It’s Official: UN Declares Catastrophic Famine Conditions in Gaza; Israel Still Denies It

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Today, in an extraordinary declaration, delivered from Geneva with articulate, controlled fury and indignation, Tom Fletcher, a British diplomat, and, since October last year, the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, confirmed to the world what has been increasingly apparent over the last six months: that the most severe famine conditions are occurring in the Gaza Strip, that this is an “entirely man-made” disaster, deliberately engineered by the State of Israel, and that it can and must be “halted and reversed”, via an immediate ceasefire “to allow humanitarian aid to reach everyone in the Gaza Strip.”

According to the devastating new report by the IPC (the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification), which Fletcher was presenting to the world, 514,000 people, roughly a quarter of Gaza’s surviving population, are experiencing famine, with the number rising to 641,000 by the end of September unless immediate action is taken.

The IPC sets stringent conditions on the evidence required for a famine to be declared. Famine (Phase 5) requires an area to have 20% of households facing an extreme food shortage, 30% of children to be acutely malnourished, and two adult non-trauma deaths or four child non-trauma deaths for every 10,000 people to be taking place every day “due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease.”

Since the IPC was created in 2004, this is only the fourth time its experts, the Famine Review Committee (FRC), have declared a famine, and their findings only relate to Gaza Governorate (Gaza City and its surroundings), one of five Governorates in the Gaza Strip, where around half of Gaza’s surviving population still lives, albeit under threat of forced evacuation and occupation by the Israeli military.

The FRC does, however, warn that it projects that the famine thresholds will be “crossed in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis Governorates in the coming weeks”, while also warning that it fears that “the severity of conditions in North Gaza” is “similar or worse than in Gaza Governorate.”

“However”, the FRC adds, “due to limited evidence on the population status in this area the FRC recommends not to classify North Gaza Governorate”, although “urgent steps should be taken to allow for a full humanitarian assessment in this governorate.” In the last of the Governorates, Rafah, the FRC notes that, although Rafah is described as “unpopulated” after its destruction by Israel, they are “deeply concerned about the condition” of those still living there.

Fletcher’s presentation this morning, as he launched the report, made me cry, and I’m posting it below, if you haven’t seen it, and I’m also posting the text.

Tom Fletcher’s UN press briefing, August 22, 2025

Please read the IPC report, cover to cover. Read it in sorrow and in anger. Not as words and numbers but as names and lives. Be in no doubt that this is irrefutable testimony.

It is a famine. The Gaza Famine.

It is a famine that we could have prevented, if we had been allowed. Yet food stacks up at borders because of systematic obstruction by Israel.

It is a famine within a few hundred metres of food, in a fertile land.

It is a famine that hits the most vulnerable first. Each with a name, each with a story. That strips people of dignity before it strips them of life. That forces a parent to choose which child to feed. That forces people to risk their lives to seek food.

It is a famine that we repeatedly warned of. But that the international media has not been allowed in to cover. To bear witness.

It is a famine in 2025. A 21st century famine watched over by drones and the most advanced military technology in history.

It is a famine openly promoted by some Israeli leaders as a weapon of war.

It is a famine on all of our watch. Everyone owns this. The Gaza Famine is the world’s famine. It is a famine that asks ‘but what did you do?’ A famine that will and must haunt us all.

It is a predictable and a preventable famine. A famine caused by cruelty, justified by revenge, enabled by indifference and sustained by complicity.

It is a famine that must spur the world to more urgent action. That must shame the world to do better. It is a famine that therefore also asks ‘… and what now will you do?’

My ask, my plea, my demand to Prime Minister Netanyahu and anyone who can reach him:

Enough. Ceasefire. Open the crossings, north and south, all of them. Let us get food and other supplies in, unimpeded and at the massive scale required. End the retribution. It is too late for far too many. But not for everyone in Gaza. Enough. For humanity’s sake, let us in.

How did we get here?

The devastating Phase 5 famine conditions confirmed by the IPC in its report, in which “starvation, death, destitution and extreme critical acute malnutrition levels are evident”, is the result, in particular, of a siege on all supplies of food, water, medical supplies, medical equipment and fuel into Gaza that was imposed on March 2, when Israel disgracefully and shamefully broke the six-week ceasefire deal with Hamas that, as well as bringing the direct slaughter to an end, had also allowed humanitarian aid to be delivered on a scale that was appropriate for the population.

As the IPC report makes clear, “Between 2 March and 19 May 2025 no food entered the Gaza Strip by any actor or supplier (humanitarian or commercial)”, and, since then, “the amounts of food entering were largely insufficient to feed the population”, with only a faction of what was offloaded actually being delivered to those in need, largely, as the graph below shows, because it was intercepted by criminal and terrorist gangs employed by Israel — although Israel has predictably claimed that Hamas is responsible.

