For the last 22 months, Israel has laid the groundwork for famine in Gaza — and just today, it was announced by a United Nations body that famine in Gaza is officially underway.
After a short-lived ceasefire ended in March, Israel began limiting and then almost completely blocking the entry of aid into Gaza, increasing hunger and causing the unfathomable conditions the world is witnessing now. Children and babies are dying with sunken eyes and bloated bellies, typical signs of malnutrition. Images of mothers holding their skeletal babies are all over the internet, underscoring the devastation of this latest escalation.
This is not, as 40 Senate Democrats claimed, a “humanitarian crisis”: This is a deliberate campaign of starvation waged by Israel, funded and promoted by the United States government, with bipartisan support.
Meanwhile, in the US, the richest country on the planet, almost 14 million children are food insecure, meaning their families “struggled to provide enough food for everyone living there at some point during the year,” as defined by the USDA. Just last month, Republicans in Congress passed what Trump called the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which guts Medicaid, cuts housing programs, and slashes billions from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). More than 41 million Americans depend on SNAP for food, and many of them are children, disabled people, and seniors.
At home and abroad, the US government is participating in starving people, particularly children, and calling it policy. It’s more than policy, though; it’s been woven into the fabric of this country since its inception. From the forced starvation of Native people through bison genocide, to the Jim Crow era’s deliberate starving of Black farm workers and their families in the Mississippi Delta by local landowners, businessmen, and politicians, America’s elected leaders have time and again chosen to starve not only our own citizens, but human beings the world over.
Since October 7, 2023, when a Hamas attack killed about 1,200 Israelis, Israel has indiscriminately bombed, sieged, and blockaded Gaza, killing at least 60,000 Palestinians in what many human rights groups have called an unfolding genocide. Doctors and nurses have reported seeing children who have been shot in the head by Israeli soldiers. The Israeli government has systematically targeted food infrastructure: bakeries, farms, fishing boats, food warehouses, and aid convoys. They have killed starving people waiting for food multiple times.
Human Rights Watch, experts from the UN, and other experts have called this a starvation campaign and accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war, which is a war crime under international law.
The United States continues to provide arms and funds for Israel, giving several billion dollars annually in military aid, and authorizing billions more since the siege began; as of September 2024, that total neared $23 billion. The US has used its veto power at the UN Security Council to block calls for ceasefires, even as children die waiting for water, food, medical care, and more. US military cargo planes resupply Israel while humanitarian aid operations are attacked with US bombs.
