Gaza siege: Years of starvation

After weeks of Israel’s continuous bombing of Gaza and the effects of the Occupation’s near total siege on the strip, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) warned at the end of October of the depletion of its stock of life-saving aid for millions of Palestinians. International supplies and aid that had entered the strip prior to October 7 were running out, to the point where relief and international organizations warned of famine and called on the Occupation to stop using starvation as a weapon against Palestinians.

Though Israel’s current siege is at an unprecedented level, life under some siege – at least partially – is generally not a new feature of life in Gaza, with the over two million Palestinians in the strip having lived under conditions whereby access to food and basic resources is a constant struggle.

The toughest phase of the siege on Gaza started in 2007, after Hamas won legislative elections and assumed control over the strip in 2006. As part of the siege, the Occupation implemented the “red lines” plan for food consumption in Gaza, whereby Israeli authorities calculated the minimum number of calories needed to provide Palestinians with calories that were  just above the United Nations definition of hunger. Despite the Occupation denying the existence of the plan for years, a protracted court battle eventually forced them to disclose documents that confirmed it.

The Occupation’s calculations were set according to gender and age: 2,100 calories per day for men and 1,700 for women. Children had varying amounts based on age and gender, according to Eyal Weizman's book The Least of All Possible Evils (2011).

According to Weizman, based on those calculations, the Occupation determined the amount of food allowed to enter the strip as a whole and split the calories into different categories, such as grains, fruits, vegetables, meat, milk, and oil.

In its calculations, the Occupation estimated that Palestinians' needs for different food items were less than the needs of Israelis. For example, the Occupation estimated that Palestinians need 43 percent less dairy products than Israelis, 19 percent less meat and 37 percent less fruits and vegetables.

In addition, the Occupation decided to prevent the entry of materials that it claimed could be used in industry, including threads, fabrics, packaging materials, industrial salt and even types of food that it considered luxuries, such as hummus with sesame paste, or mushrooms, according to the Israeli human rights organization Gisha Legal Center for the Freedom of Movement. Gisha fought the legal battle that forced the Israeli government to disclose the documents confirming the plan, after Haaretz  reported on the plan for the first time in 2009.

In the red lines documents that Gisha gained access to, the Israeli military used numerical formulas with upper and lower thresholds to define what the military called the "breathing space" – the time window before hunger begins to kill people.

Weizman quotes the rudimentary calculations from the red lines documents: “If the daily consumption per capita, per product as calculated by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics is A, the population of the Gaza Strip is B, then daily consumption C should be calculated as C=A*B. If the quantity of food reserves in the Gaza Strip is Z, the breathing space in days [D] should be calculated as D = Z/C.”

Even for food items approved by the Occupation, the quantities entering Gaza were much lower in reality than Israeli calculations,  which stated that the residents of Gaza would need the entry of 106 trucks from Israel over five days a week, in addition to the supply of wheat and grains. In the first year of the siege, an average of 65 trucks entered each working day, according to Gisha's data.

In addition, the contents of these trucks were subject to the whims of officials and their relationships with senior Israeli farmers and traders who sometimes decide to increase the supply of goods into Gaza that had lowered price in the Israeli market due to an oversupply. This way, they are able to maintain their profits and raise prices or get rid of their excess supply, therefore imposing certain food items on Gazans who have no say in the matter."

The plan was doomed from the beginning, as it assumed that the quantities of food reaching the strip’s population would remain stable on a daily basis and that distribution across that population would be fair, which was not the reality on the ground. On the other hand, the sharp decrease in food quantities entering the strip led to the inability of Gazan authorities to predict shortages in the supply of goods early enough to put mechanisms in place, resulting in a continuous shortage of some commodities such as flour, sugar, oils, and dairy products, and therefore a significant increase in food prices.

The increase in restrictions on production inputs also gravely affected the ability of Palestinian producers to continue their work, as food productivity in the occupied Palestinian territories decreased to its third lowest level between 2007 and 2010, according to the World Bank, exacerbating the situation.

The meticulous division of food inputs and the full control over their entry into Gaza from Israel was disrupted by unofficial tunnels between Egypt and Gaza. Thousands of underground tunnels changed the balance and rules of the siege above ground, providing hundreds of thousands of residents of the strip with another source of food and production inputs. According to residents of the strip, the tunnels alleviated some of the unavailability of food items and brought in various products from Egypt.

These tunnels allowed for a flourishing unofficial trade between Egypt and Gaza, which by some estimates was valued at around $700 million in 2012. For example, the strip’s imports of construction materials reached 7,500 tons daily in 2013, according to estimates by the Union of Palestinian Industries, in addition to large quantities of food, fuel, and even cars and industrial production inputs. The abundance of goods contributed to the reconstruction of the strip after Israel’s invasion of Gaza in early 2009, as well as  the employment of thousands of people, and a reduction in prices.

All of this was completely reversed after the demolition of the tunnels, when Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the Egyptian defense minister at the time, ordered the destruction of about 3000 tunnels over the course of three years starting in 2013. This was an attempt to ward off the specter of terrorism that killed 16 Interior Ministry personnel in an attack near the Egyptian border with Israel and Gaza in 2012, whose responsibility Egypt and Israel attributed to extremist Islamist groups, some of whom may have entered Egyptian territory from Gaza.

