Children will die quickly amid 'genocidal starvation' in Gaza, warns top famine expert

Middle East Eye

23-07-2025

A renowned expert on famine, Professor Alex de Waal, has accused Israel of 'genocidal starvation' of Palestinians in Gaza with its continued deadly siege on the enclave.
At least 101 Palestinians, including 80 children, have died of starvation since Israel's blockade resumed in March, including 15 who died of malnutrition on Monday, according to the Palestinian health ministry.
Meanwhile, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid at distribution sites run by the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, in place since May and manned by Israeli soldiers and US security contractors.
De Waal told MEE's live show on Tuesday that the UN is not in a position to declare famine due to Israel's obstruction of access to humanitarians and investigators to gauge the extent of hunger.
However, he said, 'it is actually relatively straightforward if you are perpetrating a famine to shut out access to essential information and then say no one has declared famine'.
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'Concealment of famine is an instrument of those who perpetrate it,' he added.
De Waal said that famine is unfolding in Gaza in 'a wholly predicted manner'.
De Waal is executive director of the World Peace Foundation, affiliated with the Fletcher School of Global Affairs at Tufts University, and the author of Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.
He explained that a healthy adult will take 60 to 80 days of total deprivation of food to die of starvation. With semi-starvation, it would take a lot longer.
'But children will perish much more quickly. Their small bodies waste away very, very fast.'
What makes children more vulnerable is the interaction between malnutrition and infection.
'Many children get diarrheal infections or malnutrition itself, which means that they cannot process or digest food properly. It's that dehydration that follows, and the combined effect of malnutrition and disease that carries most of them away.'
Therefore, De Waal pointed out that the figures on deaths from starvation may be an undercount compared to the full scale of deaths associated with famine.
The body of a starved person consumes its own reserves of fat, then its own organs, he explained. Mentally, starvation may cause hallucinations and paranoia.
'Engineered starvation'
De Waal said that Israeli actions in Gaza stand out in comparison to other famine situations historically.
'Israeli actions stand out because there is no other case in modern history in which you have such minutely, precisely engineered starvation within an hour's drive, or even less than an hour's drive, of a fully capable international humanitarian operation ready to roll,' he told MEE.
'If Israel wanted every child in Gaza to have breakfast tomorrow, the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could say so, and it would happen'
- Alex de Waal
'If Israel wanted every child in Gaza to have breakfast tomorrow, the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could say so, and it would happen.
'That is not the case in other terrible famines, such as in Sudan today. The precision, the minute control that Israel has over this is something without precedent in modern times.'
Officials from the UN's agency for Palestinian refugees (Unrwa), the largest humanitarian provider in Gaza, told MEE they have had 6,000 trucks loaded with food and medical supplies in Egypt and Jordan for four and a half months, but Israel has yet to let them in.
Prior to the current siege, aid groups were able to bring in around 600 trucks per day - the minimum amount of aid humanitarian organisations say is needed for Gaza's population, Unrwa head Philippe Lazzarini told MEE in May.
Unrwa's communications director, Julitte Touma, told MEE on Tuesday that the agency has been receiving 'S.O.S messages' from Palestinians, including its own staff, pleading for any food for them and their children. Some staff members have fainted on duty because of hunger, Touma said.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant are wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes and crimes against humanity linked to the use of starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza.
The International Court of Justice, the UN's principal judicial organ, issued a binding order on 28 March 2024 ordering Israel to take all necessary measures to ensure the unimpeded provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza, in cooperation with the UN.
But Israel has largely ignored the order.
De Waal noted that even the Israeli judge on the court, Justice Aharon Barak, voted in favour of this order, making it unanimous.
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The court also ruled that Israel's duty to ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid was part of its obligation under the Genocide Convention to prevent genocide.
Yet, 16 months since the ICJ ruling, Israel and its international partners have not fulfilled this obligation, said de Waal.
'The Genocide Convention has an obligation to prevent and to punish genocide. So the prevention aspect cannot wait until we have counted the graves of all those children who have died of starvation.
'And what we are seeing unfolding is exactly what genocidal starvation consists of.
'It is not only the suffering and death of individuals but perhaps more importantly it is that social trauma. It is that shame. It is that degradation. It is that feeling of people being reduced to the state of animals, being forced to violate profound social taboos - scavenging for food in piles of garbage, etc. This is what genocide looks like at the moment.'