A history of being starved in Gaza

During the war in Gaza in 2008, I was standing in line in front of a busy bakery, in the blazing afternoon sun. Suddenly there was an airstrike at the end of the street. The ground trembled. Smoke circled upwards. My heart was pounding in my throat, I wanted to run away: a normal reaction for a 14-year-old boy. And yet I was nailed to the ground. Hunger? Fear? Something unspoken held me in its grip.

When I had finally taken the bread bag and walked home, a wide, proud smile appeared on my face. But when I told my mother what had happened, I saw fear in her eyes. She hugged me tightly and whispered: ‘Don't go there again.’

Starvation in Gaza did not begin in 2008 or 2023, when the world finally started calling it a famine. It has roots going back generations, to the time of my grandparents, when they were forced to flee their village during the Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians, of 1948.

1948–1966: Legislating Hunger

As a child, I grew up in a refugee camp. I went to school at UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, ed.), received medical care at UNRWA hospitals, had a ration card that told me who I was even before I understood my own name. But as a child, one question lodged at the core of my heart: why had my grandparents left our village? Why didn't they stay?

One evening, I asked my grandmother directly. She looked away and whispered: ‘I was a child… I don’t remember.’

But a week later, I found a trick. I said: ‘Grandma, tell me about our hometown, Hamama.’

Her face softened. ‘Do you know why it is called Hamama (‘dove’ in Arabic, ed.)? Because the dove is the symbol of peace. And our village was peaceful, there were only farmers. Every morning we worked the land. During the olive season, neighbours helped each other with the harvest. We sang together, pressed the olives together and tasted the richest oil in the world. Families with orange orchards sold the fruit in Yafa. Our oranges were famous, the Europeans called them the “golden orange”.’

Her voice carried me into that world until I asked the question again. ‘So why did you leave?’

A shadow fell across her face. She told me how settlers spread terror during the Nakba by slaughtering villagers in the area. In Hamama, families tried to resist. Men guarded the entrance to the village, armed with nothing but old rifles and kitchen knives.

The settlers never attacked directly. Instead, they burned the fields and cut off the food supply. They besieged the village until the children began to starve. ‘We held out for ten days,’ she said, ‘but no parent can watch their child go hungry. So we fled, through the valleys, to Gaza.’

That was not the end of hunger. It was the beginning.

Within months of Israel’s establishment, the Israeli parliament (Knesset) passed the Absentees’ Property Law (1950), which reclassified Palestinians who fled as “absentees” and handed their farms, wells, and orchards to the new state. The land that had fed towns for centuries could now be leased or sold only to Jewish institutions.

It wasn’t only stolen land; it was stolen food, stolen water, stolen futures. Even Ottoman-era land codes were twisted into tools of dispossession: if a field was left uncultivated -often because its farmers had been driven out- it was declared mawat (“dead” or “wasteland”), and included in state property.

The Land Acquisition Law swallowed over a million dunams (unit area, equal to about 1,000 sq m, ed.) from 349 Palestinian villages. The Planning and Building Law forced Palestinians to beg for permits to farm or rebuild, permits that almost never came. Each measure was another lock on the gateway to food, water and self-sufficiency.

Hunger was no longer just a shadow of displacement. It became a structured system, deliberate and permanent.

1950s: Surviving on food aid and the birth of UNRWA

When my grandmother reached Gaza after days of walking, she found no refuge but a sea of tents. The fields had disappeared.

She told me that in those first months they ate boiled weeds, pieces of bread to feed 10 people, anything that could keep the children alive until the next morning. Families who once lived off their land were now queuing for relief supplies, waiting for sacks of flour with the blue emblem of the United Nations on it.

By the end of 1949, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees were fully dependent on rations. Entire communities survived only on aid.

That winter, the world could no longer look away. In 1949, the United Nations established the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), explicitly to ‘prevent conditions of starvation and distress’ among Palestinians.

Food security was at the heart of its mission. UNRWA distributed flour, lentils, sugar and milk powder packed in tin cups and jute bags. The agency then set up schools where children like my father learned to read while holding their ration cards tightly.

Without UNRWA, the aftermath of the Nakba would have been far deadlier. Israel quickly saw UNRWA not as a relief agency, but as an obstacle: a structure keeping Palestinians alive, teaching their children, sustaining their identity as a people with rights.

Over the decades, Israeli governments repeatedly sought to defund it, discredit it, or drive it out. Today, Israel has gone further: Israel bans UNRWA from operating freely in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank.

1980s–1990s: Closures and the emergence of the permit system

While 1967 placed Palestinians under occupation, the 1980s and 1990s locked them up.

Prior to this period, thousands of Palestinians still managed to farm their land or work in Israel itself, despite restrictions. Markets were under pressure but had not yet been completely cut off.

But that changed with the First Intifada (the uprise) in 1987, when Palestinians started to resist the ongoing oppression. Israel instituted the closure regime: a sudden, sweeping curtailment of movement of people and goods. A “security day” could mean strawberries spoiled at a checkpoint. The message was rammed in: food will be transported when we say so.

What made this system so devastating were not just the checkpoints but the permits themselves. They were not neutral documents, they were political weapons. A licence could be granted or revoked at will. A farmer could lose access to his fields. A student could be prevented from attending university. And when it came to food, the effect was immediate: crops were not harvested and families could no longer afford what they used to grow themselves.

The 1993 Oslo Accords, hailed at the time as a “peace process”, in reality entrenched this system further. Instead of opening Gaza and the West Bank, Israel imposed new layers of separation. Gaza was effectively fenced in, its people dependent on Israeli-controlled crossings for food and trade.

