"Once again, perpetrators expect to get away with the war crime of starvation"

Global Food Journal: Why is weaponised hunger especially destructive?

Alex de Waal: There are a couple of elements to this big question: First of all, international humanitarian law spells out rules for legitimate warfare. The most important is that a warring party may target an enemy's fighters, but must make sure that the impact on civilians stays proportionate. Hunger works in the opposite direction. If you are besieging a city of 100,000 civilians and a few thousand armed men, those fighters will be the least afflicted by any starvation strategy. Imagine wolves attacking a flock of sheep. They will get the weakest and youngest lambs, but not the strong rams. By the same token, the armed men will be the last to starve, while the most vulnerable civilians are affected worst. That is the main reason why the use of hunger as a weapon was outlawed in international agreements, in particular the Geneva Conventions and Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Second, starvation is not simply a biological phenomenon that affects individuals, with their bodies slowly wasting away. It is just as much a social phenomenon that has profoundly humiliating and dehumanizing dimensions. As accounts of survivors tell us, people become extremely selfish and sometimes even violent. At the same time, they are increasingly unable to fulfil obligations to their families, friends and communities. Mutual trust is thus eroded comprehensively.

Finally, the effects of famine and starvation are lifelong. Exposed children never acquire the same physical or cognitive capabilities as their peers who did not suffer that kind of need at an early age. As a matter of fact, even the second generation's growth may be stifled, if their mothers were exposed to famine. The psychological trauma is long-lasting too. The problems are therefore not over once the famine is over. Accordingly, restorative justice must pay attention to both physical and psycho-social aspects in the long run.

Do those who use hunger as a weapon fully understand the implications?

Where people have recent memories of famines, they certainly do. After previous brutal conflicts in Darfur and South Sudan, the warring parties in Sudan certainly know what harm they are causing. In the case of Israel and Gaza, things are more nuanced.

Please elaborate.

Well, anyone who has studied the history of Nazi Germany will have a rather clear idea of what hunger means because of what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz concentration camp, for example, or during the siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944, or the Dutch hunger winter of 1944/45. Jewish physicians conducted pioneering studies in the Warsaw Ghetto, and many Israelis have read the relevant books. It was striking how Israeli physicians, psychologists and even people at large commented on the state of hostages who were released from Gaza, where Hamas had been starving them. They said that the mere fact that some of the concerned persons looked fine, didn't mean that they actually were fine. To make that kind of statement you must know, correctly, that there is more to severe deprivation in captivity than meets the eye.

The Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Forces insist that they have only been acting in self-defense. How do we know that is not so?

Well, the right to self-defense is certainly valid, but international humanitarian law still applies. There are quite a few indicators that Israel has been breaching those norms. One example is the sheer number of dead humanitarian workers. The numbers of destroyed hospitals or killed journalists are similarly disproportionate. All these figures exceed what would normally be expected in a war, which shows that Israel has not been doing its best to limit civilian harm.

But that does not prove the use of hunger as a weapon.

There is hunger-specific evidence too. Let me point out four things: If Israel were serious about preventing famine, it would not have relied on the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) (1). The GHF had no reliable system of monitoring its supplies beyond the distribution points. It is clear that only the strongest and fittest Palestinians could make it to those sites. The GHF operations therefore bypassed the most vulnerable people. By contrast, the UN system had many more distribution points and had a quite reliable tracking system, with scannable QR codes on packages and rigorous ex-post auditing, for example.

What the Israeli government says about why it needed the GHF is bogus. Official claims were that Hamas had been stealing aid supplies, so the restriction of food shipments would hurt it. While it is true that there has been looting and theft, the data show that Hamas as an organization was hardly involved, even though individual fighters probably were. The Israeli government also argued that the UN system was massively infiltrated by Hamas, but it did not provide evidence.

Starvation only happens slowly. It is possible to bomb a hospital by accident, but you cannot starve an entire population without noticing it. If a healthy adult goes on hunger strike, his or her life will be at risk after 35 to 40 days or so. There is a lot of time to stop an escalating famine. Israel is actually paying close attention to what is going on in Gaza. Whenever pressure from the US administration became strong, Israel opened up the taps a little bit more. That happened in the spring of 2024, again in the first months of 2025 as well as in the summer, and yet again after the fragile ceasefire in the autumn. It made a difference, though the aid never became sufficient. During the current ceasefire, Israel is still falling well short of permitting the needed amount of aid to enter Gaza. The signs are that the situation has stabilized just below the threshold of famine, but far from a return to food security and a healthy population.

