South Africa accused Israel of genocide before the International Court of Justice in The Hague. At the heart of the argument is the claim that Israel is destroying the people of Gaza by starvation. Article 2(c) of the Genocide Convention prohibits "intentionally subjecting a group to living conditions which lead to its total or partial physical destruction". Israel considers these accusations "baseless".
The food system in Gaza has completely collapsed. The health system has collapsed. The basic infrastructure for clean water and sewage has collapsed. According to the Famine Review Committee (FRC), people in Gaza face the real prospect of starvation: unless something is done urgently, they are at risk of mass death from starvation or disease. The FRC submits its assessments to a group of international humanitarian agencies that use an early warning system called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).
As I wrote about the crisis in Tigray, the IPC identifies five stages of food (in)security: normal, under pressure, crisis, emergency and disaster/famine. Famine in a given area is said to occur when "at least 20 percent of the population is affected, with approximately one in three children acutely malnourished and two people dying per day out of every 10.000 population due to starvation or the interaction of malnutrition and disease." Households can find themselves in the disaster phase even if famine is not declared in the wider area. According to the latest FRC analysis for Gaza, as of December 21, 2023, "at least one in four households (more than half a million people) in the Gaza Strip face catastrophic acute food insecurity conditions."
Another way to diagnose and define famine is the additional number of deaths attributable to famine and related causes. A "major" famine is one in which 100.000 or more people die, while the threshold for "significant" famine is 10.000 additional deaths. This may be useful for describing instances of famine throughout history, but not for current food crises.
Save the Children has warned that deaths from starvation and related causes in Gaza could soon exceed the estimated 22.000 deaths directly attributable to the military offensive. Families often go without food for one, two or three days. Infectious diseases are spreading, which are often a related cause of death for malnourished people. It is estimated that almost 70 percent of residential buildings were destroyed or damaged. Few people have access to clean drinking water, and even fewer to toilets. There is an extremely high risk of outbreaks of water-borne infections and other infectious diseases.
If the disaster in Gaza continues to unfold, warnings of mass deaths from disease, starvation and exposure will come true. If humanitarian aid is provided quickly and on a large scale, mortality from hunger and disease will stabilize and decline, but it will still take time to return to pre-crisis levels. Even with an immediate cessation of hostilities and the delivery of emergency aid, with the restoration of water supply, sanitation and health services, mortality would remain elevated for weeks or months. Even then it would constitute a "significant" famine, defined as 10.000 or more deaths. A "major" famine, with 100.000 or more deaths above average, may be in the offing if current levels of conflict and destruction continue.
The war crime of starvation is defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court as the deliberate resort to starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, based on the deprivation of things necessary for survival, including the deliberate prevention of humanitarian aid as specified by the Geneva Conventions.
The concept of "objects indispensable to survival" (OIS) includes not only food but also water, medicine and shelter. It is not necessary that individuals starve to death for a crime to be committed; it is enough that they were deprived of the things necessary for survival. Human Rights Watch and others have concluded that Israel's actions in Gaza constitute the war crime of starvation.
General Giora Aland, former head of Israel's National Security Council, wrote: “People might ask if we want the people of Gaza to starve. We don't want... They should be told that there are two choices; stay and starve, or leave.” It is still the crime of starvation.
Siege warfare is not illegal in itself, but it can be if it disproportionately and systematically deprives civilians of things necessary for survival. The siege of Gaza since 2006 has been a controversial case: Israel has almost completely controlled the supply of food, water, medical supplies and electricity; he made rigorous decisions about which goods he would allow to enter the Belt, taking care not to violate international humanitarian law. As illustrated by Dov Weisglass, adviser to the then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, "the idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to starve them to death."
Over the years, the siege caused severe scarcity. "Prior to the current conflict," said UN findings released last month, "64 percent of households in the Gaza Strip were food insecure or vulnerable to food insecurity, with 124.500 young children living in food insecurity... In addition, before since the clashes began on October 7, UNRWA reported that over 90 percent of Gaza's water is considered unfit for human consumption."
These are the circumstances from which Gaza was quickly brought to disaster. The Israeli government was fully aware of the existing humanitarian conditions and the consequences of any action it decided to take. The same is true of Hamas, but that is not relevant to determining Israel's responsibility. Defense Minister Joav Galant said on October 9: "I have ordered a complete siege of the Gaza Strip." There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed." The small amount of humanitarian aid that was later allowed to enter Gaza does not diminish the power of this statement or its impact.
In terms of the framework developed by law professor David Marcus, this is a prima facie indication of a "crime of starvation" in the first degree. Even if Galant's statement does not reflect state policy or military strategy, the fact that Israel's military campaign has continued without any significant change in method since the humanitarian consequences have become clear means that the Gaza operation is also a crime of starvation in the second degree. Either way, reducing Gaza to a situation where starvation is imminent is not only a war crime under the Rome Statute, but a crime against humanity.
The integrated classification of food security phases was developed in 2004. Based on the procedures and criteria of this classification, famine was declared in Somalia in 2011 and South Sudan in 2017. In other cases, including Ethiopia, Nigeria and Yemen, the Famine Assessment Committee identified widespread stage 4 (emergency) conditions and warned to impending famine if urgent humanitarian action is not taken. Famine has not been declared in Syria, where the Committee did not collect data. In the historical catalog of famines and incidents of mass starvation, it is difficult to find a close parallel to the situation in Gaza. Few cases combine such a comprehensive siege with such a comprehensive destruction of the things necessary for survival. The absolute numbers of people who die in Gaza will not match the numbers from the catastrophic famines of the 20th century, because the affected population is smaller, but the proportional death toll may be comparable.
The ferocity, scale and speed of the destruction of the necessities of life, as well as the enforcement of the siege, surpass any other human-caused famine in the last 75 years. The Hunger Assessment Committee warns that imminent famine conditions could be widespread as early as next month. Comparisons can be made with the forced starvation of Biafra (1967-70), the siege of Sarajevo (1992-95), the "kneel or starve" tactics used by the Assad government in Syria, and the starvation crimes committed by the governments of Ethiopia and Eritrea in Tigray (2020- 22).
In a comparative historical typology, Bridget Conley and I have identified nine purposes of starvation carried out on a large scale by political and military actors, the first five of which are: extermination or genocide; control through the weakening of the population; acquisition of territorial control; expulsion of the population; punishment. For the government of Israel, the famine in Gaza is undoubtedly consistent with the last four purposes. If some of the statements of senior Israeli politicians can be taken as confirmation, and if Israel continues its campaign without interruption after the unequivocal warning of famine, then both extermination and genocide could become a plausible motive. Accountability is key to ending the crime of starvation and Israel is no exception.
(London Review of Books; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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