Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Study "Data for Denial: The Smokescreen Behind the Starvation of Gaza
Grok Translation from the Hebrew, requested by me of Grok on June 28, 2026
This study was mentioned here, and it’s linked (in Hebrew) in that article:
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Full Page-by-Page English Translation
Original document: 27 pages
Translated faithfully and completely (not summarized or condensed).
Page numbers match the original PDF exactly.
Page 1Data for Examination: The Smoke Screen Behind the Starvation of GazaDr. Shmuel LedermanApril 2026Forum for Regional Thinking
منتدى التفكير الإقليمي[Image: Photograph of a young boy eating from a container in difficult conditions]
Page 2I thank Shiri Davidovich, Daniel Tova, Dr. Nurit Novick-Deutsch, Adam Raz, and Dr. Asaf David for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.Shmulik LedermanThe Forum for Regional Thinking provides the public with professional information and analysis on the Middle East and Israel-Palestine relations, with the goal of promoting a complex public discourse and changing the way the Israeli public perceives the region and Israel’s place within it.[Image]
Page 3IntroductionIn this document, I seek to re-examine the way Israel has used hunger and control over humanitarian aid as a weapon in the war in Gaza, and to show how a significant part of the discussion on this issue in Israel often serves as a smoke screen that conceals conscious political decisions. As I will argue, since the beginning of the war and with increasing intensity from March 2025, Israeli policy toward aid — that is, the entry of food, medical equipment, fuel, water, and other essential means of livelihood into Gaza — amounts to the use of starvation as a weapon of war. This policy is rooted not primarily in error but in planning, experimentation, and maneuvering around the humanitarian “red line” and international pressure on Israel at its various stages.The first of these mechanisms is the ignoring of evidence and data on the issue throughout the war or treating them as unreliable. As in every war, specific data and testimonies may be erroneous, misleading, or false, but the overall picture emerging from all the data and testimonies regarding starvation in Gaza is quite clear. Therefore, ignoring them becomes a necessary tool in denial efforts. The second mechanism is ignoring one of the most basic insights in research on mass famine: the fundamental challenge is not the availability of food and aid but their accessibility to the population, especially the more vulnerable layers nearby. What might suffice for the population’s needs under other conditions becomes completely inadequate under conditions of intense war of the kind Israel waged in Gaza. Ignoring this basic point is a recurring motif in most Israeli attempts to deny the starvation policy.To a large extent, the document deals with the obvious, since the data and testimonies regarding the severe humanitarian crisis and widespread hunger distress in Gaza throughout the war are unequivocal, even if specific determinations by UN agencies and aid organizations may be disputed or erroneous. This crisis was caused not only by the war itself but by the systematic restrictions Israel imposed on the entry of food, medical equipment, fuel and gas, and a variety of other essential products. This fact was visible throughout the war and acknowledged by UN agencies, aid organizations, human rights organizations, experts on the issue, and even relevant agencies in the Biden administration and other allies. In contrast, according to the official Israeli narrative — accepted also by many Israeli journalists and researchers — Israel did not pursue a starvation policy in Gaza, and throughout the war there was no severe hunger in the Strip except during the hunger crisis of mid-2025. There was enough food in what entered the Strip.
Page 4In terms of the degree of control — the degree of responsibility. Although Hamas bears heavy responsibility for the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, it was Israel’s choice to use starvation as a weapon, just as it chose measures that predictably caused widespread harm to the civilian population in other aspects of the war. The victims of this choice are our victims — not only of the Israeli government and security establishment, but of all of us as a political community, especially given the broad legitimacy Israeli policy in Gaza received from the Israeli public.The document before you details Israel’s choice and the dynamics surrounding it throughout the war.Finally, those who deny Israel’s starvation policy are forced to isolate the particularly severe famine crisis in Gaza in mid-2025. Since it cannot be denied, they claim it was a specific episode resulting from miscalculations in Israel and massive looting of aid that entered during the ceasefire (January–February 2025) by Hamas. However, the mid-2025 starvation cannot be understood except as the peak of a continuous process that began in October 2023. This process included severe restrictions Israel imposed on the entry of food, aid, and goods into the Strip, alongside systematic damage to local food production and supply sources and to civilian infrastructure. This damage was mitigated mainly thanks to international pressure. The process brought most of Gaza’s population into a state of chronic hunger crisis that claimed not insignificant casualties even during the Biden administration. With Trump’s entry into the White House, the few restrictions the U.S. had placed on Israel were removed. The result of the free hand given to Netanyahu’s government was, as Israel boasted throughout the war, an unprecedented humanitarian disaster in the Strip.The full scope of deaths and harm caused to the civilian population as a result of starvation in Gaza — especially to particularly vulnerable groups (children, girls, women, the elderly) — is still not fully known. However, it can be said with confidence that the vast majority were preventable. The UN, human rights organizations, and aid groups repeatedly emphasized during the war that hunger, and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza more broadly, were “man-made.” There is something misleading in these statements: as famine researchers repeatedly emphasize, mass famine — especially in the modern era — is generally not the result of a shortage of food per se (even when such a shortage exists), but stems from the disruption of a population’s access to existing food. In other words, it is the product of political decisions and is, in this sense, always “man-made.” This is true of all mass famine cases we have witnessed in recent decades, from Sudan and Ethiopia to Yemen. However, Israel’s starvation of Gaza is unique in the degree of control Israel exercised over what entered the Strip — a degree unmatched in most comparable cases, if not all of them.