 In January 2024, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take measures to prevent genocide in Gaza. Even Aharon Barak, the Court's Israeli Judge, agreed to two of them – supplying sufficient humanitarian aid and putting an end to genocidal rhetoric. Israel's government did not comply.

Why had famines largely disappeared about a decade ago?

By the turn of the millennium, most of the factors that had led to famines in the previous two centuries had disappeared as well. In the past, natural calamities would affect communities that were isolated from transport systems, integrated markets and government institutions. Moreover, the lack of information and a free press in the colonial world meant that governments felt hardly any little pressure to respond to starvation disasters. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has argued, famine is so unacceptable to society that it does not occur under conditions of democratic governance. On the other hand, there were severe famines under communist dictatorships in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Ethiopia and North Korea. And as I mentioned before, Nazi Germany weaponised hunger in World War II, but so did Britain. The USA was intent on starving Japan — it called its plans "Operation Starvation"— and would probably have gone ahead with the plans, had the war continued any longer.

But even in the late 20th century, not all countries had become democracies.

That is true. Indeed, famines still happened in failed states like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in rogue states like Syria and Sudan or in mixtures of both like Yemen and South Sudan. Nonetheless, there was a growing consensus that starving people must not be accepted as a legitimate strategy in war. In May 2018, the UN Security Council even condemned it explicitly in Resolution 2417. Russia, China and the USA's first Trump administration all voted in favour of that resolution. I'll admit that there was an element of hypocrisy, as Russia was tolerating what the Assad regime was doing in Syria and the USA was turning a blind eye to what Saudi Arabia was doing in Yemen. Nonetheless, developments were good, and had they continued, the war crime of starvation would probably now be a thing of the past.

What went wrong?

The problem is that, once again, perpetrators expect to get away with it. The turning point was Ethiopia's Civil War. In 2021, the country's central government fought a vicious war in Tigray, in which it destroyed critical infrastructure in Tigray and then imposed a starvation siege, causing famine.

And the Security Council did not intervene?

No, it did not, even though Ireland, which has a track record of paying attention to these issues, did try to put it on the agenda. However, the Biden administration buckled, not wanting to put an African issue high on the international policy agenda. The fear was that Ethiopia would turn to Russia or China. Soon after, weaponised hunger became common in Sudan's civil war. Unlike the Gaza conflict, it is an African crisis and hardly attracts international attention.

Is the crisis in Ethiopia over?

No, I am afraid it isn't. It too does not get international attention, but I see several reasons to worry. Ethiopia has largely been cut off from food aid, which was mostly provided by USAID. This year's UN humanitarian appeal is just 11% funded. A lot of fighting is going on within the country. The ceasefire between the federal government in Addis Ababa and the Tigrayans is looking very shaky right now, and there’s a serious risk of a war between different Tigrayan factions. The national government's sabre-rattling adds to the concerns. It seems eager to go to war with Eritrea. The Horn of Africa is teetering on the precipice of another enormous humanitarian disaster.

What needs to happen to end the war crime of weaponised hunger?

The issue is simple, but making it happen is politically very challenging. All the tools are available, since appropriate multilateral rules have been defined. The moral consensus should be clear as well: weaponised hunger is unacceptable. What we lack, is political action.

Can the International Criminal Court make a difference?

Accountability for starvation crimes is certainly important, and the ICC has contributed to making the topic more salient. Unfortunately, ICC proceedings have been too few and too slow to make a big impact. In my eyes, the clamouring for the prevention of this kind of crime matters more, and so do various kinds of transitional justice. Germany's federal government, for example, has officially apologised for the genocide of the Herero and Nama people in 1904 in what is now Namibia. That atrocity was perpetrated by the German Empire, which used starvation as the main weapon. Your federal government has even agreed to pay some reparations, which are largely symbolic, however, and the ethnic groups concerned complain that they have been bypassed. Generally speaking, the governments of former colonial powers, and especially the United Kingdom, should act. The British Empire caused or tolerated quite a number of famines. The British government, for instance, could easily have prevented or ended the Irish potato famine in the 1840s, but it chose to let about one million people die. Ireland has many famine memorials today, but there is not a single one in London.

Alex de Waal is a British anthropologist. He directs the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Massachusetts.

De Waal spoke to Hans Dembowski.

Footnote: 

1. The GHF ended its aid mission at the end of November 2025, seven weeks after implementation of a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip.