Israel Using Starvation as a Weapon of War, Causing Deaths to Surge in Gaza
(Washington D.C., July 25, 2025) – United Nations Secretary General António Guterres should immediately work to secure the official declaration of famine in Gaza by U.N. agencies in light of the escalating death of Palestinians due to hunger due to Israel's deliberate starvation policy, said DAWN today. The Gaza ministry of health has reported more than 40 hunger-related deaths this month, including 16 children, and 111 since the beginning of the war, 81 of them children.
"The time is now to formally declare a famine in Gaza and to condemn Israel for carrying out a genocide by deliberately starving Palestinians," said Sarah Leah Whitson, DAWN's executive director. "The UN's bureaucratic delay in declaring a famine while Palestinians starve to death before the eyes of the world is a grave moral failure that makes the international community complicit in Israel's extermination campaign."
The U.N.'s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a partnership of 19 international organizations, including the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Food Programme (WFP), World Health Organization (WHO), and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), has established strict criteria for famine declaration: 20% of households facing extreme food shortage, 30% of children under five suffering acute malnutrition, and death rates exceeding 2 per 10,000 people daily. The partnership has declared famine only a few times, including in Somalia in 2011, and South Sudan in 2017 and 2020.
All available evidence indicates Gaza has surpassed these thresholds. The IPC's own Famine Review Committee concluded in March 2024 that "[f]amine is now projected and imminent" in northern Gaza, with all famine thresholds expected to be surpassed. Despite this assessment, technical obstacles, including Israel's blockade of international monitoring and the destruction of Gaza's health system, appear to have prevented the comprehensive data collection that the multi-stakeholder partnership requires for formal declaration.
Secretary General Guterres has the authority to coordinate action among UN agencies to issue a formal famine declaration based on assessments from FAO, WFP, WHO, and UNICEF, even when the multi-stakeholder IPC partnership faces political or technical obstacles. Secretary-General Guterres can coordinate a famine declaration based on the overwhelming evidence of Israel's systematic starvation of Gaza's population.
"Secretary General Guterres should not allow Israel's deliberate blocking of data collection to impede a formal famine declaration and provide cover for this genocide by starvation," said Raed Jarrar, DAWN's advocacy director. "The international community has sufficient evidence, including video documentation of starving children, testimonies from U.N. officials, and Israel's own statements about cutting off food supplies to support an immediate famine declaration."
Palestinian civil society organizations called for a U.N. famine declaration over a year ago, with groups including the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network warning in June 2024 that "causing famine as a military tactic against civilians is prohibited" under international humanitarian law and constitutes a war crime under the Rome Statute.
The call for famine declaration is now more urgent as over 100 international organizations, including Save the Children, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, and Amnesty International, issued an urgent letter on July 23, 2025, warning that "mass starvation is spreading across Gaza" and condemning Israel's siege for creating conditions of "chaos, starvation, and death." The organizations reported that aid workers are "wasting away" and "joining the same food lines, risking being shot just to feed their families," while tons of food and medical supplies sit untouched in warehouses because Israeli restrictions prevent humanitarian organizations from accessing or delivering them. The groups declared that "the UN-led humanitarian system has not failed, it has been prevented from functioning" and demanded an immediate end to the Israeli siege and restoration of UN-led humanitarian coordination.
In addition, 25 states, including the U.K., France, Canada, Australia, and Japan, issued a joint statement on July 21, 2025 condemning Israel's "drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food." The foreign ministers declared that "the suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths" and called Israel's aid delivery model "dangerous" and a deprivation of "human dignity."
UN agencies have repeatedly warned of catastrophic conditions. The WFP reported on July 22, 2025, that "the hunger crisis in Gaza has reached new and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row." UNICEF had previously warned on May 17, 2025 that 71,000 children and over 17,000 mothers need urgent treatment for acute malnutrition, while the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights declared that "Palestinians in Gaza are starving to death."
Human rights organizations have repeatedly documented Israel's use of starvation as a weapon of war. In December 2023, Human Rights Watch flagged Israel's conduct as a war crime, saying, "Israeli forces are deliberately blocking the delivery of water, food, and fuel, while willfully impeding humanitarian assistance, apparently razing agricultural areas." Earlier this month, Amnesty International reported, "Israel has continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and to deliberately impose conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as part of its ongoing genocide." The International Criminal Court's charges against Israeli officials, for which it issued warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over a year ago, include the deliberate starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza.
