The Fix: Israel Admits What It Is Doing

Israel is intentionally starving Palestinians. Its leaders, officials, and soldiers acknowledge it.

Credit: Anas-Mohammed / Shutterstock

Over the past few years, I have spent a lot of time countering pro-Kremlin propaganda designed to exonerate Russia for its genocidal war on Ukraine.

It is not Russia's fault, we are told; the West provoked it to invade. Later, those same Western powers pressured Kyiv to reject Moscow’s peace overtures and keep fighting. And so on and so forth.

It is all bullshit. But it can be hard to see through it without having prior knowledge of the subject. As someone who has studied Ukrainian politics for nearly three decades, I have done my best to expose the lies.

At its worst, such propaganda veers into atrocity denial. I have repeatedly had to debunk conspiracy theories that attempt to blame Ukraine for Russia’s crimes. Whether it is the execution of non-combatants, the bombing of civilian targets, or the mass-abduction of Ukrainian children to Russian “reeducation” camps, none of these things happened, insist Russia's apologists. Or, if they did, they were staged by Ukraine to frame Russia.

Nowadays, one sees a similar surge in atrocity denial on Israel’s behalf. While hardly new, it has reached a fever pitch over revelations of an Israeli-engineered famine in Gaza.

The whitewashing bears striking resemblance to the sort that tries to absolve Russia of its own crimes. There is no starvation, we are told. To the extent that there is, it is the doing of Hamas and the United Nations—anyone but Israel, really. And if it was caused by Israel, it was not part of a deliberate plan.

As we will see, these claims are demonstrably false.

While certain actors—namely, the Israeli government—are intentionally lying, I do not believe that most of those spreading the misinformation are doing so knowingly.

Either way, there is a need to correct the record. We cannot blind ourselves to human suffering or the criminals responsible for it.

Yes, Hamas has also committed atrocities—above all, its massacre of innocents on October 7^th and its mistreatment of the hostages it continues to detain.

Still, Hamas’s crimes, evil as they are, do not grant Israel a free pass to commit its own. But this is exactly what Israel is doing, as a mountain of evidence confirms. The violations include mass-executions; the rampant, arbitrary, and intentional killing and maiming of civilians, including preteen children; and the rape, torture, and starvation of detainees, many of whom are held without charge.

There is a reason why collective punishment is banned under international law. Inflicting harm on children and the elderly for other people’s misdeeds is reprehensible no matter which side is doing it.

The Fourth Geneva Convention and the UN Genocide Convention, which together form the core of international humanitarian law, were adopted largely in response to the Holocaust. But here we are, 75 years later, as Israel trashes those agreements in the name of the Jews.

How Israel Implicates Itself

Maybe you doubt the World Food Program when it says that starvation in Gaza is “unlike anything we have seen in this century,” on par with the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s.¹

Maybe you distrust the more than one hundred doctors and health professionals who say that “our Palestinian colleagues—doctors, nurses, and first responders—are all rapidly losing weight due to forced starvation at the hands of the Israeli government.”

Maybe you are skeptical of the hundred-odd international organizations who contend that “the UN-led humanitarian system…has been prevented from functioning” due to “Israel’s restrictions, delays, and fragmentation.”

To be clear, there is no valid reason to dismiss these findings. But even if you do, it just so happens that Israel’s leaders, officials, and soldiers affirm them.

Let's take a look.

Yes, there is a famine, and Israel is to blame.

On July 25^th, news outlets around the world published a photo of a skeletal Palestinian child as evidence of the severe hunger afflicting Gaza. It later emerged that the boy had congenital health problems which might have partially accounted for his appearance.

Pro-Israel commentators seized on the revelation, arguing that claims of famine were exaggerated or false. (In truth, children with certain preexisting conditions are more vulnerable than others to malnutrition, and the boy in the picture was indeed malnourished.)

Contested photos aside, Gaza is indeed experiencing acute hunger, and Israeli policies are the cause.