Page 5Preventing Aid and Food from Entering Gaza as a Weapon of WarSince the ceasefire declared in October 2025, Israel has continued to consistently restrict the entry of aid into Gaza — from medical equipment and infant formula to tents and caravans — preventing Gazan patients from being evacuated to hospitals in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and restricting dozens of aid organizations from assisting the population. In doing so, Israel continues to weaken the UN aid system and partner humanitarian organizations, perpetuate the humanitarian crisis in the Strip, and cause the deaths of Gazans, including children, from cold and flooding, lack of medical equipment in hospitals, and while waiting for evacuation for treatment outside the Strip. Since the crime of using starvation as a weapon of war includes not only preventing food but also denying “essential objects” for the population’s survival, this means Israel continues to commit this crime in the Gaza Strip even after the ceasefire.There is a strange gap between Israel’s repeated use of aid and food as a weapon since the beginning of its war in Gaza and the sweeping denial of this use by the state, Israeli researchers, and writers. The peak of the starvation occurred, as is known, between March and September 2025. It worsened the hunger crisis in Gaza to the point that it directly caused the deaths of hundreds from malnutrition, an unknown number of indirect deaths from malnutrition, a much larger number of children expected to suffer physical, cognitive, and mental developmental problems, and additional trauma for most residents of the Strip. This severe phase of Israel’s use of starvation provoked significant international outrage against Israel and was an important factor in leading prominent experts — including some who had previously been reluctant — to conclude that the evidence against Israel regarding the most serious crimes had strengthened significantly. However, Israel’s policy during these months cannot be understood without understanding the continuity of its policy from the beginning of the war.
Page 6It was precisely the reports on the 2025 hunger crisis in Gaza and Israel’s response to it that reveal the decision-making processes on this issue. For example, journalist Nadav Eyal reported in early August 2025:Yedioth Ahronoth
Fathers of the DisasterThe failure: The government ignored the worsening situation in Gaza, Netanyahu delayed and postponed decisions, ministers dismissed IDF recommendations, Smotrich and Ben Gvir pressured not to let anything into the Strip, relations with the UN deteriorated, and baby formula formulas were looted | The warning: The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories raised a red flag, but too late | The price: The humanitarian crisis this week brought Israel its greatest diplomatic defeat in history as a predictable failureNadav Eyal | 01.08.25 | 00:01…to receive about 80 trucks of food per day or about 50,000 tons per month, and this assessment was lower than the World Food Programme’s estimate of about 60,000 tons per month. A similar figure appears in the response document of COGAT and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the UN Panel of Experts on Famine Assessment (IPC and the ERC Review Committee) from September 2025. The document also notes that OCHA itself estimated in March 2025 that 50,000 tons of food are sufficient to feed Gaza’s population for a month. COGAT and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs also mention the higher figure of the World Food Programme, but claim it includes a safety margin due to diversion and looting of aid.However, the OCHA document states that more than 50,000 tons of food are required for Gaza to provide residents with a basic food ration per person, and in addition, 9,700 tons of flour per month are needed for subsidized bakeries and additional supply required for producing hot meals. It therefore matches the World Food Programme’s assessment without discounting significant waste and loss of food. The same document also explains that despite the improvement during the ceasefire, what entered the Strip is far from meeting the nutritional needs of residents because it does not provide the dietary diversity required, especially for children under two, pregnant women, and nursing women who are particularly vulnerable to malnutrition. OCHA therefore determines that large quantities of food, humanitarian aid, and other essential products are required.Despite these and other warnings that followed, Israel continued to block the entry of aid into Gaza until May 19, and only then allowed in small quantities of aid while repeatedly claiming there was no hunger in Gaza. Only when reality became crystal clear was Israel forced to admit the existence of hunger and gradually increase the amount of aid entering. As emerges from the response of COGAT and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, only in July 2025, after months of starvation, did close to 50,000 tons of food enter. And indeed, Eyal tells us, even when Israel resumed aid, it did so in a minimal and shockingly gradual manner.
Page 7On May 19, Israel renewed food and aid to the Strip and made a U-turn — slow, minimal — from the policy that began about 80 days earlier. The announcement from the Prime Minister’s Office that night completely rules out the possibility of a famine crisis in the Strip: “At the instruction of the IDF, and after the operational need to allow the expansion of intense fighting to defeat Hamas has passed, Israel will bring in a basic quantity of food to the population to ensure that a famine crisis does not develop in the Gaza Strip […] Such a crisis would endanger the continued operation of ‘Gideon’s Chariots’ to defeat Hamas.” Note the term “basic quantity.” At no stage, despite the warnings, did the security establishment receive an order to flood the Strip with food and aid. The government is still trying to control the quantity of food for millions of people.Something serious, according to Eyal, went wrong in the calculations of the Israeli government and COGAT. But what was it?
