The atrocity of starvation and death is becoming worse by the day in Gaza. After nearly two years of onslaught by Israeli occupier forces, desperate Palestinians are risking their lives for scarce humanitarian aid. In recent weeks, an alarming number of people have been shot and killed just attempting to access food at designated distribution points.
Along with the killings are dreadful images of emaciated children, many so young that their only life experience is the agony of bloodshed and starvation spawned by war. A rising chorus of voices sees the crisis as another vicious shade of genocide on the Palestinian people.
A new report called “Our Genocide” that was issued by Israeli-based human rights organizations B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, has explicitly said Israel is emphatically committing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
“Nothing prepares you for the realization that you are part of a society committing genocide. This is a deeply painful moment for us,” said Yuli Novak, executive director of B’Tselem, in a statement.
“But as Israelis and Palestinians who live here and witness the reality every day, we have a duty to speak the truth as clearly as possible: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians,” she said.
“Our genocide has context,” continued Ms. Novak, who is an Israeli and a rights activist.
Genocide is not occurring in a vacuum. The current assault on Palestinians comes within the context of over 70 years of Israeli-imposed violence and marginalization. Since its inception, Israel has maintained an apartheid and occupying force.
The report underscores three foundations of the regime: enforced separation, ethnic cleansing, demographic manipulation; the systematic, institutionalized use of violence; and impunity from accountability.
“The lives of all Palestinians, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, are being treated as worthless,” Ms. Novak said. “They can be starved, killed, displaced—and the situation keeps getting worse. The world must stop the crimes Israel is committing now,” she added.
In the report, B’Tselem describes the development of a “genocidal regime in Israel, working to destroy Palestinian society in Gaza.” In addition, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI) published a legal-medical analysis documenting the deliberate and systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system.
The analysis concluded that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza since October 2023 constitutes genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The evidence shows a deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s health and life-sustaining systems—through targeted attacks on hospitals, obstruction of medical aid and evacuations, and the killing and detention of over 1,800 healthcare personnel, said the group.
Notwithstanding these conditions, humanitarian relief has been deliberately restricted, forcing civilians to approach militarized distribution points that often became sites of mass slaughter, said the PHRI in their analysis paper.
“This is not a temporary crisis. It is a strategy to eliminate the conditions needed for life,” said the physicians’ group. If Israel ends the war today, the devastation it inflicted ensures that preventable deaths—from starvation, infection, and chronic illness—will linger for years.
This is not collateral damage nor side effects of war. “It is the systematic creation of unlivable conditions,” said the PHRI paper. “It is the denial of survivability. It is a genocide.”
B’Tselem reported that its findings are based on 20 months of data, documenting thousands of alleged abuses by Israeli forces against Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and within Israel.
Both organizations call on Israelis and the international community to act immediately to stop the genocide, using all legal tools available under international law.
According to the Genocide Convention, genocide consists of any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:
• Killing members of the group.
• Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
• Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
• Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
• Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
As a crime, genocide requires two essentials: the act itself and the intent behind its commission. Israel has both acts and stated intentions to displace and remove the Palestinian people.
After nearly 2 years of carnage from drone-clad missiles, open-fire policies and Israeli kill zones, now a dire humanitarian crisis—marked by starvation—lays bare the deliberate attempt at erasure of an entire people, their future and very existence, observers point out.
Starvation falls under the third criterion for genocide on the destruction of living conditions. Prior to the current war, 64% of Gaza’s population faced food insecurity, and 80% relied on humanitarian aid.
The deteriorated situation was exacerbated to higher levels of desperation with the war and a debilitating Israeli blockade, triggering severe food shortages and famine conditions.
UN experts warned there is no precedent for the speed and scale of starvation unfolding in Gaza, declaring that Israel has destroyed Gaza’s food system and is using food as a weapon. Israel denies the claim, despite mounting evidence.
Food security experts see a “worst case scenario” of famine unfolding in Gaza. As conflict and displacement intensified, access to food and other essential items and services has fallen to unprecedented levels.
As of July, over 320,000 children—the entire Gaza population under 5—risks “acute malnutrition” with thousands suffering “severe acute malnutrition,” the deadliest form of undernutrition, say UN experts.
Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger‑related deaths in the Gaza Strip, reported an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) alert. The IPC tracks global famine conditions.
In a statement, the head of the UN Food Agriculture Organization (FAO) said the right to food is a “basic human right” and called on Israel to restore safe and sustained access.
“Gaza is now on the brink of full-scale famine,” said Qu Dongyu, director-general of the FAO. “People are starving not because food is unavailable, but because access is blocked, local agrifood systems have collapsed, and families can no longer sustain even the most basic livelihoods,” he said.
Despite evidence to the contrary Israel strongly rejected the report findings and expert assessments and denies that starvation exists. Israeli officials allege that the Palestinian resistance group Hamas has been stealing UN aid and bears responsibility for the crisis.
However, the UN, a USAID report, and Israel’s own military are on record stating there is no credible evidence to support Israel’s claims of aid misappropriation by Hamas.
Under global pressure, Israel announced humanitarian pauses and airdrops to allow aid into Gaza, but so far, it’s woefully inadequate, argue aid groups. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in a statement that “the trickle of aid must become an ocean.”
“This nightmare must end,” Secretary Guterres said. “Ending this worst-case scenario will take the best efforts of all parties now.”
Meanwhile, there is a cascade of condemnation against Israel, even from some of its staunchest allies. France, Germany and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement slamming the crisis as “man-made and avoidable.”
“Humanitarian aid must never be used as a political tool and Palestinian territory must not be reduced nor subjected to any demographic change. Israel is bound under international law to allow the unhindered passage of humanitarian aid,” said the July 23 statement in part.
The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, the National Representative of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, for decades has warned from scriptures of the consequences of such a course according to the time and law of justice, and he cautioned that every nation will be held accountable for its actions.
The Honorable Elijah Muhammad said that, “‘The Principle of Justice’ will be ‘The Weapon’ that God will use in ‘The Day of Requital,’ or ‘The Day of Judgment,’ then this is ‘a bad day,’ then, for The Wicked—a very bad day,” said Minister Farrakhan in part 15 of his 2013 lecture series, “The Time and What Must Be Done.”
“And since we are living in such a time, all of us have to be careful of what we send forth into the lives of others; because in this time, it won’t be a long time before we see it coming back to us in our lives for in the Holy Qur’an it says that if God were to punish man for his sins, ‘not one soul would be left alive on the earth.’
Whether on an individual basis, a national basis, or an international basis, this is that Time that we will be paid fully for what we have done, and only The Mercy of God can keep back from us what each of us is justly due,” said Minister Farrakhan.