Starvation and withholding of aid

Starvation and famine

The Gaza Strip was gripped by an unprecedented hunger crisis in the first year of the war, driven by Israeli policies that included destroying the local food and agriculture industry, displacing most of the population, months of severe restrictions on the movement and distribution of humanitarian aid, and a prolonged ban on the entry of goods for the private market.

After somewhat relaxing restrictions during the ceasefire that was in effect from January to March 2025, Israel closed all crossings into Gaza on March 2, 2025, blocking all aid until May 18, and ignoring repeated warnings from international organizations and medical professionals about the rapid deterioration of humanitarian conditions and the risk of famine.

Beginning on May 19, 2025, Israel permitted only very limited deliveries of food and relief supplies to select UN and international organizations in the Strip. Despite the UN reporting some improvement in access and distribution conditions in August, numerous logistical and access barriers prevented organizations from bringing in enough aid or distributing it efficiently to meet people’s needs. Amid the hunger and chaos, most of the limited food supply was taken directly from trucks by desperate crowds or looted before it reached distribution.

In July 2025 alone, medical professionals in Gaza recorded more than 13,000 new cases of child malnutrition, with especially dire conditions among infants and children under five years old. In August 2025, the UN panel of experts formally declared a state of emergency and famine in the Deir al-Balah and Khan Yunis governorates, the highest and most severe level of hunger on the IPC scale.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, as of October 7, 2025, 461 malnutrition-related deaths had been recorded, including 157 children.

With the ceasefire, the capacity of UN and other aid organizations to deliver food to those in need significantly improved, though amounts still fall far short of demand, as most border crossings remain shut and many shipments await Israeli approval. Even after the ceasefire, Israel has refused to open the commercial crossings in northern Gaza, which means that relief cannot sufficiently reach the areas where famine had been declared, in part due to the destruction of roads. On October 24, 2025, the UN reported marginal improvement and a drop in the proportion of children suffering from severe malnutrition compared to the previous investigation, down from 14% to 10% of the 4,994 children tested.

Starving a civilian population is strictly prohibited under international law. Israel has an active duty to ensure regular, uninterrupted flow of food and humanitarian aid, including by opening border crossings, including the northern Gaza and Rafah crossing to Egypt, to allow aid in.

For ongoing updates on Gaza’s civilian population, see Gaza Now: facts and figures on Gisha’s website.

Attacks on food aid recipients

In addition to the issues stemming from the strict restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid, on May 27, 2025 a new and inexperienced agency, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), started operating in the Strip. Backed and approved by the Israeli government, the GHF set out to centralize food distribution across most or all of the Gaza Strip. Ignoring expert warnings and the existing delivery infrastructure, the Israeli government chose to institute a new system with just four distribution centers, three in the south and one in central Gaza, tasked with feeding about two million hungry people.

The distribution centers operated sporadically and offered only basic food packages. Conditions were chaotic; there was no tracking or oversight of who actually received aid. Not only was distribution by the GHF highly inefficient, it also put the lives of aid recipients at risk. According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, as of September 2, 2025, 2,306 people were killed and over 16,929 injured while trying to collect food from GHF centers or walking on the roads leading to them. Many of the victims were shot by soldiers or GHF security guards (both foreign and local). Hundreds more were wounded since September until the distribution centers were closed soon after the ceasefire took effect.

Live fire for crowd control: Israeli soldiers and officers have testified that the military used artillery, tank fire, and machine guns to direct people approaching the centers and to enforce the rules governing when and where crowds could gather. Firing live rounds, including artillery and mortars (which are inaccurate weapons) on unarmed civilians who posed no threat, sometimes from a kilometer (approximately 0.62 miles) away, is another example of the overly permissive rules of engagement given to soldiers in Gaza, disregarding their basic duty to avoid putting civilians at risk.

The high number of casualties in and around the distribution sites points to a policy whose main goal was not to provide a quick, humanitarian solution for the hunger crisis, but to force the population south, where most distribution centers were located, and buy more time for military operations under mounting international pressure over images of severe hunger in Gaza.

For more on hunger in Gaza and how the foundation’s distribution centers failed, see Gisha’s The claims Israel makes vs. reality.