To hide genocide evidence, Israel is blocking research on Gaza starvation

“I know I need to rest. I try but every minute a wounded person or starving child is brought to us in a serious condition which we need to attend to urgently. In some cases, we can’t delay attending to them even for a single minute.” With these words, Lana, a doctor in central Gaza, explains to me why she would not take a break during her exhausting and frantic days of treating patients dying of starvation.

A few days earlier, Lana collapsed suddenly while treating a patient for starvation. Like many medical staff in Gaza, she was growing hungry herself. Her blood was anaemic. She could not donate blood even though she had long wished to do so for her patients. She was also worn-out, emotionally drained, and suffering from poor nutrition. Lana was only restored to health because she was lucky to have access to a universal donor who risked his own life by giving her two blood transfusions within a few hours.

As she has repeatedly told me, Lana is in a much better position than nearly everyone else in Gaza. She treats large numbers of starving people every day, and the number is steadily increasing.

Famine

On 29 July 2025, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) broke its silence regarding what it called the “worst-case scenario of famine unfolding in the Gaza Strip” by issuing an emergency alert. The alert demands an end to hostilities and an “unimpeded, large-scale, life-saving humanitarian response.” Yet it falls short of fully declaring that Gaza has reached phase 5 in its food security phase classifications, which is to say famine.

Consider that reticence, at a moment when, as Emma Graham-Harrison reports, the number of deaths from starvation between 20 and 30 July is greater than the entire number of deaths by starvation in Gaza since the beginning of the genocide in October 2023.

The IPC’s last full report on Gaza is from June 2024, which is well before the current level of starvation had begun.

Prior to June, reports were issued on a more regular basis. Then Israel ramped up its already highly restrictive visa protocols for aid workers after barring the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) from operating in Gaza. The reports became more infrequent as the need for them increased.

In the last days of the Biden presidency, the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS), the US-funded counterpart to the IPC, warned that famine was unfolding North Gaza Governorate. This report was predictably criticized by Israel, which successfully managed to remove it from circulation. US ambassador to Israel Jacob Lew, together with U.S. Agency for International Development, pressured FEWS to withdraw the report, and FEWS complied within two days.

Like Israel, the US has a long history of obfuscation on the matter of aid distribution. US misrepresentation of aid entering Gaza has led at least two US government employees to resign since the beginning of the genocide.

The politics of data collection

The political tensions among FEWS, USAID, and other humanitarian organisations underscore the major challenge that the international community faces when it comes to addressing famine: data collection. Although seemingly neutral, data collection in practice is highly politicised because it runs contrary to the perpetrators of a genocide.

As Andrew Seal, a member of the Famine Review Committee of the IPC told me, “Basic audit type data is really hard to get hold of.” The lack of access to basic data is the major reason why the IPC has not yet been able to formally declare a phase 5 level famine in Gaza.

As famine expert Alex de Waal notes, “if a government wants to prevent the UN from declaring ‘famine’, all it has to do is block data gathering.” In the case of Gaza, the non-declaration of famine just means that the bureaucracy has not yet been able to catch up with reality because Israel will not allow them in. Yet as de Waal has also argued, with data collection made impossible, minute distinctions among the various phases of famine are becoming irrelevant.

The moratorium on data collection has meant that the IPC is no longer able to issue full reports on Gaza and is unable to fully attest to the spread of famine throughout the Strip. The pictures of emaciated bodies and skeletal children make clear what everyone in Gaza already knew and what famine experts also recognise. Israel is preventing international bodies from documenting its horrors, thereby allowing death by starvation to proceed under the veneer of normality.

We have seen this playbook before. In 2021, in the midst of the Tigray genocide, Ethiopian prime minister Abiy Ahmed expelled the IPC soon after their Famine Review Committee issued a report warning of famine in Tigray within three months. When challenged regarding the starvation it imposed, the Ethiopian regime had the perfect excuse: there was no data to prove it. Israel has also mastered the playbook of famine denial well.

For decades, Israel has obsessively monitored the caloric intake of Gaza’s besieged population. In 2007, shortly after Hamas took power internally in Gaza, the Israeli Ministry of Defence drafted a plan for limiting aid to Gaza to the bare minimum to avoid malnutrition.

This document, which was formally in effect until 2010 and made public in 2012, reveals the Israeli state’s longstanding policy of carefully monitoring the amount of food that gets into Gaza in terms of its caloric content. Israel continued imposing crippling restrictions on humanitarian aid until 9 October 2023 when Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced a complete siege on the people of Gaza. The policy of limiting aid to Gaza changed to one of death by starvation through engineered famine.

