In the first three months of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza in 2023, health officials in Gaza officially attributed only four deaths to starvation. By 2024, this number increased to 49. But in 2025 — the year the siege reached its suffocating peak — the death toll exploded to 422 deaths in a year.
This represents a 760 percent increase in starvation deaths in just 12 months.
United Nations Special Representative on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri said Al Jazeera said in August 2025 that the global standard for drought analysis, known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), appeared to be “conservative”.
“The facts on the ground were unmistakable. We raised the alarm when we started seeing the first children dying,” explained Fakhri, adding that the crisis was met with strict technicalities. Drought criteria.
The Ministry of Health in Gaza gave the number of victims: 40.63 percent were elderly (over 60) and 34.74 percent were children. In 2025 alone, cases among children under five rose from 2,754 in January to 14,383 in August.
Legal experts said what happened in Gaza was not just “food insecurity”; It met strict technical criteria for drought, a designation often delayed by political bureaucracy.
“In the human rights community, we don’t wait too long … we don’t need to focus on counting pain, suffering and death,” Fakhri explained. “When we started seeing the first children dying, we raised the alarm … because when a parent holds their child in their arms and that child is wasted, it means an attack on the whole community.”
Anatomy of Strategy
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the Occupied Palestinian Territory have accused successive Israeli governments of a decades-old policy of using food and aid as weapons of war.
Suleiman Basharat, a Palestinian commentator and researcher of Israeli affairs, relates this strategy to the Israeli-imposed blockade of Gaza in 2007.
“It was based on the idea of starvation and constriction of daily life,” Basharat noted. This theory was infamously summarized in 2006 Dov WeisglassAn adviser to the Israeli prime minister, who said the aim was to “feed the Palestinians but not starve them to death”, added that the war had shifted from “management” to “elimination”.
Senior Israeli ministers made their intentions clear at the very beginning of the genocidal war on Gaza. Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant declared a “total siege against .human beings“. His criticism was quickly reinforced by far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who said withholding aid to Gaza would mean “fair and ethical“, even if it meant millions starving.
Israel’s moves to promote this policy were profound. Ahead of the start of the war on Gaza in 2023, the United Nations said it needed 500 trucks carrying aid and food to sustain people in Gaza.
But during the war, an average of 19 trucks a day were allowed into the Strip – a 96 percent reduction – in what some Israeli media have called a “caloric collapse”.
- Calorie compression: Before the war, 500 trucks per day survived in Gaza. During the conflict, this dropped to an average of 19 trucks a day – a 96 percent reduction.
- Thirst War: During the blockade, the availability of water dropped from 84 liters to just 3 liters per person.
- Scorched Earth: Israel systematically destroyed the infrastructure for agricultural production. By August 2025, 90 percent of farmland was destroyed, 2,500 chicken farms were destroyed (36 million birds were killed), and fishing ports were destroyed.
“If Israel wanted to do this, every child in Gaza could have breakfast tomorrow,” observed de Waal. “They just need to open the doors”.
In addition to food, people in Gaza saw a sharp drop in water releases from Israel. Rights group Oxfam said that, 100 days into the “ceasefire”, Gaza is still deliberately deprived of water as aid groups are forced to cat under an illegal blockade.
Israel also has a “scorched earthA policy that systematically destroys infrastructure for agricultural production.
By August 2025, it is estimated that the Israeli army had destroyed 90 percent of agricultural land and 2,500 chicken farms. The army focused its operations on areas near the security barrier in the north, south and east of the Gaza Strip.
Mohammad Abu Odeh, a spokesman for Gaza’s Ministry of Agriculture, has warned that Israeli forces’ destruction and control of farmland will affect the food and vegetable supply chain for the Strip’s nearly two million people.
The illusion of help
Palestinian officials and analysts suggest that Israel’s strategy is to withhold aid and sometimes manipulate how it is distributed.
Political analyst Abdullah Akrabawi told Al Jazeera Arabic that Israel and the US have tried to create their own aid distribution system, such as Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), but failed. Hundreds of Palestinians were killed at GHF sites trying to access food.
“The United States came up with a pier and contracted companies … and failed,” Akrabavi said. He noted that these activities were “supporting criminal pockets” or an attempt to distribute aid to specific families, “thereby isolating Hamas – the resistance”.
Re-Engineering Society
Analysts say the starvation strategy was used not only for military gain, but also to create “anti-resistance” sentiment in Gaza.
“The goal is to break the Palestinian resistance by affecting the social base that accepts it,” Basharat explained. He argues that Israel aims to “re-engineer the Palestinian human” whose only cognitive focus is basic survival, rendering them incapable of political thought.
Analysts have described many of the strategies Israeli authorities have adopted to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, cloaking them in misleading terms such as encouraging them.Voluntary migration“
Mohanad Mustafa, an expert on Israeli affairs, said it was a pejorative term for forced displacement. “You starve people, destroy infrastructure … and finally, you ask them: ‘Do you want to migrate?'” Mustafa said Al Jazeera Arabic Channel. “This is forced displacement, not voluntary migration.”
Israeli rights activists have repeatedly pointed to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies to pressure people from Gaza and the occupied West Bank to leave.
Alice Rothschild, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, described the policies as “disgraceful mechanics”. she in detail The system forced hungry citizens to walk miles to feeding centers to get help, “caging” them. “This is all part of the effort to destroy Gaza,” she said.
A future defined by hunger
Today, despite the ongoing Gaza “truce” – which continues despite regular Israeli attacks – the destruction of Gaza’s agricultural backbone means the Strip is completely dependent on external aid, giving Israel permanent control.
The officially recorded 475 deaths are only the tip of the iceberg.
For many Palestinians, the war can theoretically be “paused,” but for a generation of Palestinians, the man-made hunger, physical and political wounds may take decades to heal.