July has been one of the deadliest months of the war in Gaza, with Israel killing one person every 12 minutes. The UN says more than 1,000 Palestinians have died trying to get food, mostly when they attempted to collect aid from hubs.
Behind these visible deaths lies the horror of systematic starvation: “minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed”, in the words of Prof Alex de Waal, an expert on humanitarian crises. More than 100 aid groups warned that it is spreading fast. At least 10 people died of hunger and malnutrition on Tuesday alone, said Gaza’s health ministry. Parents watch their children wither. Adults collapse on the street.
Never mind other essential needs – water, medical supplies, shelter. Even if food could be distributed fairly under the new system – and it cannot be – it is utterly insufficient. And even if more arrived, which might or might not happen if a ceasefire were agreed, life is not sustainable when brief periods of partial respite alternate with months of deprivation.
Starvation wreaks lifelong damage on physical and mental health, perhaps including that of future generations, and destroys societies as well as lives. People are forced to make impossible choices, such as deciding which of their children needs food most, and do desperate things, snatching food from others. These acts too leave lasting scars. While many aid groups have run out of everything, others say social breakdown has made distributing meagre supplies too dangerous for both staff and recipients. Israel blames looting by Hamas for the hunger. This, from a government which armed a criminal gang accused of seizing aid.
To deliberately inflict starvation upon a society is to take it to pieces. The genocide convention prohibits “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Even if the trickle of aid keeps most Palestinians alive – just – the deprivation can still destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a group.
Condemnation is rightly growing. On Monday, the UK and 27 other countries issued a tough statement attacking Israel for depriving Palestinians of “human dignity”. The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, called their assertion “disgusting”. But Israel’s other allies must keep working together. What matters is not what they say. It is what they do – including whether they impose sanctions and comprehensive arms embargos, and suspend preferential trade terms. Recognition of a Palestinian state is part of a necessary response, but not the only or most important issue.
Britain was right to place sanctions on far-right ministers, reinstate funding to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, and suspend many arms exports. But these measures came too late, and they are still much too little. Kaja Kallas, the foreign policy chief of the EU – Israel’s biggest trading partner – has said that “all options [are] on the table”. But the bloc has yet to agree on action.
Faced with the systematic destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, other states must together produce a systematic, comprehensive and concrete response. If not now, when? What more would it take to convince them? This is first and foremost a catastrophe for Palestinians. But if states continue to allow international humanitarian law to be shredded, the repercussions will be felt by many more around the world in years to come. History will not ask whether these governments did anything to stop genocide by an ally, but whether they did all they could.
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