Gaza famine: What the official statement means for Israel’s war

The hunger crisis in Gaza reached another grim milestone on Friday when the world’s leading hunger watchdog confirmed that a famine is taking place within the enclave, amid Israel’s ongoing blockade and bombardment.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the consortium of humanitarian groups and UN agencies that monitors and classifies global hunger crises with a five-phase classification system, considers a famine to be taking place in an area when at least 20 percent of households face an extreme lack of food, at least 30 percent of children are acutely malnourished, and at least two people out of 10,000 die per day from malnutrition. The IPC issued an alert this week that found those conditions now exist in parts of Gaza and are expected to expand in September. In response to the report, UN Secretary General António Guterres called the famine “a man-made disaster, a moral indictment — and a failure of humanity itself.”

While malnutrition has been a serious issue for Gaza throughout the war since it began after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, and to a lesser extent even before that, the situation has dramatically worsened since March, when a short-lived ceasefire between Israel and Hamas broke down and Israeli authorities halted all food aid into Gaza for two months. While food shipments eventually resumed, much of it is now delivered by a much-derided new US-backed nonprofit called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The GHF operates a small handful of sites — compared to hundreds that were in place before Israel’s March ban on aid — which critics say makes it difficult for the most vulnerable Gazans to access food. The Israeli government says the new system is necessary to prevent Hamas from stealing the food, though the New York Times reported in late July that two senior Israeli military officials said there was no evidence of aid being “systematically” stolen.

Famine classifications are rare. In the IPC’s 20-year history, there have been only four: in Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and Sudan last year. Though the distinction matters little to people who are starving, the IPC is set up to confirm the conditions on the ground. But it does not “declare” famine — governments are supposed to do that, but given that modern hunger crises are mainly driven by war or deliberate political policy, they very rarely do. The Israeli government is no exception: It is already pushing back on the IPC’s report, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling it “an outright lie,” and the foreign ministry accusing the experts of lowering the threshold for one of the criteria, the proportion of acutely malnourished children. (The New York Times summarizes the threshold dispute, which involves two different methods of measuring malnutrition and what the IPC says is a lack of data.) In other crises, advocates have criticized the IPC for being too slow to issue a famine classification, saying that by the time it’s in place, it’s often too late to stop the worst of the suffering.

If governments rarely acknowledge that a famine is happening, and if famine conditions or something very close to them are often in place long before the official statement is made, what’s the point? Advocates say that a famine classification can focus attention, political capital, and donor dollars on a crisis hot spot. While evidence of that is mixed, there are cases such as Somalia in 2011 where funding dramatically increased after a famine was announced.

But this just highlights the degree to which much of the international humanitarian system is not set up for a conflict like the war in Gaza. This isn’t a case like Somalia or Sudan, which struggle to get the attention of the media and wealthy governments. Photos of emaciated children in Gaza have been on the covers of the world’s leading news sites for weeks (though these too have been politicized). The US government, for better or worse, is deeply enmeshed in both diplomacy and aid in Gaza, to say nothing of the involvement of governments in the Middle East and Europe. A lack of resources is also not the problem here. There are already thousands of trucks worth of aid sitting outside Gaza’s borders and within them. Aid agencies say they can’t deliver the food in adequate amounts because of delays and restrictions put in place by the Israeli government and because — given the fact that aid can only enter at a limited number of places and times — they are often mobbed by desperate Gazans before they can reach distribution points.

This is not a neglected conflict, and the issue is neither a lack of attention nor inadequate resources. The problem is political will. And that’s something the IPC is not set up to provide.