September 10, 2025
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A brief history of “food insecurity” – i.e. starvation – in Gaza

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This website is normally restricted to aspects of the struggle for justice in Palestine involving universities and academics in the UK, Palestine and elsewhere. But the history of Israel’s decades-long use of food insecurity as a weapon against the Palestine is so important and so little understood that we are publishing below an excellent account by the Guardian journalist Owen Jones on his own weblog, BattleLines.

14 May 2025

Israel’s onslaught could help reduce obesity – pro-Israel lobbyists

Israel’s onslaught could help reduce obesity – pro-Israel lobbyists

The campaign to undermine trust in Gaza’s death toll plunges new depths

What do you even say? Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza may lead to a reduction in obesity, which may improve the life expectancy of the surviving Palestinian population. That’s a claim made by one of the main pro-Israel lobby groups in Britain, UK Lawyers for Israel, and specifically its chief executive Jonathan Turner.

This comes in the context of the winds beginning to shift against Israel in Britain, as the enormity of the crime being committed against the Palestinian people has become impossible to suppress or ignore. Israel’s cheerleaders are on the defensive, and they are doubling down on a strategy they’ve had since day one of the genocide – to sow doubt in the estimated death toll in Gaza.BattleLines with Owen Jones is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In this particular case, there was a debate at the Co-operative Group’s annual general meeting over a motion proposing that the retailer stop selling Israeli produce. This is an example of the crucial strategy of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions, a campaign modelled on the struggle against Apartheid South Africa, to use whatever levers are available to isolate this genocidal state.

That motion cited figures by public health academics in a letter to the Lancet, the world’s mot prestigious medical journal, published last July, so 10 months ago, where they suggested that up to 186,000 people could have been killed in Gaza at that point. That’s because, as they noted, in conflicts – though calling a genocide a conflict is obviously problematic – the number killed through indirect causes, such as lack of medical care, dwarfs the number directly killed by violence, and the official death toll in Gaza focuses only on violent deaths, and indeed excludes those who are missing and under the rubble, for example.

In a letter to the Co-operative Group secretary, Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, wrote that it was “totally false and misleading” to cite these figures. And he said the following:The [Lancet] letter also ignored factors that may increase average life expectancy in Gaza, bearing in mind that one of the biggest health issues in Gaza prior to the current war was obesity.Difficult to know what to say, isn’t it, other than “goodness fucking me”.ShareI should note, by the way, that even before the genocide began, Gaza was subjected to the longest siege of our time. In early 2006, a senior advisor to then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Israeli policy was designed “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” The strategy here was supposedly to make Palestinians turn against Hamas. That itself a war crime – it’s collective punishment, and it should also be considered terrorism, using a form of violence – which is what such a siege is in practise – to achieve political ends.Meanwhile in 2012, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a leaked official document pertaining to Israel’s strategy in Gaza which calculated the minimum number of calories needed to keep a human alive. The point is they were deliberately trying to keep what entered Gaza to the bare minimum. In September 2022 – so over a year before 7th October – a World Food Programme document estimated that one third of the Palestinian population, or 1.78 million, suffered from food insecurity, with 1.1 million severely food insecure, with 90% living in Gaza. At the beginning of the genocide, Israeli leaders and officials announced they would block the essentials of life entering Gaza, and in April 2024, two US government agencies concluded that Israel was deliberately preventing humanitarian aid from getting into Gaza. But at the beginning of March – over two months ago – Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza. Absolutely nothing is allowed in, not food, not medicines, not fuel, we could go on.At the same time, Israel has destroyed agriculture, domestic food production and livestock.The latest report from a UN-backed report, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, states that the entire population faces high levels of acute food insecurity, with half a million people – or one in five – facing starvation.Since the total blockade imposed two months ago, 57 Palestinian children have reportedly died from the effects of malnutrition. Now UK Lawyers for Israel have form, to say the least. In February 2023, a display of artwork made by Palestinian children at Chelsea and Westminster hospital in London was removed after they submitted a complaint. Why? Because they claimed it made Jewish patients feel “vulnerable, harassed and victimised.” Brian Whitaker, former Middle East editor of the Guardian newspaper, has done a thread about their activities, including the use of lawfare to pressure arts venues and youth theatres, for example.Now the UK government is complicit in genocide, and it only suspended 8% of arms deals, and continues to export crucial component for F-35 jets to rain death and destruction on Gaza.But that 8% is too much for UK Lawyers for Israel, who have threatened action against the government. Their suggestion that a total siege imposed on an entire population – which is a war crime, no ifs no buts – is somehow doing the Palestinian people a favour by reducing obesity levels is clearly a grotesque, disturbed example of a broader campaign to stop the Western public from understanding the gravity of the crime that their governments are directly facilitating.The truth is the death toll is much bigger than the official statistics suggest. The Economist is a right-of-centre magazine which spent months and months supporting Israel’s murderous onslaught. They are now getting cold feet, like others who were either cheerleaders of this abomination, or who sought to remain silent.They have released estimates about the death toll which are absolutely terrifying. They note that the number of Palestinians estimated by Gaza’s authorities to have died from traumatic injuries – this is important – is 52,615.Based on their estimate, based on cross referencing three different lists, they believe that a low estimate of deaths from traumatic injuries is 77,000 whilst the high estimate is 109,000.They are only discussing violent deaths. That’s people who have been bombed, shot, incinerated, suffocated under rubble, shredded, decapitated, we could on – apologies to to be so graphic, but we need to be clear what’s happening here. As we’ve already established, the number who die from violent deaths in, for want of a better word, “conflicts” is invariably only a fraction of the total death toll.In Yemen for example, it was estimated that 60% of the estimated death toll between 2015 and 2022 were attributable to indirect causes, like food insecurity and a lack of accessible health care. I am not going to belittle the horror of what Yemenis were subjected to, I’ve written for years about the Western-backed Saudi assault on Yemen, I went to a Yemeni refugee camp and made a documentary about it.Two points here. Firstly, the Western-backed Saudi assault wasn’t responsible for all the deaths. Secondly, however hideous the situation in Yemen, it was never anywhere near as apocalyptic as Gaza. The number of people killed in the space of seven years was a much smaller fraction of the death toll in Gaza in the space of 19 months. In Gaza we have the near total destruction of the entire health care system – think of all the people with cancer, heart conditions, diabetes, and so on – we have a total siege plus the near total destruction of the ability to produce its own food, we have the destruction of nearly all homes and thus the lack of shelter, the displacement of almost the entire population multiple times, the lack of available fresh water, we could go on. If 109,000 Palestinians have been killed because of violence alone – well, frankly, I would be terrified to even try estimating the overall total death toll at this point, bearing in mind that the pre-war population was something like 2.2 million or 2.3 million.So that would mean around 5% of the entire population suffering violent deaths in just 19 months, and if the number who have died because of the multiple and intersecting causes is much bigger: then we could easily be looking at a worse death rate than Cambodia under four years of the Khmer Rouge.

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