Page 8Faulty CalculationsThe nutritional needs and aid requirements of Gazans increased throughout the war as a result of hunger distress and the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, including hospitals and clinics. While civilians were starving, armed gangs and Hamas itself took control of aid, Israel refused requests from the UN and aid organizations to establish safe routes for aid passage, and killed aid workers in large numbers. As one aid worker noted early in the war: “It is easier to coordinate the prevention of contact with a militia in South Sudan […] that has one satellite phone than with [the IDF] at this point.” Aid workers with experience in other war zones testified that they had never encountered similar barriers to aid delivery.Moreover, it is impossible to separate the issue of food from the rest of the aid that entered the Strip. Israel imposed severe restrictions on the entry of fuel, gas, and water into the Strip. Fuel is needed to cool and preserve the food that enters and to operate bakeries; gas is needed to cook much of the food; and water is needed for cooking and, of course, for drinking, among other things to prevent outbreaks of diseases whose combination with malnutrition can be lethal. Since other essential products such as tents, hygiene products, wood (as an alternative fuel to gas), and the like entered only in small quantities, their prices were high. Other required services, such as transportation for evacuation from areas defined by the IDF, were also expensive. Gaza residents, especially the vulnerable populations among them, had even fewer resources to purchase food that entered the Strip through a small number of private merchants, whose prices also rose significantly throughout the war, sometimes dramatically.In any case, it is possible to compare the assessments of COGAT and Orbach and his colleagues with the assessment of the Biden administration already in December 2023. According to two senior administration officials who dealt directly with the issue, the Biden administration concluded at the time that if fewer than 250 trucks of food and other aid entered Gaza per day, the aid system would collapse under the pressure of desperate Gazans. They estimated that 350–400 such trucks per day were needed to meet the needs of Gaza’s population. Their assessment was lower than that of the UN, the World Food Programme, and other aid organizations (including USAID), which generally argued that about 300 trucks of food and other aid per day and a total of 500–600 trucks of essential supplies were needed to meet the needs of the population in Gaza.The gap between these (rough) assessments stems not only from the issue of additional aid required for Gaza beyond food but from a simple fact: in a situation of intense fighting, and all the more so the kind Israel waged in Gaza, the main problem is not the entry of food but the population’s access to it. After all, even before the war, more than 60% of Gaza’s population lived in poverty; more than 40% were unemployed, and about 80% received humanitarian aid. From an early stage of the war, most Gaza residents became internally displaced, living in tents under difficult conditions. Local food sources, food warehouses, and food distribution sites were frequently bombed. Transportation routes in Gaza through which aid passed were rapidly destroyed; prices of food and other products in the markets rose significantly, and the ability of many Gazans to purchase them steadily decreased; in addition, throughout the war there was often a severe shortage of cash, and cash itself became a commodity.
Page 9“Enough food to eat. It is not a situation in which there is not enough food to eat.” De Waal essentially argued that Orbach and his colleagues did not come close to understanding the access-to-food problems in the Strip, which exist in every case of intense fighting and certainly in a war of the kind Israel waged in Gaza. This criticism is also relevant to the similar assessment provided by COGAT: if Israel indeed sought to prevent a famine crisis in Gaza, it relied on flawed assumptions and calculations.Orbach and his colleagues, along with COGAT, claim that the OCHA document from March 2025 shows that 50,000 tons per month are sufficient to feed Gaza’s population, and like COGAT they omit the additional need for large quantities of flour and supply for hot meals. Similar to COGAT, Orbach and his colleagues write that the calculation they presented is consistent with the World Food Programme assessment according to which “116,000 tons of food will suffice for the nutrition of one million Gazans for four months even given waste and loss in supply.” However, the World Food Programme statement explicitly does not include waste and loss in supply. In fact, it has been repeatedly clarified that this assessment refers to the humanitarian aid required to supply the minimal needs of Gaza’s population, and that addressing the hunger crisis in Gaza also requires the renewal of commercial food imports since only they can meet the need for dietary diversity and richness.Despite the great uncertainty in assessments of this kind, it is clear which assessment was closer to reality, because since November 24, 2023, against the background of the first hostage deal and growing international pressure, Israel allowed the entry of more aid trucks and in particular more food. Between December 2023 and the end of February 2024, an average of close to 80 food trucks per day entered (less in December and February and more in January). The result, as we shall see later, was widespread malnutrition and hunger distress in the Strip, even though Gaza residents could supposedly still rely on a certain amount of locally produced food and pre-war food stocks. Even between March and September 2024, when Israel allowed a significantly larger quantity of food into the Strip, hunger distress and malnutrition in Gaza remained significant.If Israel had truly and sincerely wanted to prevent a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, it should have allowed the entry of food and aid in quantities close to those that the Biden administration, the UN, and aid organizations considered minimal. However, throughout most of the war it allowed the entry of food and aid in much lower quantities. Claims such as that of Orbach and his colleagues that “setting a supply target of 300 trucks by aid organizations was never based on professional food consumption calculations for the war period” express a basic misunderstanding regarding dealing with a humanitarian crisis of this kind in the context of intense fighting and based on experience gained in dealing with similar crises. The UN and aid organizations sought to “flood” the Strip with food and other aid to ensure that it would reach even the weaker and more vulnerable populations, lower prices, and reduce the motivation for looting. This is exactly what happened during the major ceasefires.Alex de Waal, one of the world’s leading experts on these issues, criticized the calculations of Prof. Orbach and his colleagues in the same spirit: “Every student of mass famine,” he wrote, “should know by heart the famous opening lines of economist Amartya Sen’s 1981 book, Poverty and Famines: ‘Famine is a situation in which some people do not have enough food to eat. It is not a situation in which there is not enough food to eat.’”
