With experts warning of “worst-case scenario” famine in the Gaza Strip, and images spreading of malnourished children and chaotic scenes at food distribution hubs, international condemnation of Israel’s handling of the hunger crisis is mounting.
Under pressure, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did an about-face, pausing Israel’s bombing campaign in parts of the beleaguered strip, ordering the air force to conduct airdrops of food aid, and allowing other countries to do the same.
Neighboring Jordan has taken point on facilitating the airdrops from other countries, even as experts note that each cargo-plane load provides a tiny fraction of what is needed, and such deliveries are insufficient to avert a catastrophe.
Why We Wrote This
Growing global outrage over the hunger crisis in Gaza has many asking if Israel had a deliberate policy of starving civilians. Israelis say that was never the case, but an ignorance of Palestinian suffering allowed an inconsistent government policy to lead to a calamity.
Yet as the Israeli government pivots on what has been an inconsistent and minimally communicated food-supply policy, Israeli public opinion has lagged behind the growing worldwide alarm about starving Palestinian civilians. There are signs that is starting to change.
“The public is [still] mostly focused on hostages and soldiers’ lives being lost,” says Amos Harel, military analyst for Haaretz, a left-wing Israeli newspaper. “But things are moving quickly with the whole issue becoming so massive that [attention to hunger] could grow exponentially.”
Guy Hochman, a psychology professor at Reichman University outside Tel Aviv, says Israeli lack of empathy for Gaza civilians mirrors others the world over who care first and foremost for their own population. Factor in trauma and almost two years of a war with no end in sight, he says, and mental exhaustion compounds the compassion deficit.
Changing policy
In the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack, the deadliest and most traumatic day in Israel’s history, Israel’s wartime food delivery policy in Gaza has oscillated between restricting and then resuming aid distribution under American and international pressure.
The policy’s ongoing underlying rationale: to retain Israeli control of what goods enter Gaza as a means to pressure Hamas, using humanitarian aid to increase Palestinian political pressure on the group to release hostages and relinquish power, while simultaneously working to prevent Hamas from controlling and profiting from the aid.
But the policy has badly backfired, some analysts say, and could even cost Israel the war.
“There was never a policy of starvation,” says Chuck Freilich, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and a former deputy Israeli national security adviser. “There was a policy of privation, in other words, making life in Gaza very unpleasant for people.”
This policy was in place intermittently since the start of the war, he says.
A turning point came in early March when Israel abruptly ended both the ceasefire with Hamas and the large amounts of humanitarian aid it had been allowing in during the two-month truce. “We’ve done that because Hamas steals the supplies and prevents the people of Gaza from getting them,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the time.
That withholding of aid lasted until May, leading to the current hunger crisis, which could become full-fledged starvation and famine, experts warn.
The government’s defense
Yet Mr. Netanyahu and his officials have been defiant in defense of their approach.
Israel “very closely” monitors the aid situation in Gaza, Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer said in a recent podcast interview. “And anytime we see any sign of a real danger, of something happening, the trucks go in. And that’s what happened about a month ago.”
According to Mr. Dermer, Israel has tried over the last two or three months to “ensure that there would be some alternative way of distributing the humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza,” while sidestepping Hamas.
“How can we figure out a way, on the one hand, to not make that population suffer? On the other hand, get an alternative to them so they’re not beholden to Hamas, so the Hamas mafia can’t extort them,” he said. “And instead of the world embracing this, the world attacks us.”
That alternative was the establishment of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), the controversial, privately run U.S. group operated by U.S. security contractors. It has limited food distribution to a few hubs close to Israeli military positions.
Yet once the GHF was set up, it was “too late, too little, and too incompetent,” says Dr. Freilich.
GHF sites, criticized for being difficult to reach for most Gazans, are where desperate Palestinians have been shot at as they rush to get supplies. Violence has affected other food distribution efforts, as well. On Monday alone, hospitals in Gaza reported 58 deaths from an aid convoy in southern Gaza.
Gisha, an Israeli human rights organization that advocates for Palestinian civilians in Gaza, describes the GHF approach and the government policy as a whole as “punitive and strategic.”
“Israel has advanced a narrative of ‘aid theft’ as justification, yet this cannot serve as legal or moral grounds to withhold assistance from civilians or obstruct the operations of U.N.-led humanitarian actors,” says Shai Grunberg, the organization’s spokesperson. “In practice, aid has been weaponized and used deliberately as a tool to apply pressure on the civilian population, in flagrant violation of international law.”
An evolving plan
In the immediate days after the Oct. 7 attack, then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered what he called a “complete siege on the Gaza Strip.”
“There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel,” he declared. But under international pressure, that decision was rolled back.
“From the beginning there was a sentiment, expressed by Gallant, that Israel could not bring Gaza electricity and water after we endured the worst massacre in Israeli history,” says Mr. Harel. The government later emphasized aid theft as an issue.
Soon after the war began came United Nations experts’ warnings about hunger in Gaza. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Harel for “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.”
Danny Orbach, a military historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, rejects those allegations and says that overall, until March, “Israel fed and supplied its enemy while fighting it.”
But it was in March that Israel made a “crucial mistake,” Dr. Orbach says. “Israel calculated that there was enough aid in Gaza,” and didn’t realize how quickly parts of the strip could fall into food insecurity.
Israeli public sentiment
On Sunday Yonit Levi, anchor of the Channel 12 evening news, Israel’s most-watched television news broadcast, made a comment about Gaza hunger, rare for Israeli media that largely have downplayed news of Gaza suffering.
“Maybe it’s time to understand that it’s not failure of public diplomacy but a moral failure and to start from there,” she said.
Her comments sparked controversy, but suggest a noticeable shift in public sentiment. There have been street protests employing images of starvation, vigils in which lines of protesters hold empty bowls in silent protest, and a large march of Arab citizens in northern Israel.
An open letter by five university presidents published this week stated Israel had an obligation to ensure Gazans don’t go hungry. Some 1,400 Israeli academics signed on to another letter against what they called the “mass killing, starvation and destruction that Israel is wreaking in Gaza.” There was even a letter by artists and academics calling for the international community to impose sanctions on Israel.
Iris Shelhav, a former member of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, one of the border communities targeted in the Oct. 7 attack, says, “What is happening now in Gaza is horrifying.”
She says her sentiments have changed since the war began. “I was angry. I couldn’t feel anything else, and I didn’t care about what happened to them after they raped, beheaded, slaughtered, and kidnapped us.”
But now, “The longer the war now continues, the more tragedies there are, here and there.”
David Stav, chief Rabbi of Shoham, a town in central Israel, says “there is no Israeli that wants to see hunger in the streets or Gaza. I don’t think that there is anybody that is happy about that. On the other hand, I’m not ready, just as most Israelis are not ready, to sacrifice even one finger of an Israeli soldier or risk his life in order to provide them food.”
Hamas is the one responsible for the situation in Gaza, he says, and the international community should take Hamas to task and not pressure Israel for wanting to bring back its hostages and protect its soldiers.
“There’s no moral value that says that I have to die, or my soldiers have to die, in order to provide my enemy food.”
