The Tragedy Unfolding in Gaza

If any place had experience seeing civilians through war, it was the Gaza Strip. It’s much of why the place exists. That stretch of Mediterranean coast was only even named while being demarcated as a refuge for Palestinians driven off their land by Jewish forces in the 1948 war that created Israel. Gaza’s permanent status, like the fate of the Palestinians, was never decided, however. And as the decades churned on, so did the conflict.  There was a devastating rhythm to it. Palestinian militants launched missiles into Israel from Gaza. Israel’s military replied with airstrikes, at times with sustained campaigns dubbed wars. The longest lasted 50 days. In each round of fighting, civilians knew where to find safety: in the schools, clinics, and hospitals run by the U.N., which also fed them.  Nearly all of that has been destroyed in Israel’s response to the horrific Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023—though not only by bombardment. In its war on a terrorist group, Israel also dismantled civic structures that support an entire population, with the bonus of undercutting the U.N. Israeli distrust of the U.N. runs deep. Most of its member nations support the Palestinian ambition for a state of their own, and in 1949 it set up the architecture of one. That was the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. As its administrator, Philippe Lazzarini, put it, “The Israelis got a state. The Palestinians got UNRWA.”  Read More: We Can Stop Gazans From Dying of Starvation Right Now. Here’s How We Do It With 13,000 employees, UNRWA was Gaza’s largest employer, and after Oct. 7, Israel charged that a dozen of them took part in the attack. (One was videotaped loading a body into an SUV.) Asserting that UNRWA was as riddled with Hamas as Gaza was with tunnels, Israel cut relations with it in January. In March, as a cease-fire with Hamas fell apart, Israel shut down aid from all international aid agencies—collapsing a fragile but professional humanitarian apparatus that had kept 2.1 million residents fed.  No food entered Gaza during March and April. In May, Israel declared that it was taking over aid distribution itself, through what’s called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Aid groups lamented that it reduced the number of food-distribution points from 400 to four and that, at about the same time, Israel launched a massive new offensive.  The result: now “the worst-case scenario of famine is unfolding in Gaza,” according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a consortium of leading aid agencies. The IPC is, in effect, the world’s hunger watchdog: from sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East and beyond, aid groups take their cues from its determinations about the food needs of communities caught in natural and man-made upheavals. Though it stopped short of formally declaring famine across the Strip, the warning was the humanitarian-world equivalent of a four-alarm fire. And it galvanized global opinion. “That’s real starvation stuff,” President Donald Trump said, after seeing images of wasting children on television. “You can’t fake that.”  Such is the elemental power of mass starvation. Its specter can, overnight, reframe a conflict that already has cost 60,000 lives, and fueled tense global debates on morality, antisemitism, the laws of war. When children are starving, the enemy is hunger. Solving the crisis We know what to do about that. And doing it carries benefits beyond saving lives. In Gaza, addressing famine means sanctifying life instead of normalizing violent death. The meaning of a war that, over 21 months, threatened to be buried under endless mountains of rubble now becomes about facts—the kind found on a medical chart, like the levels of magnesium and zinc in a patient, depleted electrolytes being among the first signs of starvation. Soon the body breaks down fatty acids to create the fuel to function, then proteins, and finally cells. Read More: The Malnutrition Crisis in Gaza Will Outlive the War Fighting famine calls for a mobilization, but not one that can be effective on a battlefield where, since May, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed while traveling toward aid. This kind of mobilization requires not only a steady supply of basic foodstuffs for the merely hungry, but also high-calorie, nutrient-rich pastes; therapeutic feeding centers for the acutely malnourished; dedicated clinics for pregnant women; clean water and sanitary regimes to prevent cholera—all the infrastructure of lifesaving aid that a concerned world rushed to erect in Sudan, in South Sudan, and in Somalia, the only other places famine has been declared in this century. In Gaza, all that will amount to restoring a measure of what already was there just two years ago. Not the buildings, but the structures of mutual aid that constitute the core of civic life. It’s what Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who was essentially Prime Minister of Gaza, threw into the fire when he concocted the Oct. 7 attack.  The next move is up to Israel, which within living memory was known less for its military might than for its ingenuity. This is the country that, with drip irrigation, produced the miracle of growing food in the desert.