In a Guardian article three weeks ago, “The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza”, Emma Graham-Harrison, the Guardian’s Chief Middle East correspondent, described Israel’s historic control of calorific content in Gaza, and the inadequacy even of the amounts humanitarian aid agencies are currently calling for.

The mathematics of famine are simple in Gaza. Palestinians cannot leave, war has ended farming and Israel has banned fishing, so practically every calorie its population eats must be brought in from outside.

Israel knows how much food is needed. It has been calibrating hunger in Gaza for decades, initially calculating shipments to exert pressure while avoiding starvation.

“The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”, a senior adviser to the then prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in 2006. An Israeli court ordered the release of documents showing the details of those macabre sums two years later.

COGAT, the Israeli agency that still controls aid shipments to Gaza, calculated then that Palestinians needed an average minimum 2,279 calories per person per day, which could be provided through 1.836kg of food.

Today, humanitarian organisations are asking for an even smaller minimum ration: 62,000 metric tonnes of dry and canned food to meet basic needs for 2.1 million people each month, or around 1kg of food per person per day.

That would equate to just 1,241 calories per day, far less than is required to sustain a population at anything above the barest of subsistence-level survival, and what makes the situation even more grave is that inadequate amounts of food have been delivered through almost the whole of the last 22 months.

As the IPC report explains, “A recent analysis on the declining food availability in the Gaza Strip showed that the October 2023 to December 2024 period had a considerable caloric deficit as only 1,640 kcals per person per day were estimated to be available.”

Despite imposing a “compete siege” on Gaza after the attacks on October 7, 2023, when defense secretary Yoav Gallant memorably, and horribly declared, “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed,” adding, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”, Israel has persistently refused to accept that its siege mentality would lead to starvation.

Damning rulings by the International Court of Justice

On January 26, 2024, in response to a case alleging genocide by Israel, which was submitted to the International Court of Justice in The Hague (the UN court, often known as the World Court), the Court issued provisional measures against Israel based on a recognition that a genocide in Gaza was “plausible” under Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention, and requiring Israel, amongst other measures, to “take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”

In response, however, Israel immediately undermined the Court by alleging that 12 of the employees of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East), which has been the main provider of support to the Palestinians since its founding in 1950, took part in the October 7 attacks.

Instead of requiring proof, which was never provided, the US withdrew funding from UNRWA, followed by numerous other western countries. That funding was later restored — after, as usual, the claims evaporated on contact with reality — but reputational damage to UNRWA had been achieved, as Israel intended.

On March 28, 2024, the ICJ responded to an urgent request by South Africa to issue amended provisional measures by focusing unerringly on the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza, in relation to “famine and starvation”, issuing the following order:

In conformity with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, and in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by Palestinians in Gaza, in particular the spread of famine and starvation, Israel shall: (a) take all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, in full co-operation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance, including food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care to Palestinians throughout Gaza, including by increasing the capacity and number of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary; and (b) ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit acts which constitute a violation of any of the rights of the Palestinians in Gaza as a protected group under the Genocide Convention, including by preventing, through any action, the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian assistance.

On May 24, 2024, the ICJ issued another amended order in response to an additional update from South Africa, as Israel embarked on a vile campaign of destruction in Rafah. As well as calling on Israel to “immediately halt its military offensive”, the Court also recognized that the catastrophic situation in Gaza confirms the need for the immediate and effective implementation of the measures indicated in its Orders of 26 January 2024 and 28 March 2024, which are applicable throughout the Gaza Strip, including in Rafah”, specifically emphasizing the measure irequiring the “unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance”, which “necessitates that the Respondent maintain open land crossing points, and in particular the Rafah crossing.”

Undeterred, Israel proceeded to lay waste to Gaza, eventually erasing Rafah from existence, while also, crucially, maintaining a stranglehold on the delivery of necessary humanitarian aid. In October 2024, it initiated a “genocide within a genocide” in northern Gaza, via the horrific “Generals’ Plan”, which I wrote about extensively at the time, and which, as the graph below shows, based on information provided by COGAT, led to a precipitous slump in aid deliveries throughout October and November.

The International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant

On November 21, as the situation in northern Gaza became apocalyptic, the International Criminal Court (ICC), empowered to investigate and charge individuals with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minster, and Yoav Gallant, who had recently been replaced as Israel’s defense minister. The ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan KC, had announced that he had issued applications for the arrest warrants six months earlier, on May 20, but in the intervening period there had been grave doubts about whether the arrest warrants would be issued, because of unacceptable pressure exerted on the Court, and its judges, by countries including Israel, the US and the UK.

The Court “found reasonable grounds to believe” that Netanyahu and Gallant “each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

Specifically, the Court found that “there are reasonable grounds to believe” that both Netanyahu and Gallant “intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity, from at least 8 October 2023 to 20 May 2024”, further explaining that this finding “is based on the role of Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant in impeding humanitarian aid in violation of international humanitarian law and their failure to facilitate relief by all means at its disposal.”

