“Deliberate Starvation”: UN Staff Collapse, Children Die As Gaza Famine Deepens Under Israeli Siege.

GAZA CITY – UN staff are collapsing from hunger. Children are dying with skeletal limbs and swollen bellies. And humanitarian convoys are being shelled or shot at as they attempt to deliver food. What is unfolding in the Gaza Strip is not a crisis born of natural disaster or logistical failure; it is, by growing consensus, a premeditated act of mass starvation, executed in full view of the international community.

UN agencies, doctors, analysts, and humanitarian workers now accuse the Israeli government of weaponising hunger to subjugate and depopulate Gaza, amounting to a crime against humanity and possibly genocide. A senior aid official, speaking anonymously for fear of reprisal, called it “the most systemic use of starvation as a tool of war in modern memory.”

“This is not a breakdown in coordination. This is siege warfare. It’s the intentional infliction of famine on a civilian population,” said Dr. Tanya Hajjar, field coordinator with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), speaking from Rafah. “We are watching children starve to death in hospital beds while thousands of trucks of food are idling just a few kilometres away.”

A Starving Population, Silenced And Under Fire:

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, 111 Palestinians have died from starvation and malnutrition, including at least 80 children, as of this week. Ten people, including four children, died in a single 24-hour period earlier this week. Medical personnel are increasingly overwhelmed. Dr. Sami Al-Haddad, a paediatrician at Kamal Adwan Hospital, told Al Jazeera:

“We’ve had to reuse feeding tubes and IV lines. Mothers are bringing in children who weigh less than newborns. This is not malnutrition, it’s planned starvation.”

Juliette Touma, Director of Communications at UNRWA, told the BBC that UN staff themselves are fainting from hunger.

“Our colleagues are collapsing while distributing aid. Gaza is a living hell. And this is not a failure, it’s a policy.”

Over 6,000 UNRWA trucks packed with food, medicine, diapers, and hygiene kits are currently stuck in Egypt and Jordan. They have been barred from entry by Israeli authorities since March.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini was blunt:

“This is not humanitarian aid denied by circumstance. This is humanitarian aid deliberately blocked.”

“Snipers Open Fire On Crowds”: US-Backed GHF Scheme Under Fire.

As Israel stalls humanitarian access, it has permitted a parallel aid effort to operate: the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a controversial distribution scheme coordinated by Israeli and US officials and run by private US security contractors.

UN officials and human rights monitors have denounced the GHF as a “death trap”.

“The so-called GHF scheme is a sadistic death trap,” said Lazzarini. “Snipers open fire randomly on desperate crowds as if they are given a license to kill.”

The UN human rights office (OHCHR) confirmed this week that over 1,050 Palestinians have been killed while attempting to collect food, including 766 near GHF distribution sites. Another 288 were killed in proximity to UN or NGO convoys.

“People are being shot while queuing for flour,” said Thameen Al-Kheetan, spokesperson for OHCHR. “It is execution by starvation.”

Israeli and GHF officials claim the UN failed to adequately distribute aid and allowed Hamas militants to exploit relief deliveries. But Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), called such claims “manifestly incorrect.”

“We have staff, supplies, routes, and coordination mechanisms. What we don’t have is access,” said Laerke.

“They’ve replaced humanitarian aid with militarised aid,” said Dr. Sarah Roy, a scholar of Gaza at Harvard University. “It’s as if Gaza is being used as a lab for how to privatise and weaponise relief.”

“$200 For A Bag Of Flour”: The Collapse Of Life In Gaza.

The economic strangulation has been total. Gaza’s economy, already devastated by 17 years of blockade, has completely imploded.

“A bag of lentils and a bit of flour costs $200,” said one UNRWA staffer. “A single diaper is $3. Parents are wrapping children in plastic bags.”

Local journalist Hind Khoudary, reporting from central Gaza, described people fainting in the streets.

“I saw a boy collapse outside a bakery that had no bread. His mother said he hadn’t eaten in two days. She had sold her wedding ring to buy cooking oil.”

“We’re watching famine in slow motion. Every day we don’t act is a death sentence,” said Dr. Rik Peeperkorn, WHO’s Gaza representative.

WHO also reported that 58 international medical personnel have been denied entry visas by Israel since March. These include trauma surgeons and specialists critical to Gaza’s collapsed health system.