The West Bank was fragmented into zones ( Areas A, B, and C ), with Israel retaining full control over the fertile lands of Area C. In addition, the Paris Protocol effectively welded the Palestinian economy to Israel’s tariff wall; farmers couldn’t independently trade or protect local producers. Every truck, every crate still relied on an Israeli gate.

Food sovereignty, already compromised in 1948 and stifled after 1967, was now completely shattered. A farmer in Nablus could not reach Jerusalem markets without a permit. A fisherman in Gaza could not sail further than a few nautical miles without being shot at. Families who used to store grain and oil to get through the seasons were now dependent on UN rations or international aid to keep their heads above water.

This was no accidental setback. It was a deliberate system of control: by determining who could move, who could plant and who could trade, Israel turned basic survival needs into levers of power. The pattern was clear: first land expropriation, then occupation, then closures. At each stage, the Palestinians' ability to feed themselves was weakened, until hunger itself became a bargaining chip.

2007–2010: The years of calorie counting

By 2007, the blockade on Gaza had tightened into a straitjacket. The Israeli government, citing security concerns after Hamas won the parliamentary elections in Gaza in 2006, sealed almost every crossing. Trucks stopped coming. Fishing boats were limited to a few miles offshore.

It was at that point that the policy shifted from sporadic restrictions to something horrifyingly systematic. Reports surfaced that Israeli authorities were calculating exactly how many calories could be allowed per person in Gaza. These were no longer just checkpoints or delays in obtaining permits, this was the creation of hunger as a means of political pressure.

Families began to live in a new kind of uncertainty. A mother in Gaza City might have to ration flour, counting the teaspoons, knowing that a delay at the border crossing would mean her children would have to skip dinner. Food prices rose sharply, pushing even frugal households to the brink of malnutrition.

Hospitals and clinics felt this immediately. Malnutrition rose, especially among children. Doctors and aid workers reported a growing number of cases of anaemia and growth retardation. It was not a natural famine; it was a famine with a blueprint. Some documents and testimonies revealed that the Israeli army was thinking about, in a well-calculated way, the minimum number of calories needed to prevent mass deaths while keeping the population “under control”.

‘The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.’  Dov Weisglass, senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, 2006.

The blockade was not just a fence. It had become a meticulous regulation of life itself, controlling what people could eat, where they could go and how long they could survive without help.

The lessons were stark: occupation had evolved, and the calculation of human needs, calories, rations and access to food had become a central control mechanism. And it affected the most vulnerable first: children, the elderly and the sick, making survival itself an instrument of political pressure.

2010s: The first attempt to break the siege

In 2010, we all sat in front of the television, waiting. The first major international attempt to break the siege on Gaza was to take off: the Mavi Marmara fmotilla, carrying goods and activists from more than fifty countries.

For a moment, it looked like there might be a crack in the walls around us. But as the ships approached Gaza, the signal dropped. The screen went black. I still remember how my mother and grandmother whispered prayers, pleading that nothing would happen to the passengers.

The next day, the truth came out: Israeli forces had stormed the flotilla in international waters, killing ten activists aboard the Mavi Marmara flotilla.

The world reacted with outrage, the UN and EU issued sharp condemnations, and Israel promised to “ease” the blockade. Some consumer goods trickled back in (chocolate, soda, spices), but the key controls remained in place. The optics softened; the policy did not.

Behind the headlines, the siege only got tighter. By the mid-2010s, Gaza’s fishing zones had shrunk to a sliver of coast, farmers were cut off from their land, and 80% of families were dependent on food aid.

Israeli checklists still determined whether flour or fuel could pass, whether trucks could drive or had to wait. Even the promise of “easing” turned out to be yet another form of control, determining what kind of life Palestinians could or could not lead.

Hunger was no longer just about empty stomachs. It was about power: who controlled border crossings, who decided on calories, who made survival itself conditional.

2023–2025: From “Diet” to Declared Famine

Just last week, during a phone call with my family in Gaza, my brother Fuad told me what it means today to chase a sack of flour. He went to one of the aid centers run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), gates, hoping to get flour or maybe a few cans of beans. But what should have been a queue for survival turned into a death scene.

‘We hid behind sand dunes’, he told me. ‘Anyone who got too close to the gates was immediately shot.’ When the trucks drove in, soldiers opened fire as they moved. People kept their heads bowed, crawled, sprinted and risked everything. Hundreds ran anyway, because what else could we do? Without food, we die slowly. With food, we might die fast.'

In less than three minutes, the trucks had emptied with help. Fuad arrived too late. He came back empty-handed. 'Every time the same thing happens,' he said. 'But we are going back anyway. We have no choice. A single meal now costs more than 150 dollars. Who can afford that?'

That is what starvation looks like in Gaza in 2025: not just a lack of food, but food turned into a death trap, survival itself made into a deadly gamble.

After 7 October 2023, Israel announced a ‘full siege’. No electricity, no food, no fuel. This was not the measured deprivation of 2007 to 2010, but open starvation pressure. Aid convoys were blocked or delayed, corn mills and bakeries bombed, farms and greenhouses razed to the ground. By July 2024, UN experts warned of famine across Gaza. By early 2025, Gaza was being called the hungriest place on earth.

The mechanisms were not new (borders, permits, technology that could be used for both civilian and military purposes, buffer zones, siege), but now they had reached their logical endpoint. What began as a “diet”, in the words of Israeli officials, has become an extermination by hunger.