In 2015, in line with an Israeli request, the Egyptian military flooded nearly 1,000 tunnels at the border with the Gaza Strip by pumping massive amounts of water from the Mediterranean Sea into them. However, attempts to destroy the tunnel trade between Egypt and Gaza began before that – in 2010, there was an attempt to build an underground steel barrier.

With the destruction of the tunnels, the market in the strip shrank, and the quality of available food changed drastically, according to residents of Gaza.

At the same time, food productivity levels  in Gaza and the West Bank dropped to their lowest ever in 2015, according to the World Bank. According to statistics from the World Food Programme, 63 percent of the population in the Gaza Strip suffers from a lack of access to sufficient food for growth and healthy development, a condition otherwise known as food insecurity, and relies on international assistance. Nearly 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza live in extreme poverty (80 percent of the total 2.2 million).

Like any impoverished people dealing with food insecurity, people in Gaza rely mainly on carbohydrates to survive. They have only two meals a day, combining breakfast and lunch into one and skip the third meal. The meals themselves usually consist of homemade bread – to save the cost of purchasing bread – or pasta with sauce for lunch, relying primarily on food aid programs from international organizations that provide coupons for purchasing oil, flour, sugar, chickpeas, lentils, and sometimes rice at highly subsidized prices. For protein, they often use cheaper parts of chicken, such as wings, necks, and legs, which they also rely on to prepare soups for other meals, like mulukhiyah.

Years of malnutrition have exacerbated the rates of diseases affecting children and pregnant women in the strip. According to the World Bank, more than half of pregnant women and children between six and 23 months in Gaza suffered from anemia in 2022, in addition to high rates of deficiencies in key vitamins that play a crucial role in the development and health of vision, bones, and immunity. These diseases have already affected a large portion of the strip’s population, including approximately 126,000 children (35 percent of Gaza's total children) who are at risk of stunted growth, according to UNICEF.

Household living standards have continued to deteriorate despite the Occupation easing restrictions on food imports into Gaza. Israeli imports gradually increased through official channels to account for about 35 percent of total imports in 2020.

However, after the October 7 war began, Israel withheld tax revenue it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, which it uses to administer to the West Bank and pay for public sector wages and electricity in Gaza. The latest transfer was due by the end of October, but Gaza was cut off by an Israeli cabinet decision. This adds to the already undermined ability of Palestinian Authority to provide job opportunities and tackle the already high unemployment rate, especially with Palestinians unable to leave the strip to seek employment elsewhere.

Therefore, despite more food being available, it was often food that could not be purchased.

Even if the worsening economic situation is put aside, Palestianians in Gaza had little time to benefit from the increased food supplies before the Occupation brought the siege to unprecedented levels after October 7. 

Just one day after Hamas launched the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced on October 8  a "complete siege" on the Gaza Strip.

Gallant stated in a recorded statement that his forces have imposed a complete siege, including on electricity, food, water, and fuel. "Everything is closed," he said,  adding that the Occupation was confronting "human animals" and was acting accordingly.

During the weeks following October 8, no supplies reached those besieged in Gaza, who were  completely reliant on their existing stock as they faced  constant bombardment from the Occupation, which destroyed bakeries and food shops. 

Other food supply sources, such as bakeries and shops, still standing cannot meet local demand for basic food items, which have completely disappeared from the markets, according to the estimates of the United Nations Office Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), as of November 10. At the time, the agency estimated that Gaza had enough wheat supply to last for 12 days. However, the unavailability of wheat itself is a result of the shelling of mills, except for one mill that is now inoperable due to the lack of fuel, creating a severe bread shortage.

The power cuts have also disrupted local food supplies by disrupting refrigeration and crop irrigation. In just a few days, over 15,000 farmers lost their crops, and 10,000 livestock breeders were unable to obtain feed, causing many of them to lose their animals, while the recent siege prevented fishermen from accessing the sea. The remaining animals were slaughtered by shepherds to avoid their death by starvation and thirst.

Days go by under bombardment, and stocks are  rapidly decreasing, with most products disappearing from store shelves. The residents have shifted from consuming fresh food to primarily relying on canned goods such as meat, beans, tuna, and chickpeas. Canned and ready-to-eat foods are preferred  because they do not require water or fuel, which are scarce. Residents rely on Feta cheese because of the salt that preserves it without the need for refrigeration in the near complete absence of electricity. Some eat bread they obtain after long hours of waiting in queues, and garnish it with zaatar, or they resort to eating Molto or Bake Rolls instead.

As for the few who are still able to buy other products, they rely on pasta with tomato sauce and cook it using firewood.

The aid entering Gaza prior to the pause in Israel's aggression was nothing more than a grain of wheat in a sea of hunger. According to Oxfam International, it represents only 2 percent of food that would have been delivered  since the siege was imposed, which the organization described as the use of hunger as a weapon of war against civilians, and collective punishment.

The number of aid trucks allowed into Gaza from October 21 to November 11 has not exceeded 861, according to UNOCHA. The agency clarified that the strip received an average of 500 trucks daily in recent years, and as of two months ago. 

Sally Abi Khalil, the regional director of Oxfam for the Middle East, said that the situation in Gaza is worsening everyday. "Drinking water is polluted or rationed, and soon families may not be able to feed their children as well,” she said. “How much more can the people of Gaza endure?"