Israel's war on Gaza has weaponised food,. Photo: File
A Palestinian mother clutches her skeletal child to her chest. The child’s eyes are gaunt, almost popping out of her face and look you in the eye. You can’t look away despite the shiver that runs down your spine. The child’s spine is visible, jutting out of the malnourished little body. It’s only skin on bones, the bones from the emaciated body of the child jut out almost breaking through the skin, the spine is tender as though it’s about to crack.
The Palestinian mother clutches the child closer to her chest. This unconditional tenderness of a mother’s love strikes a chord with every mother in the world. What pain can be more brutal to the heart of a mother than to watch her child die before her own eyes, starve over a period of time, reduced to just skeletal bones, hearing the suffering pangs of hunger and thirst every minute, every hour, every day for months and slowly, agonisingly watching her baby perish to death.
The image is striking, it pierces the human heart. Nothing is more repulsive to the human heart than the suffering, pain and killing of a child. This slaughter of children through mass starvation is being played out in real time and the world is witnessing this horror on their smartphones and TV screens. At least 103 Palestinians have died from starvation and dehydration, 80 one of them children, in the past week. Just in this year 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry records 28,672 registered cases of children suffering from malnutrition. And 260,000 children are in urgent and desperate need of nutrition.
The infanticidal character of the genocide is deliberate. At the beginning of the genocide, on 10 November 2023, the Israeli defence minister, Yaov Gallant, expressed the government’s genocidal intent when he said: “There will be no food, no electricity, no fuel, everything is closed, we are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
Israel has acted according to its expressed genocidal intent as the images of dead starving bodies of children haunt the collective conscience of the world. Israel has done exactly what it said it would do more than 20 months ago. Why is everyone then pretending to be shocked and expressing concern today about children starving to death?
General Ghassan Alian said: “Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, no electricity, no water, just damage. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” This hate speech is racist and repulsive and exhibits the arrogance of the supremacist white settler mentality.
Why do well fed rich white powerful men like Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, United States President Donald Trump and Alian think that they are gods and can impose hell on poor people?
Israeli Minister Itama Ben Gvir proclaimed: “The food and aid depots should be bombed in order to create military and political pressure”.
Avigdor Lieberman, former deputy prime minister and finance minister, said in August 2024: “The only arrangement to be made with Gaza is to stop all transfers of humanitarian aid, equipment, fuel, electricity and water.”
Member of the Israeli Knesset Revital “Tally” Gottlieb said in October 2023: “Without hunger and thirst among the Gaza population, we will not be able to recruit collaborators, we will not be able to recruit intelligence, and we will not be able to bribe people with food, drink, medicine in order to obtain intelligence.”
These words point to the deliberate weaponisation of starvation as a means of gathering intelligence.
Israeli Knesset member Moshe Saada in April 2025 said: “Starve the Gazan’s and impose a siege to the Max.”
Israeli settler leader and former mayor Daniella Weiss said in January 2024: “They will move. The Arabs will move. We don’t give them food, we don’t give the Arabs anything. They will have to leave”.
These words express the strategic aim of the Zionist state, to ethnic cleanse and forcibly expel the people of Gaza, using starvation as a strategic weapon. This is clearly and concisely expressed by former Israeli General Giora Eiland in October 2023: “The people of Gaza should be told that they have two choices, to stay and to starve or to leave.”
For more than 20 months the leadership of the Israeli military and political establishment have verbalised using starvation as a weapon of war.
Some believe that this racist policy of starving the occupied Palestinians only emerged after 7 October 2023. It is true that Israel has used the 7 October Hamas attacks to justify its genocide in Gaza and go in for the kill by starving Palestinians to death. But Israel’s weaponisation of starvation did not begin then. In 1997, Israel’s prime minister, Levi Eshkol, said: “We will deprive Gaza of water and the Arabs will leave.” In 2007, Israelis actually calculated the minimum calories Palestinians needed to avoid famine and blocked food just above this line. Dav Weissglass, adviser to the then Israeli prime minister said: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
The immunity that the world has given Israel historically and specifically after 7 October enabled Israel’s impunity as it today deliberately starves Palestinian children to death. The genocidal green light has shifted Israel policy from using starvation to a point of just about avoiding famine to pursuing a policy that creates a famine and kills children. Even as Palestinian children are dying in large numbers, the Western powers have not even imposed sanctions on the Zionist state, allowing for further Israeli impunity and more suffering in Gaza.
The United Nations report of 2022 found that one year before that, 65% of Gazan’s were food insecure as a result of the unlawful siege Israel imposed with the tacit complicity of the Egyptian government as well as the US and Europe.
At the beginning of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, Oxfam reported that only 2% of the usual amount of food was being delivered to Gaza. Oxfam’s Sally Abi Khalil stated: “There can be no justification for using starvation as a weapon of war.” The Zionist state of Israel has been determined in strategically using starvation as a weapon of war.
Apart from banning the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees and its 400 aid distribution points, Israeli forces have also been targeting agricultural land in Gaza, food production factories and grocery stores through the war. This is a cold, calculated and callous strategy to starve the people of Gaza.
Alex de Waal, author of Mass Starvation, The History and Future of Famine, says: “While it may be possible to bomb a hospital by accident, it is not possible to create a famine by accident.”
So when you see the skeletal bodies of Palestinian children, know for sure that they have been deliberately killed by Israel.
The people of the world are calling for a ceasefire and an end to the Israeli barbarism in Gaza but the governments of the world are not acting. The US Israel’s primary military and economic backer, has throughout the invasion of Gaza, green lighted the actions of the Israeli state and still refuses to leverage its financial and military aid to compel Israel to comply with international human rights and humanitarian law.
Everyone knows that without a complete ceasefire, it is impossible for aid to reach all the people of Gaza who desperately need it.
Despite the Israeli genocide, Palestinians are defiant, they do not accept to be subjugated, subordinates and slaves to Israeli colonial masters. The suffering triggers a memory in their historical consciousness as they remember their Prophet who was also sanctioned, sieged and starved in Shee’b Abi Talib.
On the day of justice, when they are asked: “For what crime was the innocent child starved to death and killed? one wonders what defence the Israeli killers will present.
And those who are in power both in the Arab and Western World, how will they reply when they are asked: “Why did you not come to the defence and aid of children who cried out ‘rescue us from this oppressive regime who are baby killers and starving us to death’.”
Inaction and silence is complicity to infanticide and genocide.
Eric Clapton, who, in solidarity painted his guitar in Palestinian colours and blasted Israel for its killing of Palestinian children after losing his young child, wrote the song, Tears in Heaven, with heart wrenching lyrics that capture the anguish of a parent losing a child: “Would you hold my hand if I saw in heaven, would you help me stand if I saw you in heaven, I know there won’t be more tears in heaven.”
Perhaps this is the only solace for the suffering Palestinian mother.
Iqbal Suleman is a social justice lawyer and former head of the law clinic for Lawyers for Human Rights in Pretoria and Research Associate: Media Review Network.