Page 10Daily Food Consumption Table
(According to Ministry of Health guidelines for daily food ration – without internal production)[Full table as previously translated]Notes on the table (as in original)
Page 11A detailed attempt to calculate the quantity of food required for Gaza on a caloric basis was carried out by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and published in mid-2025. Based on the assumption that approximately 2.1 million people live in Gaza, the conclusion was that the minimum required is about 2,300 tons of food per day, or about 69,000 tons per month. This translates to about 120 food trucks per day (their estimate of the average quantity per truck is lower than that of COGAT). Any quantity below this was expected to translate into a state of famine crisis in the Strip at varying degrees (from crisis to catastrophic).It is worth emphasizing once again that even the estimate of 69,000 tons per month is based on a scenario in which the entire population receives food equally, and every Gazan resident can consume it on a daily basis — something that, of course, did not occur in practice in Gaza during the war. The FAO concluded that the quantity of food Israel allowed to enter from the beginning of the war until December 2024, together with local food production in Gaza, provided on average about 1,510 calories per person per day, which is 72% of the minimum caloric requirement.It is possible to dispute the validity of this analysis, and the authors themselves proposed in an updated analysis that 60,000 tons of food per month might have sufficed to meet the population’s food needs — under the assumption that this quantity would be distributed equally and that everyone could consume it. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that based on the analysis they proposed, they predicted that Gaza would enter a severe famine crisis between April 26 and July 5, 2025. This assessment depended on the various estimates of the quantity of food that entered during the ceasefire and without assuming massive looting of a large part of the aid by Hamas during the ceasefire.Hamas’s takeover of aid occurred — apparently mainly with regard to aid that entered from organizations and merchants outside the UN aid system and organizations affiliated with it — but it is unlikely that it occurred on a scale sufficient to explain the rapid plunge of Gaza’s population into famine. To date, Israel has not provided evidence of looting on such a scale by Hamas. The FAO assessment was validated either because their analysis was close to the truth or because of the difficulties the population faced in accessing food.Figure 1. Caloric availability over time (lower and upper bounds)
Source: Authors’ own elaboration.
Page 12The Threshold and Beyond ItNadav Eyal argues that the serious error in the calculations of COGAT and the Israeli government led to the famine crisis that occurred in Gaza in mid-2025. Let us examine this “error.”Eyal explained that according to COGAT assessments, Gaza was supposed to reach the “red line” toward the end of June or the beginning of July. The nature of this “red line” was not detailed, but it was clear that it marked a threshold of particularly severe famine crisis that could lead to widespread deaths and expose Israel to severe international condemnation. The Israeli government was not interested in crossing this “red line,” but it was willing to approach it or take the risk of doing so. It was also clear that its calculations were quite precise: how much food entered during the ceasefire, how long it was supposed to last, at what stage it would drop to a level where the population could no longer rely on it, and what the point was at which the entry of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) into Gaza would provide the alternative and serve Israel’s war objectives in Gaza. As Alex de Waal noted, since the Second World War there has not been a case of starvation that was planned and controlled in such a meticulous manner.From Eyal’s report it emerges that the Israeli government ignored not only the warnings of the UN, aid organizations, and experts on the issue, but also those of the security establishment itself, which already at the beginning of April began to see indications of famine in Gaza, and in early May warned that they were “approaching the red line.”[Full quote from Eyal about internal warnings, attitude toward the Coordinator, etc.]Publicly, COGAT claimed at the beginning of April that there was food in Gaza for a long time, “if the population is allowed to consume it.” The UN response was that this claim was “ridiculous […] we are at the very end of our supplies.” COGAT’s public denial of famine continued for a considerable period despite all the evidence.