Before it’s too late

Many deaths by starvation are not registered as such because the technical cause of death is attributed to normally minor diseases such as respiratory infections or diarrhoea. If we can to accurately assess the situation, such undercounts should be contested. If a person dies from a sickness that their body would have been able to overcome or cope with under better conditions, is that too not a starvation-related death?

People are collapsing in the streets, and yet the impossibility of adequate data collection concerning the numbers of people dying of starvation means that IPC cannot immediately declare famine, giving the international community yet one more excuse for inaction and deflection.

Given that a consensus of scholars and humanitarian agencies have warned repeatedly that famine is already underway, history’s judgement on us is already clear. Why should we wait until it’s too late? Humanitarian law was not created for the purpose of passing judgement retrospectively.

In the case of the famine in Somalia during 2011, over half the 250,000-death toll had already been reached before a famine was declared. It seems that few lessons have been learned.

Famine is a tipping point. Once the escalation is reached and the number of deaths begins to increase, the damage is irreversible. An entire generation joins what humanitarian Steve Sosebee calls “the genocide generation,” in which even the survivors are permanently impaired, and must live with damaged immune systems, intellectual impairments, and all the harm that was done to their bodies while they were being starved.

As the famine worsens in Gaza, Israel’s obfuscations and attempts to hide the famine proliferate.

Mohammad in Gaza is well versed in the hypocrisies and shortcomings of the international aid world. He predicts: “even after IPC get the figures, data and percentages and all other information and they reach a conclusion that it is a level 5, Israel and the US will say that the data IPC received and basis which it declared famine in Gaza is incorrect because it is from the Hamas-run health ministry or Hamas-affiliated groups or use other discrediting claims.”

Indeed, throughout the genocide, the vague spectre of Hamas has been repeatedly invoked to deflect culpability, and it is now being used to legitimate the starvation of a captive population.

Action can always be taken

The acuity of Mohammad’s analysis is hard to deny. This does not, however, mean there is nothing to be done. We can draw attention to the vicious cycles of deference to Israel that is leading to the starvation of the Palestinian people and the obliteration of Gaza. We can demand answers, at the highest possible levels of government, to the questions that Palestinians are asking themselves: “Why doesn’t the IPC be more proactive and send their own experts to investigate the situation in Gaza first hand?” They could stand at the borders of Gaza and demand to be let in.

The international institutions that manage and fund the data collection activities could speak out more forcefully against the political dynamics that are preventing them from carrying out their work. Most impactfuly of all, UN member states could increase their demands that aid workers and aid be allowed in. If their demands are not met, these states could impose sanctions.

None of this is happening at sufficient scale and intensity, and that is why a genocide and the spectre of mass death by starvation is unfolding before our eyes.

Estimates of those who died in Gaza from indirect causes in the first year of the genocide, including starvation and lack of access to care for chronic diseases, range between 67,413 and 186,000. In addition, the more than 1,373 aid seekers who have been killed while seeking aid from the misnamed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation are also victims of the famine. They would not have risked their lives to seek aid for themselves and their families unless their own lives and their families’ lives depended on it.

Back in Gaza, Muhammad has his own answer to the question of why the international community has failed to send experts to investigate the situation in Gaza and to establish the scale of the famine. “Israel won’t allow it,” he said, “And why doesn’t Israel allow it? The answer is simple, because there is famine in Gaza.”

The torturously circular nature of this logic is strangling Gaza. Israel does not allow the international community to investigate famine in Gaza because famine is already there.

As the evidence of famine become impossible to deny, Israel doubles down on its deflection and misinformation campaigns. By far the easiest path for Israel is to block all access, to make data collection impossible, just as they have preventing journalists from entering Gaza since the beginning of the genocide.

The international humanitarian community should end its complicity with this playbook of deflection and denial that has been used to legitimise so many atrocities in times past, and which is being used to conceal a genocide and deny a famine now. We must not facilitate the narrative Israel is crafting by obstructing data collection and denying access to facts on the ground.

Rebecca Ruth Gould is a Distinguished Professor of Comparative Poetics and Global Politics, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is the author of numerous works at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, including Erasing Palestine (2023), Writers and Rebels (2016) and The Persian Prison Poem (2021). With Malaka Shwaikh, she is the author of Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine (2023). Her articles have appeared in the London Review of Books, Middle East Eye, and The Nation and her writing has been translated into eleven languages

Follow Rebecca on Blue Sky @rrgould and subscribe to her Substack.

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or its staff.