The July alert from the Famine Review Committee (FRC) has a terrifying headline: "The worst-case scenario of famine unfolding in the Gaza Strip".
Based on a close assessment of all the available information, the FRC shows that "a risk of Famine was detected in all areas of the Gaza Strip", but that half a million people face "Catastrophe (IPC Phase 5), characterised by an extreme lack of food, starvation, destitution, and death". The IPC refers to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, and No. 5 is the worst of this taxonomy.
Alarmingly, the FRC notes that the "food consumption threshold for Famine has already been passed for most areas of the Gaza Strip". This means that most Palestinians in Gaza are already living in conditions of Phase 5 Famine. Even US President Donald Trump admitted that there is "real starvation" in Gaza.
The Israeli government has denied being responsible for the creation of these famine conditions. It blames the situation on the United Nations for not handing out the food, and it blames Hamas and other Palestinian factions for stealing the goods.
However, the FRC’s alerts show that even if the amount of food that the Israeli authorities – COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories) – claim to have sent is eaten by the Palestinians, this would be far from sufficient.
Furthermore, the food sent into Gaza – limited as it is – requires fuel and water to be prepared, which are not available inside most of Gaza.
Finally, the food is being distributed by an Israeli-US ‘start-up’ called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which former US Green Beret Tony Aguilar, who had worked with them, said is a sham company that has participated in war crimes against the hungry and desperate Palestinians. There is, therefore, no doubt at all that the famine in Gaza is being orchestrated by the Israeli authorities.
Last year, in his report to the United Nations, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, wrote that Israel "announced its starvation campaign against Gaza" in October 2023, and by December, 80 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza began to experience famine or catastrophic hunger. "Never in post-war history", Fakhri wrote, "had a population been made to go hungry so quickly."
The term ‘starvation campaign’ is precise. From the early airstrikes, it became clear that the Israeli military was targeting key infrastructure in Gaza that had enabled people to feed themselves in previous sieges and attacks.
For instance, very quickly, Israel destroyed 93 percent of the agricultural, fishing, and forestry sectors of the Gaza economy and stopped access to clean water and electricity. Then, Israel’s military attacked the Palestinian fishing boats and bakeries – assaulting whatever remained of the food sovereignty of the Palestinians. This decisive Israeli ‘starvation campaign’ was reflected in a series of statements made by high officials of the Israeli government that had been documented in the International Court of Justice’s filings on the genocide case.
In 1941, the Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture, Herbert Backe, crafted the Hungerplan (Hunger Plan) to divert food from the territories of the Soviet Union to feed the German population (Deutschland aus dem Osten ernähren) and to destroy by aerial bombardment Soviet food production facilities.
The idea that Backe developed was that "useless eaters" (Slavs and Jews) should starve. It is thought that four million Soviets died of starvation.
Two years later, in Bengal, the British imperial authorities diverted food aid from cyclone-ravaged Midnapur and other districts to feed British troops and the British public. Despite what the British government said in its own inquiry, historian Paul Greenough found that even after the cyclone damage, the pest attacks, and the end to Burmese import of rice, 90 percent of rice supplies had been available for the starving people.
These were not delivered. Around this time, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was in Washington for a meeting. At lunch, Churchill was seated next to Helen Rogers Reid, president of the New York Herald Tribune, who asked him about the situation of the ‘poor Indians’. Churchill’s response is indicative of the colonial attitude: ‘Madame, to which Indians do you refer? To the brown Indians, who under benign British influence have multiplied alarmingly, or to the red Indians of this continent, who under the current administration are almost extinct?"
Between 1857 and 1947, famine deaths in India totalled between thirty million and eighty-five million. These are famines that are engineered by colonialism (its own kind of hunger plans) and not due to population increase. The callousness of the colonial joke is powerful at both ends.
The Famine Review Committee, initially the Emergency Review Committee, was set up in 2014 by the United Nations and several non-governmental organisations. The impetus for the FRC was the 2011 famine in Somalia, which, it was found by these organisations, could have been prevented with early warnings.
Certainly, the drought in East Africa played a catalytic role in the food crisis. A war in southern Somalia against al-Shabaab, global food price hikes due to hoarding (which also produced the catalyst for the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt), and a delay in humanitarian response led to a situation where 260,000 Somalis died (half of them children).
The UN and NGO agencies cannot by themselves end a war or manage the price gouging of advanced capitalism, but they could alert the world fast enough to a food crisis. That was the reason why the FRC was created.
In the case of Gaza, the FRC has delivered several shrill warnings. But they do not seem to work. The genocide continues. The food is not delivered. The Palestinians are dying of starvation. There is a colonial famine ongoing in Gaza.
Why have the Egyptian and Jordanian governments not sent trucks of food and water across the border, disregarding the Israeli authorities?
Vijay Prashad is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is the editor of Letters to Palestine (2014) and his most recent book is (with Noam Chomsky), On Cuba (2024).
Follow him on X: @vijayprashad
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