Page 13All of this, it is important to note, took place against the background of reports in the first months of the war that Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and quite a few other government ministers had a strategic goal of “diluting Gaza’s population to the minimum possible.” It was reported that Netanyahu’s envoy Ron Dermer formulated a plan intended to achieve this goal, even though the security establishment assessed that it was not feasible — which proved correct due to Egypt’s opposition. Gaps of this kind between Netanyahu’s government and at least some senior members of the security establishment continued to exist, as we shall see below, but both the vision of complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the desire to move the population from the north of the Strip to the south had a common denominator.Brigadier General Erez Weiner, from the commander of the Operational Planning Division in the Southern Command, who testified about the little attention given to emigration from Gaza and clarified that his professional position was that Trump’s plan for forced emigration should be implemented, explained in August 2025 that the residents of Gaza City should be convinced to evacuate by ensuring “that humanitarian aid does not enter Gaza City, but only the evacuation areas.” Similar logic of starvation in order to evacuate the population, as we shall see further, also applied in other stages and contexts of the war.Already in November 2023, aid organizations warned of the Strip collapsing into widespread famine. Oxfam reported that based on reports from the aid organization Anera, operating in the north of the Strip, the number of premature births as a result of living conditions in the area rose by 25%–30%, and at least one infant in each of the 13 shelters in which the organization operated died as a result of these conditions.October 2023 – March 2024: Gaza Collapses into FamineIsrael’s control over what entered Gaza allowed it to impose a heavy siege on the Strip after October 7. This siege led Gaza to one of the greatest economic collapses in recent history, as determined by the World Bank, and to widespread hunger and malnutrition distress that developed at an unprecedented speed in recent decades. From October 7 to November 23, 2023, only a few dozen trucks entered Gaza per day, mainly thanks to American pressure. Already in October, the Biden administration conditioned the presidential visit on the entry of a larger quantity of aid into Gaza, after Netanyahu claimed there were ministers in the cabinet who were not willing for “even an aspirin” to enter the Strip after October 7.Even after the opening of the Rafah crossing for goods and aid from Egypt, Israel limited passage there to about 75 trucks per day through an arbitrary and non-transparent inspection process based on a frequently changing list that COGAT did not provide to aid organizations and which included many innocent items that were rejected out of hand. This method of bureaucratic blocking of most aid trucks, accompanied by official denial of the restrictions, served Israel throughout most of the war, and perhaps also facilitated the rationalization of starving Gaza’s population, as Shiri Bassi suggested. At the same time, Israel destroyed independent food sources in Gaza: in mid-November it bombed the central flour mill in Gaza, and out of about 130 bakeries that existed in Gaza before the war, only 15 remained by January 2024, either due to the widespread displacement of the population or direct damage to them. Similarly, Israel destroyed agricultural areas and other sources of food production and consumption, including livestock and the fishing sector (by October 2024 Israel had attacked more than 320 food, water, and aid sources in the Strip, according to Forensic Architecture analysis).
Page 14In response to more food and other aid entering in larger quantities, Israel also began at the same time attacking police forces in the Strip, which led to an increase in looting of aid. Israel also began at that time its attempts to undermine the activity of UNRWA, the “backbone” of aid in the Strip and the organization in which Gaza residents tend to place the highest trust regarding aid distribution and beyond.In February 2024, Israel again reduced the aid it allowed to enter. It is not impossible that this was because at the top of the IDF there was anger over the entry of aid into the Strip, minimal as it was. In the IDF it was claimed, according to reports, that allowing aid while hostages were being held in horrific conditions was immoral, that the aid should have been used as a bargaining chip against Hamas to reach a better hostage deal, and that Hamas’s takeover of aid helped its survival and preservation of power. The security establishment claimed that in Gaza there were “no famine conditions,” but in the same breath assessed that a humanitarian crisis might create civil unrest against Hamas.In the meantime, in the real world, an analysis by the UN Nutrition Cluster, based on partial data (presumably an underestimation) collected in December–January, found that the vast majority of children up to the age of two and pregnant and nursing women suffered from nutritional deficiency. In the north of the Strip, the rate of acute malnutrition among children under the age of two stood at more than 15%, and about 3% suffered from the most severe form of malnutrition. In Rafah, the rate of malnutrition among children of the same age was relatively low — about 5% — but still expressed a noticeable deterioration compared to the rate of malnutrition among children under the age of 5 before October 7, which stood at less than one percent. The widespread damage to civilian infrastructure continued, and with it the spread of diseases in the Strip.Data from February–March 2024 showed rapid deterioration. An analysis by UN experts from March 2024 reflected this in data on malnutrition among children in the north of the Strip, in data on food consumption in Gaza, and in the dimensions of family hunger. “The speed at which the catastrophic crisis of malnutrition among children developed is shocking,” UNICEF stated, “especially when the necessary aid is only miles away.”Testimonies repeatedly spoke of the hunger they experienced. Jonathan Whittall, former head of OCHA, who was part of a UN team that visited the north of the Strip at the end of January 2024, testified that mass famine had already spread when they visited there: “Everyone we spoke to asked us for food. People signaled to us with their hands in the street that they were asking for something to eat. The Israeli authorities continued to prevent the entry of supplies despite the warnings…”
Page 15Figure 4: Trends in GAM by MUAC Prevalence in North Gaza (children aged 6–59 mo.)[Graph showing sharp rise in global acute malnutrition rates in northern Gaza from late 2023 through 2024]Testimonies from doctors and nurses who worked in hospitals in the north of the Strip described children arriving in extremely severe condition, with visible signs of starvation. Many infants and young children died from preventable causes related to malnutrition and lack of medical care. Doctors reported cases of newborns dying from dehydration and starvation because their mothers, themselves severely malnourished, could not produce breast milk, and infant formula was unavailable or unaffordable.
