In 2012, Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization, won a legal battle forcing the Israeli government to release documents revealing that it had calculated calorie intake for Gaza’s population. The goal was to engineer a crisis just short of famine. And it worked. By 2021, the World Health Organization found that nearly 90% of Gaza’s preschoolers were consuming less than 75% of their daily caloric requirements.

Back in 2005, Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) signed an agreement intended to ensure the flow of goods and people between Gaza and the West Bank. But instead of improving access, the policy became a tool of restriction. Before 2006, 400 trucks entered Gaza daily. Israel then imposed a limit of 107 trucks, and by 2007, only 67 trucks per day were actually allowed in.

The manufactured scarcity forced Palestinians to dig tunnels underground to smuggle in food and essential supplies. In 2012, The Guardian reported on a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable quoting Israeli officials who described their objective: to “keep Gaza’s economy on the brink of collapse.” Gisha called the policy what it was: economic warfare.

What’s unfolding in Gaza today is the result of a strategy decades in the making. The Oslo Accords appeared to offer Palestinian self-rule but, in reality, denied any true sovereignty. Israel maintained full control over borders, security, and the movement of people and goods, while delegating limited responsibilities—like health and education—to the PA. What seemed like a step toward statehood instead institutionalized forced dependency. As the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said put it, Oslo was “an instrument of Palestinian surrender—a Palestinian Versailles.”

Starvation is the final phase of Oslo.

For years, Gaza’s starvation was engineered quietly—camouflaged behind border policy, calorie math, and diplomatic doublespeak. But hunger at its peak is harder to justify than bombs. Even the institutions once trusted to manage the narrative are starting to shift.

Ross Douthat, a columnist for The New York Times, published a piece on July 26, 2025, titled “How Israel’s War Became Unjust.” This admission is particularly notable given the Times’ long-standing role in amplifying Israeli military narratives—a pattern thoroughly documented by the activist collective Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG).

Even so, on July 30, 2025, the Times updated an earlier front-page story under pressure from pro-Israel groups. The piece had shown a haunting image of Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, a starving child in Gaza. The correction read: “Had the Times known the information before publication, it would have been included in the article and the picture caption.”

At face value, it’s a standard correction. But in practice, it functions as narrative damage control to cast doubt on the visual evidence of starvation. By adding ambiguity the correction served to blunt the emotional and political impact of the Times’ own reporting.

This fits a long-standing pattern. For decades, the Times has repeatedly framed Israeli violence as security, while treating Palestinian suffering as either self-inflicted or incidental. It amplifies the Israeli military’s talking points, dilutes Palestinian testimony with qualifiers, and routinely fails to name the occupation as a root cause.

So why, after months of justification and denial, has the Western press—especially the Times—begun to acknowledge the scale of atrocity in Gaza?

Because starvation resists spin in ways bombs do not.

Mass casualties can be reframed as “collateral damage.” But starvation speaks a deeper, more primal language. It exposes horror that cannot be softened by euphemism or hidden behind military jargon. It leaves behind emaciated bodies and hollow eyes—images that no narrative of necessity can justify. At some point, the brutality becomes so undeniable, so unspinnable, that even the monster flinches at its own reflection.

But not always.

While the American Jewish Committee feigned condemnation of Rep. Randy Fine’s (R-Fla.) genocidal incitements, the New York Post dug in. Meanwhile, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) became the first Republican to explicitly call Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has also broken ranks, consistently opposing U.S. military funding to Israel.

The images that finally forced even reluctant Western media and political elites to confront Gaza’s reality were never ambiguous to legal scholars. For years, they’ve argued that starvation is not collateral damage but a deliberate weapon of war that demands its own category of prosecution.

Tom Dannenbaum, a legal scholar, in his 2021 article “Siege Starvation: A War Crime of Societal Torture,” argues that siege starvation must be treated as a distinct war crime—not merely a form of inhumane treatment, but a method of torture at the societal level.

To bomb people—to sever limbs, level large swaths of infrastructure, or extinguish entire bloodlines—is one kind of horror. But to starve a mother until her breasts run dry, and then shoot her as she walks toward aid, is another. It is an assault not only on her body, but on her capacity to mother, to love, to decide, to hope.

Dannenbaum warns that starvation is uniquely insidious because it does not only destroy the individual—it unravels the social bonds that hold a people together. It targets not just “political commitments, but also at the human capacity for friendship and love.” Writing for Just Security, Dannenbaum, and Alex de Waal who is the foremost expert on famine, deepen this point: “Human existence is based upon sharing food. The etymology of the word ‘companion’—someone with whom one shares bread—is just one indicator of how deep this goes. When people can no longer share bread but must instead fight one another for scraps, human society is severely impacted in its ability to function. This is what we see unfolding in Gaza today.”

This is what Israel’s starvation of Palestinians aims to break: the human capacity to hope, to care, to endure.

This is why he calls siege starvation “a crime of societal torture”: because it is designed to dismantle human agency and break political will.

Starvation is already illegal, prosecutable as a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and—when used with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group”—prosecutable as genocide under the Genocide Convention. The law is clear; what’s missing is prosecuting siege starvation.

At Nuremberg, prosecutors presented compelling evidence of how the Nazis used starvation as a weapon of war. Defendants were convicted under charges like “crimes against humanity” or “extermination.” However, the courts didn’t call the starvation of civilians during the siege of Leningrad illegal, only abhorrent. Why? Because the Allied powers had also used siege starvation during the war. Prosecuting it would have meant putting themselves on trial too. Prosecutors cited Lieber Code (Art. 17), drafted for the Union Army during the American Civil War, as permitting the use of starvation to hasten military victory.

In other words, the legal precedent for ignoring siege starvation came from the United States.

As de Waal notes, in his article “Nazis used it, We use it,” the Allies’ own tactics included Britain’s blockade of Germany in World War I, which killed an estimated 750,000 civilians, and the U.S. Air Force’s 1945 “Operation Starvation,” which mined Japanese harbors, killing civilians as well as soldiers.

So why does it matter if siege starvation has its own category of prosecution? As Dannenbaum explains, when it’s folded into other charges, the most devastating part of the harm—the dismantling of a community’s ability to live and function together—vanishes from view. It slips into the background of “military strategy” or “counterterrorism,” protected by the political power of those who use it. This silence masks the crime, allowing siege starvation to persist not only as a weapon of war, but as a long-term strategy of domination.

History, tragically, has seen starvation as a tactic of domination before.

To fully grasp the gravity of siege starvation, we have to place it within the broader historical and legal arc. Legal scholars like Dannenbaum aren’t alone in urging us to recognize starvation as a distinct crime and prosecute it as such. De Waal also echoes this view. He also notes that modern starvation is almost never due to weather—it’s political.

Yet, as de Waal notes, modern genocide scholars have largely neglected starvation in their analyses—although Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide,” studied such tactics in great detail. Lemkin focused specifically on what he called “racial discrimination in feeding,” citing Nazi policies that rationed food based on ethnicity: 100% of carbohydrates for Germans and only 27% for Jews. He also documented how the Nazis intensified suffering through overcrowding, denial of medicine, and calculated neglect. Starvation was not a byproduct of war—it was policy.

These mechanisms are chillingly mirrored in Gaza today. Israel has imposed the longest siege in modern........

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