To avoid widespread malnutrition, the UN estimates that Gaza needs a minimum of 62,000 tons of food per month. But Israel decides whether and how much food can enter Gaza, and in ten of the 22 months since the war began, deliveries fell below that minimum level.

The data behind this claim comes not from the UN but from Israel itself—in particular, COGAT, the defense ministry unit that oversees the territory. Each month, COGAT calculates the amount of food that is brought into Gaza.

Source: BBC / COGAT

As you can see, in October 2023 (far left), almost no food at all was allowed to enter. The reason was the total blockade that Israel imposed that month in response to Hamas’s attack. The restrictions were eventually relaxed, but only under American pressure.

By the start of 2024, food deliveries began to pick up. Still, in February, September, and October of that year, they failed to meet the minimum UN threshold. Later, during the ceasefire of January and February 2025, supplies increased dramatically.

It would not last, however. In early March 2025, Israel initiated another blockade. “Prime Minister Netanyahu has decided that, as of this morning, all entry of goods and supplies into the Gaza Strip will cease,” read a March 2^nd press release from his office.

For the next 78 days, Israel prevented all humanitarian assistance, including foodstuffs, from entering Gaza.

Predictably, the blockade led to a crisis. By mid-May, COGAT, the defense ministry agency, was warning the government that Gaza was on the brink of famine.

According to officials interviewed by the New York Times,

Israeli military officers who monitor humanitarian conditions in Gaza have warned their commanders in recent days that unless the blockade is lifted quickly, many areas of the enclave will likely run out of enough food to meet minimum daily nutritional needs.

…The officers…privately briefed senior commanders on the worsening situation, warning with increasing urgency that many in the territory were just a few weeks away from starvation. An Israeli general briefed the cabinet on the humanitarian situation in Gaza last week, saying that supplies in the territory would run out within a few weeks, according to an Israeli defense official and a senior government official.

It was in response to the briefing, the officials confirmed, that the government lifted the blockade.

Problem solved, right? With no more blockade, the impending emergency which defense officials warned about would be avoided, would it not?

Nope.

Far from it, in fact, because even after lifting the blockade, Israel continued to maintain severe restrictions on the food entering Gaza.

As the table above shows, food deliveries in May, June, and July remained well below the level required to prevent malnutrition.

According to COGAT, the government allowed only 19,900 metric tons of food to enter in May and another 37,800 tons in June. This, combined with the zero tons it authorized in the two preceding months, adds up to 57,700 metric tons of food over a four-month period.

Compare that to the 62,000 tons the UN defines as the minimum amount needed each month to stave off malnutrition.

In other words, in the four months between March and June, Israel allowed in less than the bare-minimum amount required for a single month.

That is why the crisis became as severe as it did, and that is what explains the ubiquitous photos of walking skeletons desperate for food.

So, yes, of course Gaza is suffering an acute malnutrition crisis, and of course Israel is responsible. How could it not be? The defense ministry’s own data proves it! Simply put, Israel is not letting nearly enough food to come in.

But don’t Hamas and the UN bear most of the responsibility?

Israel blames the crisis on other actors—in particular, the UN, which is ineffective and does not prevent Hamas from stealing the aid. But, it says, they then turn around and pin the blame on Israel.

This is bullshit. For one thing, we already saw that Israel’s restrictions alone were more than sufficient to cause the crisis.

Still, is it not possible that Hamas and the UN are making it worse?

The answer is no—and, once again, it is Israeli officials who confirm it.² At a cabinet meeting in March, the New York Times reports, the military presented evidence that it

never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.

In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.

Not only did the UN system work, but it was set up in a way that prevented Hamas from diverting the aid:

The military officials who spoke to The New York Times said that the original U.N. aid operation was relatively reliable and less vulnerable to Hamas interference than the operations of many of the other groups bringing aid into Gaza. That’s largely because the United Nations managed its own supply chain and handled distribution directly inside Gaza.

Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid.

