Photograph Source: CiDiBi – CC BY-SA 4.0

While starvation profoundly affects individuals across all age groups, this essay focuses specifically on Palestinian children to illuminate how deliberate starvation strategies are designed to compromise the futurity of the Palestinian nation by systematically destroying its youngest generation. Beyond the immediate devastation, Palestinian children’s physical health, mental well-being, and emotional development are being deliberately compromised through weaponized hunger. This analysis examines how starvation functions not merely as a byproduct of armed aggression, but as a calculated tool of necropolitical warfare aimed at foreclosing Palestinian futures (Mbembe, 2003)—a process enabled by the global racial hierarchies established through coloniality (Quijano, 2000).

Theoretical Framework: Necropolitics and the Politics of Unchilding

The genocide and the systematic starvation of Palestinian children must be understood as a manifestation of the enduring coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), which establishes a global racial hierarchy that constructs non-European lives as expendable, and as a direct application of Achille Mbembe’s (2003) necropolitics: the sovereign power to decide who may live and who must die. This necropolitical power is exercised upon a population already prefigured as inferior and killable within Quijano’s colonial hierarchy. Applied to Palestine, this........

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