Gaza is being ravaged by famine, the result of a brutal policy of starvation by Israel. This crisis has startling parallels to another famine a century ago – caused by the British in Bengal.

Both resulted from deliberate acts.

The famine in Gaza underscores economist Amartya Sen’s contention in the context of the Bengal tragedy that no functioning democracy has ever experienced a famine. Democratic governments, accountable to their citizens through elections and a free press, have a strong incentive to prevent large-scale starvation to avoid political consequences, he noted.

Just as the British colonial government did not have such constraints, neither do the Israelis in occupied Palestine.

In the Gaza Strip, 514,000 people of the total population of 2.1 million, are experiencing famine, the international partners behind the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the global standard for classifying the severity of food insecurity and malnutrition, said on August 22.

By their standard, famine has a high threshold: at least 20% of households in a territory must be facing extreme lack of food; at least 30% of children must be suffering from acute malnutrition; and two people of every 10,000 residents must die each day due to “outright starvation”.

The partnership concluded that all three thresholds had been met in Gaza. Earlier, in July, the United Nations World Food Program had noted that the situation in Gaza was “unlike anything we have seen in this century”.

Calling for an immediate ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid, medical supplies and sanitation services for everyone in Gaza, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification partnership noted that the deteriorating conditions in Gaza threaten an exponential increase in deaths across the devastated territory.

Every child in Gaza under the age of five —more than 320,000— is at risk of acute malnutrition.@UNICEF is on the ground delivering life-saving nutrition supplies.

But with famine likely to spread, children urgently need a massive scale-up of humanitarian aid. pic.twitter.com/xo1I4Jz1qq

On September 2, Gaza’s Ministry of Health declared that in the previous month, 198 people in Gaza had died due to malnutrition. More than 83, including 15 children, had died since famine had been declared in Gaza. As the network had predicted, these figures are rising.

The famine determination came shortly before the International Association of Genocide Scholars, a 500-member body of academics, passed a resolution on September 1 stating that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza fulfil the definition of genocide set out in the 1948 United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The partnership has listed four reasons for why it has determined that the famine in Gaza is........

© Scroll.in