In sum, Israel’s policies are exclusively responsible for the hunger crisis. Contrary to Israel’s official stance, moreover, neither Hamas nor the UN are making it worse; Israeli military officials said so themselves.

No, Israel does not merit special praise for feeding Gaza.

“Israel is the only country that has ever fed an enemy population in a time of war.” So goes a common refrain by Israel and its supporters. In fact, they argue, far from condemning Israel, we should applaud it for allowing in any food at all.

This is nonsense. Imagine if the US government laid siege to Detroit and established tight control over the city’s land, sea, and air access. Under these conditions, nobody would be able to bring anything, including food, into the city absent the express authorization of the federal government. Unless Washington allowed food to come in, Detroit would starve.

That is the situation in which Gaza finds itself. Given its small size—it has about the same area as Detroit, only with a higher population density—there is no way that Gaza can support the agricultural base required to feed its two million inhabitants. As a consequence, it is almost entirely dependent on the import of food and other essential supplies.

But without Israel's approval, it cannot import anything.

While Israel formally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it continued to exercise extraordinary control over anything and anyone moving across its borders.

Israel has long controlled access to Gaza by land, sea, and air. This includes Gaza’s border with Egypt. Past agreements with Cairo granted Israel indirect control over the movement of goods and people through the Rafah crossing that connects the territory with Egypt. In the wake of Israel’s May 2024 Rafah offensive, its control became direct and absolute.

For this reason, even after the 2005 withdrawal, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) continued to regard Israel as an occupying power under international law. An ICJ advisory opinion from July 19^th, 2024, states that

Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip [in 2005] has not entirely released it of its obligations under the law of occupation. Israel’s obligations have remained commensurate with the degree of its effective control.

When it comes to food, specifically, the court ruled that Israel’s status as an occupying power gives it “the continuing duty to ensure that the local population has an adequate supply of foodstuffs, including water.”

It is very simple: Unless Israel allows food to come in, Gaza starves. To the extent that Israel does permit food to enter, this is not an example of its benevolence; it is its minimum obligation under international humanitarian law. Israel does not deserve special credit for that.

Not that it complied with its obligations in the first place. Even before October 2023, it intentionally kept food imports to a minimum. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet,” a government advisor wryly remarked in 2006, “but not to make them die of hunger.”

Official documents released under court order in 2012 show the meticulous calculations Israel used to determine the least amount of food needed to keep Gaza’s inhabitants from falling below international malnutrition thresholds. COGAT, the Israeli defense agency cited above, referred to these minimum requirements as “red lines.” In practice, actual food deliveries fell far short of these levels, according to UN data.

Intent to Starve

As we saw earlier, the restrictions became even more severe after October 7^th.

But not only did Israel limit the amount of food that entered; in recent months, it started sabotaging the distribution of the food that did arrive.

After lifting its blockade in May of this year, Israel drastically scaled back the UN’s role in allocating food aid. Under the new plan, the UN and its partners would receive only half the food entering the territory. The other half would be distributed by the now-infamous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Explaining its decision, Israel claimed that the UN network was ineffective and that it failed to stop Hamas from stealing the aid.

But that was a lie. The Israeli military admitted it, as we saw earlier.

Recall what a group of military officials told the New York Times. At a March meeting, they informed Netanyahu's cabinet that the UN was “largely effective” at handing out food and that there was no evidence that Hamas had stolen from the UN on any significant scale. That is because the system was set up in a way that minimized the possibility of Hamas’s interference.

The government nevertheless rejected those findings and proceeded with its plan. From now on, the GHF, an Israeli- and USbacked outfit run by American evangelists and private equity executives, few of whom had any prior experience in the aid realm, would take over much of the UN’s role.

Not only was the new arrangement unnecessary; the Israeli government knew it would fail. At the same March meeting, military officials expressed serious doubts about the GHF’s capabilities. But the government dismissed their concerns.

In place of the hundreds of aid distribution points operated by the UN, the GHF established four—yes, four—all of which were located in the middle of active combat zones.

