Imagine an army captured the city of Philadelphia, fenced it in, closed its waterfront and opened just a few gates for supply trucks. Now imagine the army bombed Philadelphia’s hospitals, razed land used to grow food, barred fishing and closed those gates to all but an intermittent trickle of aid. If you saw news footage of children dying of malnutrition and read U.N. warnings of mass starvation, would you doubt those reports? If the military blocking the food trucks was using U.S. public money to buy weapons, would you question the need to stop the flow of arms and demand that the military let aid in?
An estimated thousands or tens of thousands of people have died from complications related to the supply blockage, including malnutrition, dehydration and disease.
Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israeli civilians, which constituted crimes against humanity, Israeli authorities have used starvation as a weapon of war in varying degrees, intermittently blocking all aid to the Gaza Strip, which resembles Philadelphia in size and population. Since Israel ended the aid shutdown in May, the government has permitted supplies to enter the territory in quantities catastrophically insufficient for its approximately 2 million residents. The Israeli military also razed cropland, banned fishing, destroyed hospitals and water infrastructure and cut electricity, rendering people almost entirely dependent on the obstructed external supplies. An estimated thousands or tens of thousands of people have died from complications related to the supply blockage, including malnutrition, dehydration and disease. Aid agencies are begging to be allowed to deliver food sitting in nearby warehouses or waiting just outside Gaza.
Israel has controlled the movement of goods into Gaza since 1967 and, in the 1990s, built fences and walls around it, making residents dependent on the Israeli military opening crossings, in order to eat. What we are seeing play out now in recent months is weaponization of this control, with increasingly deadly results.
The Israeli government denies famine or aid obstruction and blames the United Nations and Hamas for any shortages. Israeli officials accuse aid agencies of “distributing lies,” say restrictions are needed to prevent diversion by Hamas, and argue that because tons of U.N. aid is still on the Gaza side of crossings, waiting to be distributed, there’s no need to allow more in. On Friday, Reuters revealed the existence of a U.S. Agency for International Development report finding no evidence of systematic Hamas diversion of U.S.-funded aid.
Official Israeli misinformation is not particularly sophisticated, but it’s repetitive, relentless and reliant on Western dehumanization of Palestinians to help render the information Palestinians convey — with words and with images and videos they share of their emaciated bodies — suspect. Only racism — the belief that some people’s lives are worth less than others, and that some people’s statements are inherently unreliable — can explain American susceptibility to Israel’s denial of starvation in Gaza. If you block food to a besieged population, nearly half of whom are children, what do you think will happen?
Thursday’s statement by U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff that, in the absence of a ceasefire deal, he’ll explore alternative options to “try to create a more stable environment for the people of Gaza” would be laughable given the billions of dollars of U.S. support for the army that’s blocking the food — if it didn’t involve 57 children documented by the Gaza Ministry of Health to have died of malnutrition in just over two months.
There are two things the United States government should urgently do to end U.S. complicity in the mass starvation.
First, the U.S. must tell the Israeli military to open all crossings into Gaza, end onerous bureaucratic restrictions and allow aid groups to flood the strip with food. On average since March 2, just 28 international aid trucks have entered Gaza daily, compared with 500 total trucks per day before the war. Limited additional quantities have entered via the U.S.- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), but reaching their distribution sites is dangerous or impossible for most people in Gaza. That severity of the food shortage makes safe and orderly delivery to civilians nearly impossible. Out of 1,090 truckloads of aid collected from the crossings last month by veteran international organizations, all but 43 were looted or “self-distributed” by hungry crowds. According to the U.N., the Israeli military has failed to approve safe delivery routes, mechanisms and timing for truck delivery. According to the U.N., the Israeli military has failed to approve safe delivery routes, mechanisms and timing for truck delivery. This, combined with the desperation that starvation creates, is the main reason it’s been so hard to distribute the little aid that has entered Gaza — that’s why there is some aid in Gaza still waiting to be distributed. If Israeli authorities allow unrestricted aid into Gaza, subject only to physical inspection and credible U.N. assurances against diversion, and cooperate with the U.N. on delivery, supplies will reach the level at which safe, dignified distribution will become possible. Second, the U.S. must end support for dangerous, militarized distribution schemes like the GHF and instruct the Israeli military to resume cooperation with the United Nations and the other principled, impartial aid groups. Hundreds of people have been fatally shot by Israeli forces or crushed in a stampede after walking for miles to reach the four highly militarized GHF distribution points that have replaced the hundreds of community distribution sites aid groups ran until Israeli authorities banned them from bringing in food for household distribution. Workarounds to parachute small quantities of food into Gaza were ineffective in the past and would be even less effective now, given the scope of the need and the desperation. The Israeli government is responsible for starving Palestinians in Gaza, but U.S. backing makes it complicit, too. How many more children need to die of hunger before the U.S. government admits that without food, human beings will die — and that U.S. economic, military and diplomatic support should not be used as a tool in mass starvation?
Sari Bashi
Sari Bashi is a human rights lawyer, the former program director at Human Rights Watch and the author of “Upside-Down Love," forthcoming in 2026. 