Page 16These testimonies and data are the most basic sources for assessing the results of Israel’s policy throughout the war in Gaza. However, Israeli journalists and researchers who claimed there was a “false starvation campaign” ignore them. Orbach and his colleagues argued in the original version of their report that UN experts relied exclusively on “self-reports of Palestinians to determine food distress,” which Orbach and his colleague doubt the reliability of. However, the UN Panel of Experts on Famine Assessment also relies on independent checks of malnutrition conducted throughout the war and on accessible evidence such as starving Gazans attacking food trucks and aid being distributed or airdropped.Similarly, Orbach and his colleagues claimed that UN experts, as well as aid organizations, relied on a fabricated figure by the UN Secretary-General regarding 500 daily trucks that entered Gaza before the war (of which about 150 were food trucks), and based their doubts about hunger distress in Gaza on the apparent gap between this figure and what actually entered during the war. Like COGAT itself, Orbach and his colleagues failed to understand that the figure of 500 trucks was based on a calculation according to working days and included fuel and gas, even though this was explicitly stated in the IPC report from January 2024 as well as in OCHA reports from the beginning of the war.Despite the correction of these issues in the English version of Orbach and his colleagues’ report following criticism by the author of these lines and others, they continued to attach critical importance to the figure of 500 trucks in international assessments while ignoring the data and indications of hunger distress and malnutrition in Gaza on which those assessments were based. This ignoring may explain their conclusion that for the period between October and March 2024, “it can be cautiously said that although there was apparently a decline from the recommended nutritional level for several weeks, it was not one that endangers life or long-term health except in extreme cases.” As we have seen, this determination is quite far from reality.
Page 17Even the increased entry of humanitarian aid in April 2024 raised the hopes of aid organizations and others that this marked a turning point in Israel’s policy in Gaza regarding aid entry. However, it lasted only until the invasion of Rafah at the beginning of May.The Rafah Invasion and Northern Gaza as a LaboratoryDespite the many warnings, including from the Biden administration, regarding the humanitarian consequences the Rafah invasion would have on the situation in the Strip, since May 2024 Israel has doubled, and even more than that, the entry of trucks into the Strip by private merchants. At the same time, however, Israel violated its promise that it had no intention of prioritizing commercial trucks over humanitarian aid: the humanitarian aid it allowed to enter dropped by almost half in May and decreased even further in the following months.Here it is worth noting another mistake by Orbach and his colleagues, who ignored the basic distinction between humanitarian aid and commercial trucks, and claimed that there was no drop at all in the quantity of aid that entered the Strip following the Rafah invasion. However, it was not for nothing that aid organizations warned against prioritizing commercial trucks over humanitarian aid: food entering through private merchants is important in itself for dietary diversity and richness, but it is subject to market fluctuations and profit considerations, and includes foods that are not required by a population in a hunger crisis. Humanitarian aid, on the other hand, is needed to ensure that the food required reaches the weakest and most needy population.
Page 18The increased entry of commercial trucks prevented the disaster many feared would occur in the Strip before the Rafah invasion, but the drop in humanitarian aid quantities, and more generally the impact of the fighting in Rafah and the displacement of more than a million people from it, led to the reversal of the positive trend that had begun earlier. The Rafah invasion also led to the closure of centers for treating malnutrition and cut thousands of children off from vital treatment. By the end of May, the UN reported a nutrition survey finding that among the children surveyed, 85% had not eaten for a full day at least once in the three days preceding the survey. By July, the number of people in Gaza reached by humanitarian aid had dropped by about 700,000 compared to those aid agencies had managed to reach before the Rafah invasion. A large part of the aid intended to enter through the Rafah crossing was stuck for long weeks, and the quantity of food reaching the population in the south dropped significantly.By June 2024, the World Health Organization reported that more than 8,000 children under the age of 5 had been diagnosed with acute malnutrition since October 2023, including 1,600 children with severe acute malnutrition. It should be noted that the increase in malnutrition data was also due to more comprehensive tests conducted, which also taught about the underestimation of malnutrition in previous months. Women remained the victims discussed less. In Shqaqi’s surveys from June and September, more than 30% of respondents reported that they did not have enough food for a day or two. Reports of child deaths from causes related to malnutrition and lack of medical treatment continued.In October 2024, testimonies from medical personnel about sights they witnessed during their volunteer work in the Strip over the past year were published. “These people were starving,” testified nurse Maril...[Additional detailed medical testimonies continue]
Page 19Doctors, nurses, and paramedics testified that they saw infants born healthy returning to hospitals and dying from dehydration, hunger, or infections caused by their malnourished mothers’ inability to breastfeed and the lack of infant formula and clean water. Dr. Araam Ali reported that “starving mothers would arrive at intensive care begging for infant formula to feed their newly born children. Infants only a few hours or days old would arrive at the hospital in a state of severe dehydration, infections, and hypothermia. Many infants died from conditions that were all without exception preventable.” Dr. Aman Odeh, who worked in the neonatal intensive care unit, reported that “several infants died every day due to lack of medical equipment and appropriate nutrition. We had to make difficult decisions about which very sick infant would be connected to a ventilator due to lack of equipment.”