The result was chaos, hunger, and death.

Starting in late-May, thousands of desperate Palestinians would regularly descend on the handful of GHF distribution sites.

Crowd control was achieved by launching artillery shells into crowds of hungry civilians—a fact confirmed by officers at a meeting of the IDF Southern Command. According to one attendee,

[IDF commanders] talk about using artillery on a junction full of civilians as if it's normal. … What concerns everyone [at the meeting] is whether [the use of these weapons] would hurt our legitimacy to keep operating in Gaza. The moral aspect is practically nonexistent. No one stops to ask why dozens of civilians looking for food are being killed every day.

IDF soldiers interviewed by Israeli news outlet Haaretz describe how they were ordered to fire on unarmed civilians lined up to receive food and who posed no danger. As one soldier recounts,

When we asked why [soldiers at an aid distribution point] opened fire, we were told it was an order from above and that the civilians had posed a threat to the troops. I can say with certainty that the people were not close to the forces and did not endanger them. It was pointless—they were just killed, for nothing. This thing called killing innocent people—it's been normalized. We were constantly told there are no noncombatants in Gaza, and apparently that message sank in among the troops.

Sorry, but you do not lie your way into depriving millions of people of food, while also putting them in mortal, unnecessary danger, unless you intend to starve and kill them.

Going by the public statements of Israel's leaders, in fact, this would appear to have been the plan. Consider just a few of the many examples:

Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, July 24^th, 2025:

No nation feeds its enemies. Have we gone crazy? Should we bother with this? They should return the captives, they should return the hostages, they should stop fighting us. Should we bother with their hunger? This discourse is simply crazy.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, May 6^th, 2025:

[The Palestinians] will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.

Former Military Intelligence Directorate chief Aharon Haliva, who stepped down in April 2024:

For every victim of October 7^th, 50 Palestinians had to die. No matter if they are children.

Israeli security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, November 12^th, 2023:

We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba [Nakba is the word Palestinians use to describe Israel’s ethnic cleansing policies since 1948]. From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war—as the IDF seeks to do in Gaza—with masses between the tanks and the soldiers.

Galit Distel Atbaryan, a lawmaker from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, November 1^st, 2023:

Erase Gaza from the face of the earth. Let the Gazan monsters rush to the southern border and flee into Egypt, or die. And let them die badly.

Netanyahu, January 13^th, 2024:

We provide minimal humanitarian aid. … If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid.

These sentiments, it is worth noting, are not those of a rogue government that is out of step with mainstream opinion. As a recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute reveals, 79 percent of Jewish Israelis are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by “reports of famine and suffering” in Gaza.

Other surveys find that anywhere from 53 to 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. According to a February poll, 64 percent agree that "there are no innocent people in Gaza.”

In sum, one need not rely on the UN, foreign NGOs, or anyone else to tell us that Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians. Israelis admit it themselves:

• Yes, there is a famine, and Israeli policies are to blame. The defense ministry’s own data proves it, and military officials confirm it.

• Neither Hamas nor the UN have been systematically withholding aid from Gaza’s inhabitants, Israeli officials acknowledged to the New York Times.

• The UN-led food distribution system was mostly effective before Israel replaced it, those same officials admit.

• Israel’s leaders knew that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation would fail its stated mission of feeding Gaza’s inhabitants; the Israeli military warned the government about it.

• Israeli soldiers were ordered to shoot civilians at GHF distribution sites despite the fact that they posed no threat, as the soldiers themselves attest.

• The Israeli government is deliberately imposing mass-suffering on Gaza’s civilian population. It says so publicly.

• A majority of Jewish Israelis either support these policies or are unbothered by them, opinion polls show.

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These are the facts.

Make of them what you will.

But do not deny them.

1. Credit to Jasper Nathaniel of Infinite Jaz for alerting me to this report.

2. Credit to Mehdi Hasan and Zeteo for alerting me to this article.