The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza

The Guardian

5 days ago

The mathematics of famine are simple in Gaza. Palestinians cannot leave, war has ended farming and Israel has banned fishing, so practically every calorie its population eats must be brought in from outside.
Israel knows how much food is needed. It has been calibrating hunger in Gaza for decades, initially calculating shipments to exert pressure while avoiding starvation.
'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,' a senior adviser to the then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in 2006. An Israeli court ordered the release of documents showing the details of those macabre sums two years later.
Cogat, the Israeli agency that still controls aid shipments to Gaza, calculated then that Palestinians needed an average minimum 2,279 calories per person per day, which could be provided through 1.836kg of food.
Today, humanitarian organisations are asking for an even smaller minimum ration: 62,000 metric tonnes of dry and canned food to meet basic needs for 2.1 million people each month, or around 1kg of food per person per day.
As Gaza has slid into famine this summer, Israeli officials have variously denied the existence of mass starvation, claimed without evidence that Hamas steals and hoards aid, or blamed hunger on UN distribution failures, sharing pictures of aid pallets awaiting collection inside the border.
They pointed to deadly and chaotic food distributions by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a US and Israeli-backed logistics startup, as proof that Palestinians had access to food.
Yet data complied and published by Israel's own government makes clear that it has been starving Gaza. Between March and June, Israel allowed just 56,000 tonnes of food to enter the territory, Cogat records show, less than a quarter of Gaza's minimum needs for that period.
Even if every bag of UN flour had been collected and handed out, and the GHF had developed safe systems for equitable distribution, starvation was inevitable. Palestinians did not have enough to eat.
A 'worst-case scenario' famine is now unfolding in Gaza, UN-backed food security experts said this week. Food deliveries are 'at a scale far below what is needed', amid 'drastic restrictions on the entry of supplies', the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said in a report citing Israeli figures on aid.
The Famine Review Committee, an independent group of experts that scrutinises IPC alerts, said food shipments 'have been highly inadequate', and singled out the GHF.
'Our analysis of the food packages supplied by the GHF shows that their distribution plan would lead to mass starvation, even if it was able to function without the appalling levels of violence that have been reported,' the FRC said.
In March and April Gaza was under total siege, with no food entering. In mid-May Netanyahu said shipments would restart because of international pressure over a 'starvation crisis'.
Just a few weeks of extra aid shipments during the ceasefire in January and February this year provided enough calories to bring Gaza back from the brink of famine, UN data shows.
However, in May only a trickle of food returned, in quantities that served only to slow Gaza's descent into starvation, not stop it. Two months on, the scale of suffering has now spurred another round of international outrage, including demands from Donald Trump to get 'every ounce of food' to starving children.
In response Netanyahu has promised only 'minimal' extra aid. The number of food trucks entering the territory has risen, but is still well below the minimum needed to feed Palestinians there, much less reverse a famine.
Airdrops, used intermittently throughout the war, have also restarted, with France, Germany, the UK, Egypt, Jordan and the UAE among the countries announcing flights even though parachuting in food is expensive, inefficient and occasionally deadly.
Last year at least 12 people drowned trying to recover food that landed in the sea, and at least five were killed when pallets fell on them.
In the first 21 months of war, 104 flights supplied the equivalent of just four days of food for Gaza, Israeli data shows, for a cost running to tens of millions of dollars. Spent on trucks, the same budget would deliver much more food, but the price of these flights is not only a monetary one.
They allow Israel and its allies to frame starvation as a catastrophe caused by logistics, not a crisis created by state policy.
Airdrops would usually be ordered as a last resort to feed people in emergency situations where hostile armed forces or geography make road deliveries impossible. In Gaza the only obstacles to driving aid across the border are restrictions imposed by Israel, an ally of many western nations including Britain, and armed with British and US weapons.
Two Israeli-based rights groups this week declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, with reports citing evidence including the weaponisation of hunger. B'tselem described an 'official and openly declared policy' of mass starvation.
Israel's government knows how much food Gaza's people need to survive, and how much food goes into the territory, and in the past used that data to calculate how much food was needed to avoid starvation.
The vast gap between the calories Gaza needs, and the food that has entered since March makes clear that Israeli officials are doing different maths today. They cannot pass responsibility for this human-made famine to anyone else, and nor can their allies.