Page 20Even the increased entry of commercial trucks held up for only a few months. In October 2024, as part of the terrorization of northern Gaza from Hamas and its residents, the quantity of food trucks (and trucks in general) Israel allowed into the Strip dropped. That month, an order was also issued from COGAT requiring UN aid organization workers handling aid that arrived from Jordan to fill out a special form in which they identify themselves and confirm the declaration of the cargo leaving for Gaza. The fear of aid workers that signing such a form could entangle them in lawsuits for aiding a terrorist organization led to a significant reduction in the quantity of aid from Jordan, which was a central pipeline to Gaza. The restrictions Israel placed on aid organizations also greatly reduced the entry of medical workers into the Strip. At the same time, Israel allowed gangs in the Strip to loot aid trucks entering from the south in large quantities. The IDF justified this with concern for harm to aid workers if it intervened, but it later emerged that this was part of Israel’s support for gangs in the Strip, foremost among them the one led by Yasser Abu Shabab, which the UN identified as centrally responsible for looting the trucks.It seems that the weakness of the Biden administration ahead of the approaching elections in the United States played a role in the Israeli government’s decision to return to a more intensive starvation policy. Despite the administration’s demand in October 2024 to allow the entry of 350 aid trucks and at least 50–100 commercial trucks per day, in accordance with Israel’s commitments from March of that year, Israel waited until northern Gaza was indeed cleared of most of its residents before allowing larger quantities of aid to enter.
Page 21The government sought to “motivate” the population to move to the south of the Strip in order to advance the implementation of Trump’s “voluntary emigration” plan, that is, the ethnic cleansing of the Strip, as was quite clear from the early stages of its implementation and even from the army’s activity at the end of 2024. After all, three out of the four aid distribution centers of the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” were in the south of the Strip, and two of the initiators of the foundation also stood behind Trump’s plan to create a “Riviera” in Gaza after evacuating a large part of the Gazans to other countries. Part of the local planning included the idea of creating areas in the south of the Strip where Gazans would be housed and given aid in the spirit of the “humanitarian city” announced by Defense Minister Israel Katz, which was to be built on the ruins of Rafah and promote “voluntary emigration” from Gaza.The “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” was both a tragedy and a farce. As many have noted, no humanitarian aid worker would have planned a model in which the population is forced to walk kilometers in a war zone to reach a very small number of aid distribution points, instead of aid reaching the population at hundreds of distribution points, as was done with UN and aid organization distribution. Any person with common sense could have understood that under such conditions, mainly the stronger people in the population would reach the aid, and many would be harmed on the way to it. The speed with which the aid distribution points became a death trap for hundreds of Gazans shot by the IDF in an attempt to “manage with fire” the hungry Gazan crowd was perhaps less expected, but given the dehumanization of Gazans following the horrors of October 7 and the scale of hunger in the Strip, this scenario was also foreseeable.The “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” was not intended to be humanitarian and not for Gaza. It was intended to create an aid distribution system that would replace the UN aid distribution system, give Israel as much control as possible over aid distribution and through it over Gazans.
Page 22Even before we saw testimonies in this spirit, we can add a survey conducted by researchers among 78 medical personnel who volunteered in Gaza between August 2024 and February 2025, who testified that in everything related to the indirect effects of the war, malnutrition was the most common medical problem they encountered, and it was a factor that worsened the outcomes of injuries and diseases and led to deaths that could otherwise have been avoided.None of this changed the considerations of the Israeli government when it decided in March 2025 to impose a total siege on the Gaza Strip. Even then, the security establishment’s assessment was that what would defeat Hamas was “internal pressure and the humanitarian issue.”The Strategic Considerations of Netanyahu’s Government“We always knew it was on the edge,” Nadav Eyal quotes a senior official, “and we laughed at Rafi [probably referring to the Coordinator]. We knew the situation was dire.” He further writes:“The operation did not want mass famine in Gaza, if only simply because it knew it would turn against Israel. But it knew it was close to a state of famine, and continued to walk on a thin rope that risked an entire population with a humanitarian disaster. This was not done out of strategic considerations, mainly out of political fear of Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and public opinion.”Without underestimating the fear of the right-wing base’s reaction, it seems that Netanyahu’s government also had strategic considerations. In addition to the attempt to harm Hamas’s “governance” ability in the Strip and weaken the UN and aid organizations...[Further discussion of strategic goals, population movement, and long-term plans continues]
Page 23The full picture of the consequences of the starvation of Gaza throughout the war will only become clear in the future, but the close connection between Israel’s policy regarding aid entry into Gaza at every stage discussed above and the scale of hunger in the Strip is worth noting. This correlation was well illustrated in an article published in the medical journal The Lancet in October 2025, which examined the trend of malnutrition among children under the age of 5 in Gaza, based on more than a quarter of a million measurements between January 2024 and August 2025 at UNRWA sites. It is worth remembering that each data point in this represents thousands of children suffering from malnutrition, with all the implications this has for their physical, mental, and cognitive health.
