“No one in the world will allow us to starve two million people,” said Israeli finance minister Belazel Smotrich last year. But 70 days ago, Israel imposed a total blockade on the Gaza strip, testing the world’s tolerance for man-made starvation. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reluctantly allowed 100 trucks carrying aid into Gaza this week, Right-wing members of the Knesset were furious. “Letting humanitarian aid in now directly harms the war effort to achieve victory,” one protested.
It seems monstrous, as we watch children in Gaza wasting before our eyes. But in truth, the weaponisation of food in counter-insurgency is nothing new.
The British counter-insurgency in Malaya in the Fifties is often cited as a textbook “hearts and minds” programme. Less mentioned is that the army also targeted Malayan stomachs. In 1951, Sir Harold Briggs, director of Britain’s “anti-bandit activities” in the colony, launched “Operation Starvation”. He ordered “food denial operations” to shut down farming and trade in the countryside where the Communist guerrillas roamed. Instead, rural people were relocated to “protected villages” where all food supplies were rigorously monitored. To prevent food falling into the hands of the rebels, Britain at times ran central kitchens to feed those in the camps. As a metric of success, they counted the number of Communist guerrillas who surrendered, citing hunger as a reason.
It was a brutal campaign, but it worked. Setting aside whether food weaponisation is legal or not, it is effective when two conditions are met. Firstly, it’s important to prevent reports of famine — which are politically embarrassing. And secondly, there must be a big enough political carrot alongside the stick of hunger. Key to the success of the British campaign in Malaya was that Britain promised that when the Communist threat receded, Malaysia would become independent.
Israel has taken a page from the colonial war handbooks. But it is doing something that has never been done before. It is bringing the weaponisation of food into the digital age — hoping that precisely targeted food rations will be a way of selectively starving Hamas operatives, and also, we can assume, providing Israel with a public rationale for the policy.
“Israel has taken a page from the colonial war handbooks.”
The Israeli strategy has evolved. It began, in a crude manner, the day after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on 7 October 2023, with the imposition of a total blockade on the Gaza Strip. As Israel controls all the entry points, and local farm production is very small, the blockade quickly caused widespread hunger. The situation was made swiftly worse by an intense bombing campaign, which destroyed essential infrastructure, and the forced relocation of the Palestinian population to what were euphemistically called “humanitarian zones”. By the time of the short-lived ceasefire seven weeks later, when Hamas released a first batch of hostages and humanitarian aid was allowed in, most of the population were hungry. Since then, the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system — that measures the distress of an afflicted population on a five-point scale with “catastrophe” and “famine” as its worst categories — has made assessments every few months, five in total. Encouraged by the United States, Israel has tried to keep the Gazans from descending into “famine” by turning the aid tap on whenever the data indicate it is about to cross that threshold. When it does this, and the IPC reports that the deterioration has been arrested, Israeli advocates claim that the famine story was made-up all along. That’s wrong.
Three times Gaza has teetered on the brink of the IPC’s “famine” threshold, and Israel has opened the aid tap. The IPC experts protest that even when the situation is an “emergency” (level four) or “catastrophe” (level five for food insecurity) the level of distress is unacceptable. But for international policymakers it seems that what counts is the “F-word”. They won’t say it out loud, but the implication is that hunger that doesn’t reach the famine threshold is somehow tolerable.
Some humanitarians say privately that Israel is gaming the IPC system, others that the “famine” benchmark no longer makes sense. What’s certain is that Israel wants to deprive Hamas of all possible resources. It’s also likely that Israel wants desperate Gazans to blame Hamas for their plight and turn against them. And indeed, formerly quiet criticism of Hamas leaders’ crimes and blunders is turning to public protest.
Gazans had a brief respite with the ceasefire in January this year. The situation sharply deteriorated after Israel imposed a total blockade on 2 March and resumed its military actions on 19 March. Food stocks are running out. The small amounts of food on sale in markets are so expensive that few can afford it. There’s no clean water and scarcely any fuel for cooking.