Hospitals Attacked, UN Staff Stripped And Detained:

The World Health Organisation confirmed that its main warehouse in Deir al-Balah was bombed on Monday, and that staff and their families were handcuffed, stripped, and interrogated at gunpoint by Israeli forces. One WHO staff member remains detained without charge.

“It’s a systematic attack on the humanitarian response,” said WHO spokesperson Tarik Jašarević. “It’s pushing survival further out of reach for over two million people.”

UN agencies say 94% of health facilities in Gaza are damaged, and half are entirely nonfunctional. Over 1,500 health workers have been killed since October.

Legal Implications: Starvation As A War Crime.

The International Criminal Court has already issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The case includes charges of “starvation as a method of warfare”, a crime under Article 8 of the Rome Statute.

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice, brought by South Africa. The ICJ has issued multiple orders for Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza and prevent famine, but the orders have been ignored.

“What we’re witnessing is genocidal starvation,” said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights. “This is not about negligence. It’s about erasure.”

Information Blockade: Journalists Barred, Witnesses Silenced.

International journalists are still barred from entering Gaza unless embedded with Israeli forces. UNRWA’s Touma called it “a deliberate blackout.”

“We need international journalists in Gaza to document what is happening. The world has no idea how bad it truly is.”

“This is the most under-reported atrocity of our time,” said Daniel Levy, former Israeli peace negotiator and president of the US/Middle East Project. “And it’s not because there’s nothing to report, it’s because no one is being allowed to see it.”

Conclusion: Famine By Design, Complicity By Ideology.

What is happening in Gaza is not a humanitarian failure; it is a calculated and systemic atrocity. A man-made famine is being imposed on over two million Palestinians through a total siege, deliberate obstruction of aid, military bombardment of health facilities, and the criminalisation of hunger itself. Civilians, infants, the elderly, the sick, are dying in the hundreds, not just from bombs, but from the slow agony of thirst, malnutrition, and untreated wounds.

This is not a byproduct of war; it is the war, a war whose goal is not merely territorial but demographic. Starvation, displacement, and death have become the weapons of choice in a genocidal campaign to erase Palestinian life from Gaza.

Behind this atrocity stands a vast network of complicity. Western governments, chief among them the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada, have not only armed and funded this destruction, but have provided political cover for it. Their language of “self-defence” masks a deeper truth: that these are states guided by the same fascist ideologies of supremacy, settler-colonialism, and racial extermination that they once claimed to oppose.

“This is not just support,” said Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, Palestinian political analyst. “This is ideological alignment. They are part of the machinery that is trying to starve Gaza into submission and then erase it.”

From cutting UNRWA funding to vetoing ceasefire resolutions and defending Israeli impunity at the ICC and ICJ, these governments have demonstrated time and again that Palestinian life holds no value in their so-called rules-based order. Their silence and justifications are not passive; they are acts of political violence.

“You cannot weaponise starvation, bomb hospitals, and shoot civilians queuing for bread, and still call yourself a democracy,” said Michael Lynk, former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine.

Even aid has been turned into a weapon. The US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), run by private security firms rather than humanitarian agencies, has become a death trap where desperate people are routinely gunned down by Israeli snipers. As UNRWA’s Juliette Touma said:

“Seeking food has become as deadly as the bombardments.”

Meanwhile, thousands of trucks loaded with lifesaving supplies sit locked at Gaza’s gates, as UN staff inside collapse from hunger. Doctors faint during surgery. Mothers bury their emaciated children in makeshift graves. And children, whose tears have not even dried, have become the targets of this evil empire, hunted by drones, starved by siege, and forgotten by a world that has chosen to look away.

“Gaza’s children are being punished for surviving,” said Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a British-Palestinian war surgeon. “Their bodies are the frontlines of this war.”

This is not merely a war crime. It is the visible edge of a larger, darker project: the extermination of a people through siege, starvation, and silence.

History will record the names of the dead, but it will also remember those who armed the siege, those who justified the killing, and those who were too cowardly to speak. Western governments can no longer hide behind the veil of diplomacy or the illusion of neutrality. They are co-authors of this crime.

Suppose the international community does not act, not with statements, but with sanctions, prosecutions, and protection for the besieged. In that case, Gaza’s fate will be the precedent for how the world treats the colonised, the racialised, and the voiceless in the 21st century.

This is not just a test of international law. It is a test of our shared humanity.

And right now, humanity is failing.