Gaza and famine as political punishment

We've all seen the constant images of thousands of people in Gaza queuing, or fighting, to get some food, as well as of the emaciated children and the first deaths from starvation, nearly a hundred, in an episode of hunger rarely seen in recent decades. And all because of Israel's decision to prevent the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza, with the aim of killing or displacing the entire population of Gaza in a textbook ethnic cleansing. Israel has imposed a total blockade on Gaza, restricting the entry of food, forcing ovens to close due to lack of fuel, and practicing hunger—that is, deliberately provoking hunger—as a weapon of war and as political punishment for the entire Palestinian population, not Hamas.

Everything that has been said about the current situation, however, is nothing more than the culmination of a political process to starve Palestinians that began almost two decades ago. Already during the Second Intifada, specifically in April 2002, the FAO warned of increasing hunger and malnutrition among the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The total blockade they were suffering paralyzed the Palestinian economy, largely dependent on Israel and already seriously affected by frequent border closures, to the point that it was currently facing extreme food insecurity.

Six years later, and following an escalation of hostilities in June 2007, the FAO again noted that, since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2008, the West Bank and Gaza Strip continued to suffer serious economic and human consequences. The main factor behind Palestinian food insecurity was political in nature. The increase in checkpoints in the West Bank, frequent closures of the Karni Crossing, restrictions on the movement of people and goods, settlement expansion, and lack of access to key resources were all processes perpetuating the livelihood crisis.

In 2014, more than a quarter of Palestinian households were classified as food insecure, representing around 1.6 million people. They were evenly split between severely and moderately insecure. In 2018, the World Food Programme (WFP) described Palestine as a territory where nearly a third of the population lacked the means to purchase nutritious food. Food insecurity was high among women—32 percent of female-headed households were food insecure—and especially in the Gaza Strip, where it peaked at 54 percent. Humanitarian conditions in Gaza—where poverty and food insecurity affected 53% and 68.5% of the population, respectively—continued to deteriorate at an alarming rate.

The panorama described here cannot be understood through purely conventional political analysis, since the systematic violations and blatant disregard for the most basic norms of humanitarian law, or for the simple humanity that should characterize living beings, completely disappear in the Palestinian case, and especially in Gaza, where they have been developed. We have countless examples of such cases and we know very well the high cost of persisting in this macabre game, especially when one of the parties, Israel, has a policy of making people pay multiplied for any aggression. Although Palestine as a whole is paying the price, the different political and economic realities of the West Bank and Gaza have taken their toll on the latter region, which is doubly imprisoned by Israel and Hamas's strategy, in a vicious cycle of feedback loop, with punishment, in all its forms, as an established way of life. Strategic political punishment unfortunately plays a determining role in this absurdity.