The statistics published by the UN’s IPC earlier this month showed a population once again on the brink of famine. Fully 93% of the population were in “crisis” levels of food insecurity, with 244,000 of the 2.1 million people of the Gaza Strip classified as suffering “catastrophic” lack of food. This means that people have literally nothing — they’re scavenging for scraps and living off crumbs provided by relatives and neighbours. Child malnutrition rates were poor but not yet disastrous — probably because adults are going hungry to provide what little food they have for children. The IPC have no data for the numbers who have perished from hunger, disease, exposure and exhaustion — possibly because mass death from starvation hasn’t yet arrived, but perhaps because Gaza’s deeply conservative society doesn’t report hunger deaths to the authorities and simply buries the dead quietly with only private grief.
But this time Israel hasn’t responded by opening the regular, UN-based aid tap. This week’s relief supplies, according to the head of the UN’s humanitarian affairs office, Tom Fletcher, are “a drop in the ocean”. Israel argues that relief supplies provided by the United Nations and international organisations will fall into the hands of Hamas. To some degree this is surely true — it happens in every conflict of this kind and there are videos that show Hamas men commandeering aid trucks — even if senior officials in the Biden administration were never convinced that diversion was happening at scale.
So now Israel is setting up an aid system of its own design — one that will prevent even the smallest amount of food aid feeding any Hamas operative. The technology to achieve something close uses individual surveillance and ration minimisation. A planned US-Israeli aid mechanism, called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, appears to be based on this. The details for how the GHF will work are unclear, because it is new and untried, and the information it puts out is changing day-to-day. But there are signs of how it intends to operate.
The GHF aims to use a small number of aid distribution sites, strictly controlling access. They will be run by private military contractors. In phase one it will have just four. (The UN and voluntary agencies had 400). Pre-identified Gazans will be notified that they can go to one of these centres to collect a week’s worth of rations (including food, sanitary kits, and medical supplies) for their families at a specified time. Biometric screening will ensure that the correct person gets the ration. The target is 300 meals over 90 days (an average of 1.6 meals per person per day) with a ration of 1,700 kilocalories per day. This is less than the 2,100 Kcal/day recommended humanitarian ration used by the UN but more than the 1,560 Kcal/day fed in the Forties to the volunteers of the “Minnesota Experiment”, which examined the effects of starvation on the human body.
We can conjecture on how the recipients will be selected. The IDF uses an algorithm known as Lavender for selecting Hamas suspects, based on individual profiles and electronically tracked behavioural traits. It’s a method for targeting assassination. That system can also generate a list of people who are not affiliated with Hamas — who can be targeted with food. If the ration is just enough to feed a family for a week, it’s fair to assume that the chances of food falling into Hamas’s hands are very low. Hamas operatives will go hungry; innocent civilians will be fed. It is a hybrid of Operation Starvation and surveillance humanitarianism.
The UN and liberal humanitarians are horrified by the way that this trounces various principles that they hold dear. They have condemned it as “a dangerous, politicised sham”. But let’s set aside the legality and consider whether it might prevent the descent into famine and achieve the victory that Israel seeks.
The recent IPC report outlines two scenarios. One is a continued blockade and ongoing war. The arithmetic of food availability is simple: mass starvation within weeks. The second scenario requires the GHF. Taking an untested emergency aid operation to scale in a few weeks is a huge and risky undertaking. And in the unlikely event that it works it will slow starvation but won’t stop it.
First, the quantities just aren’t sufficient and not in enough places. Second, there’s no provision for specialised feeding for malnourished young children, which requires skilled staff and special foodstuffs. Third, there’s no plan for clean water and electricity. A family member might be able to carry enough food to feed a family for a week, but no one can carry enough water even for a single day. The GHF isn’t designed by a relief professional.
The last and biggest problem is that counter-insurgency only works if there’s a political endgame. Israel is offering the Palestinians a choice between starvation or capitulation — with unknowable long-term implications. Hamas may be destroyed, but there’s no sign that the Palestinians of Gaza will abandon their land or submit quietly to Israeli occupation. They may turn on Hamas, accusing it of crimes and blunders, but that doesn’t exonerate Israel. And if protracted, intimate humiliation of surveillance humanitarianism in the ruins of their homes becomes the future, not only will Palestinian society in Gaza become dismembered, but Israel itself will forever be tarred by the inhumanity it is inflicting.
