the famines in World War 2, perhaps 20 million.”

He argued that until very recently there had been a strong international consensus against weaponized starvation. Security Council Resolution 2417 marked “the high point of this effort. At that time, the major governments tended to condemn regimes they didn’t like: the US condemned Syria, the Russians were more critical of the Saudis and UAE over Yemen, and everyone criticized the warring parties in South Sudan and Somalia. All agreed that the principle of prohibiting starvation should be upheld.”

But, he warned, the tide turned in 2021 with Ethiopia’s starvation siege of Tigray. “Since then, governments have been imposing starvation without facing consequences. We are seeing the growth of impunity since then, and the cases of Myanmar repression of the Rohingya, the lack of accountability for starvation in Ethiopia, and the conduct of the wars in Sudan and Gaza are the clearest cases. So at root it is a question of impunity: those who inflict starvation expect to get away with it.”

Perfect crime, imperfect justice

On mechanisms for accountability, de Waal noted: “There are options for prosecution, in the International Criminal Court and in national courts using universal jurisdiction. This hasn’t been done before, so there are few precedents to rely on. I am not optimistic that cases will be brought to court.”

He added that the case brought by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice is based on the Genocide Convention. “We won’t expect the court to come to its decision for some years. But the court has already activated the most important duty, which is the duty to prevent genocide. And it has specified in its provisional orders that in order to fulfil that obligation, Israel must provide a full spectrum of humanitarian aid and restore essential services, in full cooperation with the UN. Failing to do that would, it indicates, place Israel at risk of being responsible for genocide. And failing to press Israel to fulfil that duty implicates other states that are signatory to the Genocide Convention of failing to fulfil their legal obligations also.”

He stressed that transitional justice must also be considered: truth telling, apologies, reparations and compensation. “Prosecution is not the only form of justice.”

At the same time, de Waal expressed doubt that prosecutions would be possible in the current circumstances. He warned that disregard for the ICC’s rulings against Israel—and even US sanctions on its judges—“have a deeply chilling effect on the attempt to sustain humanitarian standards, international law, and basic principles of humanity. This is not only calamitous for the Palestinians but also encourages other authoritarian governments to act with impunity.”

Lifelong scars of starvation

De Waal explained the long-term consequences of famine: “For individual children, malnutrition has lifelong effects. Those who are malnourished when very young, or in utero, never achieve the same physical or mental capabilities as others.”

As for society as a whole, it is “traumatized by starvation. The dehumanization and loss of dignity, the sundering of social ties, all have a lasting impact. What we see from societies that have experienced famine is that they struggle to deal with the lasting trauma. In Ireland after the great hunger of the 1840s, it was more than a century before the famine could be commemorated in public.”

“Some of the traumatic consequences play out within a generation. One case from my own experience is Darfur, Sudan. I studied the famine of 1984/85 for my doctoral research. I was there at the time. I recall staying in the encampment of the sheikh of the Mahamid Rizeigat nomadic Arabs, Hilal Mohamed Abdalla, in 1985. He described how the way of life of his people was coming to an end with the famine, how the ties between them and the farming Fur communities were breaking down. Twenty years later his son, Musa Hilal, was the commander of the Janjaweed militia that was terrorizing Darfur.”

De Waal closed with a message to activists and journalists worldwide: “We need to continue to draw attention to starvation, to the crime of starvation, and to the stratagems of denial and concealment used by the perpetrators of starvation.”