The people of Gaza are enduring “catastrophic” levels of hunger, and famine is imminent in northern Gaza as Israel continues its devastating war and siege of the Palestinian territory. That stark warning came in a report on Monday from a global authority on food security which was set up 20 years ago by UN agencies and humanitarian groups to sound the alarm on famines.

While Israel bears much of the responsibility for this human-made famine, it’s not alone. Joe Biden and his administration are also complicit in this unfolding catastrophe: the UN and international relief groups have been warning about the potential for widespread starvation in Gaza since December. The Biden administration could have acted then, pressuring Israel to allow more aid into the territory and enforcing an existing US law that bars weapons shipments to US allies that obstruct humanitarian aid.

Instead, the US president and his aides dithered, as they have done repeatedly since Israel launched its war against Gaza after the 7 October attacks on Israel by Hamas. And it’s now too late to prevent a famine. As Martin Griffiths, the UN’s top emergency relief official, wrote on Twitter/X: “The international community should hang its head in shame for failing to stop it … We know that once a famine is declared, it is way too late.”

The aid group Refugees International was even more direct, noting that the “opportunity to avert famine in Gaza has been lost. A famine is now getting underway”. The group’s president, Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Biden administration official, wrote on X that a formal declaration of famine is retroactive, and often lags behind reality on ground. (For example, about half of the estimated 260,000 people killed by starvation in Somalia, between 2010 and 2012, had already died by the time a famine was formally declared in 2011.)

The Biden administration and Israel’s other supporters........

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