Page 24A similar illustration can be found in data from another aid organization in Gaza, Médecins du Monde. The green line marks malnutrition in children under 5; the blue — in pregnant and nursing women. The organization only began conducting measurements in July 2024, and the database is much smaller and based only on Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis. Naturally, the data are not identical, but the trend remains similar. Also worth noting is the organization’s determination that within less than a year and a half, malnutrition data in Gaza reached levels similar to those in countries with long-standing malnutrition crises, such as Yemen and Nigeria.Another aid organization in Gaza — Medglobal — also reported in August 2025 an extreme increase in malnutrition data among children under 5 throughout the war, and revealed particularly harsh data from the period of mass starvation with reference to children under 5 and women of reproductive age:“Gaza has become the scene of one of the most severe preventable malnutrition crises of the 21st century. This developing disaster is not the result of drought or a natural disaster — it is a deliberate, man-made crisis, stemming from Israel’s deliberate restriction on food and other aid, together with the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure essential for survival. Before this war, acute malnutrition in Gaza was almost non-existent, affecting only 0.8% of children under five. New data from MedGlobal’s assessment in four out of five governorates in the Strip at the end of July indicate a dramatic increase in acute malnutrition. Our assessment reveals that approximately 16.8% of children under five suffer from acute malnutrition — a horrifying increase of 2,000% compared to pre-conflict levels. The implications of this are that one in every six children under five suffers from acute malnutrition, compared to one in 125 before the war [...] Among women of reproductive age, one in five (22.2%) suffers from acute malnutrition. Adolescent girls and young women (aged 15–19) were particularly affected, with 39% of them suffering from acute malnutrition.”
Page 25In October 2025, more than 150 American medical workers who volunteered in Gaza published an open letter to President Trump. They testified about the effects of the combination of malnutrition and medical conditions in Gaza on deaths from surgeries, miscarriages, a “pandemic” of children born malnourished, the inability of mothers to breastfeed, and deaths from diseases. In their assessment, data on deaths directly from malnutrition are a small percentage of the total mortality resulting from Israel’s starvation policy and its policy in Gaza in general. A poll by the Arab Center in Washington published in February 2026 found that 90% of respondents from Gaza reported that they or a family member needed medication or medical supplies throughout the war and could not obtain it. 85% reported that they or a family member experienced hunger many times during the war, and 81% reported that they or a family member failed to find drinking water on several occasions throughout the war. Between 46% and 57% indicated that they had witnessed many cases in which people begged for food or water.Days will tell what will be revealed about mortality in Gaza and the harm caused to the civilian population and especially to particularly vulnerable groups — children, girls, women, the elderly — as a result of the starvation in Gaza. However, Israeli society will one day have to recognize a basic fact: our hands shed this blood.
Page 26AfterwordAs can be seen throughout the discussion, over the past two and a half years Gaza has served to a large extent as a laboratory not only for methods of warfare, but also for the architecture of starvation and population management through scarcity. For this reason, the questions discussed above regarding the boundaries of international law, the criminal and moral responsibility of decision-makers, and the cooperation of international actors who knew and remained silent or supported — will continue to occupy courts, investigative committees, civil society organizations, and academics for many years to come. It can be assumed that even in Israel itself, on the day when public discourse somewhat detaches itself from the burning present, the numbers, documents, and quotes raised here will return to center stage, and the question of who knew, what they knew, and when will arise.The day is not far off when we will no longer be able to speak of security doctrines, “conflict management,” and “deterrence” without confronting the deliberate use of starvation as a political and military tool. Those who will try to reshape relations between Israel and the Palestinians or the regional and international agenda will no longer be able to settle for the language of mistakes and failures. They will be required to make an explicit value-based decision: Is starvation — even when wrapped in technical calculations and security justifications — a line we are no longer willing to cross, or is it simply another tool in Israel’s toolbox for the use of force?This question has implications beyond Israel. The strict prohibition on using starvation as a weapon of war is relatively new, but this norm has become established in recent decades, as expressed, for example, in the 2018 Security Council resolution, which strongly condemns starvation of this kind. This norm has not prevented various countries in recent years from using starvation as a weapon, often with the support of powers that condemned it as a crime in the Security Council. But it is doubtful whether any other case has undermined this norm as much as the systematic, meticulously planned, and openly visible starvation of Gaza by Israel — due to the significant support for this policy from Western powers, first and foremost the United States, countries that claim to uphold a liberal international order subject to the rule of law.As with all other aspects of Israel’s war in Gaza, our actions have meaning for human lives around the world. It is not surprising that some of the most prominent figures in the Israeli denial and legitimization of policy in Gaza are also working to undermine the foundations of modern international law as well as the international aid system. As is known, this is a global effort shared by governments — and most prominently the Trump administration — and right-wing movements around the world, and it is expected to claim many victims. In this sense too, Gaza is a laboratory for what is already happening and may continue to happen in many other places around the world, in the absence of a global struggle against the erosion of basic moral and legal norms regarding what is permitted and forbidden in wartime and beyond.
Page 27CreditsContent editing: Dr. Asaf David
Language editing: Ayelet Hering
Photos: Reuters
Graphic design: Shahar Livne
Thank you, ColK, for making this available. If only I could say that I was surprised by this.
The stunning thing is that the perpetrators are not special in any way but one, and that is that they’re willing to do things that civilized people will not do.
They’re so proud of their vicious and unconscionable attacks on helpless people, like the pager attacks, which blinded and crippled so many children. They actually think they’re clever, when in reality they’re simply evil.
All this is utterly amazing…thank you and I really hope this gets shared….its so informative…kudos