Starvation as policy: how Israel’s aid blockade deepens the genocide in Gaza

THE Palestinian people are living through one of the most catastrophic horrors of recent history, an event that will be remembered in history books with shame.

Israel has just decided to make it worse by barring more than 30 critical aid groups from operating in Gaza which will leave people trapped without food and medicine, exacerbating starvation. The genocide in Gaza is not only carried out through bombs, bullets and bulldozers. It is also executed through paperwork, border controls and the deliberate denial of food, water, medicine and shelter.

Israel’s systematic obstruction of humanitarian aid is not a secondary failure or an unfortunate by-product of war. It is a central pillar of a policy designed to destroy Palestinian life in Gaza. Even under the guise of a so-called ceasefire, Israel has continued to strangle the Strip. More than 80 days into an agreement announced with much fanfare by the United States, Israeli forces have killed hundreds of Palestinians, carried out close to a thousand violations, and maintained sweeping restrictions on humanitarian access.

What is unfolding is not peace interrupted by breaches, but genocide continuing by other means. International humanitarian law is unequivocal. As the occupying power, Israel has a legal obligation to ensure the civilian population has access to food, medical care, shelter and basic services. Instead, Israel has done the opposite: it has obstructed aid, criminalised humanitarian actors, dismantled life-sustaining infrastructure, and turned starvation into a weapon of war.

Only a fraction of the aid required to sustain Gaza’s population has been allowed to enter. Less than half of the promised humanitarian supplies have crossed the border. Fuel deliveries, essential for hospitals, water pumps, bakeries and sewage treatment, have been reduced to a trickle. As a result, hospitals shut down operating theatres, incubators go dark, dialysis machines stop, and patients die not from lack of medical knowledge, but from lack of electricity. This is not collateral damage. It is policy.

The humanitarian catastrophe has been made even more lethal by Israel’s systematic targeting of shelter. Israel continues to block the entry of prefabricated housing, caravans, tents, construction materials and heavy equipment needed to clear rubble. Thousands of families are forced to live in partially destroyed buildings that collapse during winter storms, or in flimsy tents that flood, freeze and offer no protection from rain or wind.

In recent weeks, children have drowned in flooded displacement camps. Infants have died from exposure to cold. Entire families have been crushed beneath collapsing walls weakened by months of Israeli bombardment. These deaths are not accidents of nature. Winter does not kill by itself. It kills when people are deliberately deprived of shelter.

Human rights organisations have been explicit: Israel is using the blockade as a tool of genocide, creating living conditions calculated to bring about the physical destruction of the population. This language mirrors the definition of genocide under the Genocide Convention, which includes the deliberate infliction of conditions of life intended to destroy a group, in whole or in part. The assault on humanitarian aid has intensified further with Israel’s banning of dozens of international humanitarian organisations.

Doctors Without Borders, the Norwegian Refugee Council and many others now face revoked licences, arbitrary registration requirements and threats of expulsion. These organisations are accused, without a shred of evidence, of links to Palestinian armed groups, a familiar tactic used to delegitimise any institution that alleviates Palestinian suffering. Even the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the backbone of humanitarian support for Palestinian refugees, has been targeted through Israeli legislation stripping it of diplomatic protections, cutting access to utilities, seizing property and criminalising cooperation with it.

These measures directly contradict binding orders from the International Court of Justice, which instructed Israel to facilitate, not obstruct, humanitarian assistance in Gaza. The message is unmistakable: aid is not merely restricted for “security reasons”; it is being dismantled because it keeps Palestinians alive. Nowhere is this clearer than in Gaza’s unfolding famine.

According to international monitoring bodies, more than three-quarters of Gaza’s population faces acute food insecurity. Children are wasting away from malnutrition. Mothers are unable to breastfeed because they themselves are starving. Fresh food including meat, dairy, eggs, fruit and vegetables, is deliberately blocked from entering the Strip. Hunger here is engineered. The long-term consequences are devastating. Malnutrition in childhood permanently damages physical and cognitive development, undermines education, shortens life expectancy and traps entire societies in cycles of poverty and ill health. This is not only about immediate deaths. It is about destroying Gaza’s future.

Israel’s defenders routinely deflect responsibility: blaming Hamas, the United Nations, aid agencies, weather conditions or “logistical challenges.” But these excuses collapse under scrutiny. Border crossings are controlled by Israel. Airspace and territorial waters are controlled by Israel. Aid convoys are approved, delayed or denied by Israel. Even rainfall becomes lethal because Israel has destroyed drainage systems, sewage networks and flood defences, and, according to multiple reports, has deliberately released floodwaters toward displacement camps.

To describe this as a “humanitarian crisis” is to obscure agency. This is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made catastrophe enforced by military power and administrative control. What makes this moment especially damning is that Israel continues these policies under intense global scrutiny. The International Court of Justice is seized with genocide proceedings. United Nations officials have repeatedly warned of starvation and ethnic cleansing. Yet the aid blockade persists, backed diplomatically and militarily by powerful states that proclaim their commitment to human rights while enabling their systematic violation.

History will not accept claims of ignorance. The evidence is overwhelming. Aid stoppages are not an administrative failure; they are a method of warfare. Starvation is not an unintended consequence; it is a strategic choice. And yet, even amid this deliberate destruction, Palestinians continue to live, learn and resist annihilation in ways that expose the moral bankruptcy of their oppressors.

A recent Al Jazeera English report highlighted the graduation of a new cohort of students in Gaza, framing their achievement as a “triumph of the human spirit” amid what United Nations experts have described as scholasticide - the systematic destruction of an education system. In November 2025, around 150 students from Al-Aqsa University became the first class to graduate since the war began. Their ceremony took place against a backdrop of rubble, loss and grief.

One graduate described her degree as living proof that the human spirit cannot be defeated. That such a moment is even possible is extraordinary. Over 97% of schools in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Every university has been bombed. Classrooms have been turned into shelters, campuses into mass graves. Students have lost parents, siblings, homes and limbs. Electricity is intermittent. Internet access is unreliable. Books, equipment and laboratories are gone. And yet classes have continued and held remotely through social media, in tents, in bombed-out buildings, with scraps of paper and borrowed phones.

This persistence is not evidence that conditions are tolerable. It is evidence of how far Palestinians are forced to go simply to remain human in the face of policies designed to erase them. These graduates are not symbols of Israeli restraint. They are indictments of Israeli policy. Their resilience should not be romanticised to soften the crime. No people should have to prove their humanity by surviving starvation, bombardment and the systematic dismantling of their future. That Palestinians continue to educate themselves despite genocidal conditions is not a justification for those conditions; it is a condemnation of a world that allows them to persist.

If genocide is the destruction of a people, then denying them food, water, shelter, medicine and education, while bombing their homes, hospitals and universities, constitutes genocide by design. Gaza is being killed slowly, bureaucratically and deliberately, one blocked truck, one cancelled permit, one destroyed school at a time. Ending this genocide requires more than rhetorical concern or temporary pauses. It requires the immediate and unconditional lifting of the blockade, full and unhindered access for humanitarian agencies, and accountability for those who have turned aid, hunger and ignorance into weapons of war.

The world must decide whether international law is real, or merely decorative. In Gaza, the answer is already being written, in hunger, cold, rubble, and in graduation certificates earned against all odds, in defiance of a system that seeks to ensure there is no future at all.

Professor Usuf Chikte is the coordinator of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, in Cape Town

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. 

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