The Court added that “their conduct led to the disruption of the ability of humanitarian organisations to provide food and other essential goods to the population in need in Gaza”, and that “[t]he aforementioned restrictions, together with cutting off electricity and reducing fuel supply, also had a severe impact on the availability of water in Gaza and the ability of hospitals to provide medical care.”

The Court also noted that “decisions allowing or increasing humanitarian assistance into Gaza were often conditional”, and “were not made to fulfil Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law or to ensure that the civilian population in Gaza would be adequately supplied with goods in need.” In contrast, “they were a response to the pressure of the international community or requests by the United States of America”, and were, in any case, inadequate, because “the increases in humanitarian assistance were not sufficient to improve the population’s access to essential goods.”

The Court also “found reasonable grounds to believe that no clear military need or other justification under international humanitarian law could be identified for the restrictions placed on access for humanitarian relief operations”, adding that, “Despite warnings and appeals made by, inter alia, the UN Security Council, UN Secretary General, States, and governmental and civil society organisations about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, only minimal humanitarian assistance was authorised.”

As a result, having “considered the prolonged period of deprivation and Mr. Netanyahu’s statement connecting the halt in the essential goods and humanitarian aid with the goals of war”, the Court “therefore found reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare.”

The Court also “found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the lack of food, water, electricity and fuel, and specific medical supplies, created conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the civilian population in Gaza, which resulted in the death of civilians, including children due to malnutrition and dehydration.”

Although the arrest warrants have ensured that neither Netanyahu or Gallant dare travel to the 125 countries worldwide who are signatories to the Rome Statute of 1998 that established the ICC, where they risk arrest, Khan has, since the summer of 2024, been plagued by apparently unjustified sexual misconduct allegations —made as he was reportedly preparing further, and entirely justifiable arrest warrants against Israel’s two far-right ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. These allegations have required him to take a leave of absence, while the US government, under Donald Trump, which has never recognized the legitimacy of the ICC, has imposed punitive sanctions on him and on other ICC judges. Just three weeks ago, Middle East Eye published a detailed analysis of the situation, “How Karim Khan’s Israel war crimes probe was derailed by threats, leaks and sex claims”, which is well worth reading.

What has happened over the last six months

Meanwhile, as noted above, after the ceasefire in January, which Israel deliberately destroyed after six weeks, the complete ban on all food and other humanitarian aid supplies entering Gaza between March 2 and May 19 paved the way for today’s famine announcement, not just via the siege itself, but also because, since May 19, a joint Israeli-US solution, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, established ostensibly to deliver food aid to the Palestinian people while sidelining UNWRA and other well-established international aid agencies, has been revealed, from the very beginning, not to be a genuine aid organization, but a sadistic exercise in forcing a “Hunger Games” scenario on a starving population, whereby desperate individuals, after walking miles to remote sites for food distribution, have regularly found themselves deliberately being shot and killed by the security contractors.

I covered the first day of this unforgivable vile project at the time, in my article, 600 Days of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: Has Humanity’s Light Been Forever Extinguished?, and followed up in two articles last month, Horror As Israel Implements the “Mass Death” Phase of Its Genocide in Gaza Through the Deliberate Starvation of the Entire Population and Despite Condemnation of Mass Starvation in Gaza, Israel Steps Up Its Extermination and Plans to Annex the Whole of Gaza and the West Bank.

Since the GHF program began three months ago, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has reported that more than 1,800 Palestinians have died trying to get food, at least 1,000 in the vicinity of GHF sites.

The GHF has been widely condemned, not only by UN experts and numerous other aid agencies and charities, but also by whistleblowers involved in it, of whom the most prominent has been via former US Special Forces officer Anthony Aguilar, who told the BBC that he witnessed IDF soldiers “shooting at the crowds of Palestinians”, and stated that, in his entire career, involving assignments in numerous war zones, he had never witnessed such a level of “brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population.”

Aguilar has subsequently been interviewed by numerous broadcasters in the US and worldwide, and, just yesterday, another US eyewitness, hired by an American logistics company to drive aid trucks in Israel, told CBS News that “it’s not just the IDF firing at Palestinians, but also personnel hired through American subcontractors to secure GHF sites.”

The eyewitness told CBS News, “It took me two or three days to realize that they were actually shooting at people, they weren’t shooting at combatants”, and, when asked whether he thought they were warning shots, said, “No, it’s indiscriminate.”

Beyond the unforgivable GHF program, the IPC report also focuses on how food scarcity has drive up prices of available food to astronomical levels, noted that “Food prices continued to rise sharply in July, increasing by 25% to as much as 9,900% compared to the February ceasefire levels, and by 233% to 15,285% compared to pre-conflict prices.”

The report also highlights the impact of starvation and deliberately broken hygiene systems, as well as a deliberately destroyed healthcare sector, on the Palestinians, with the following two paragraphs indicating just some of the acute problems — although I do encourage you to read the whole report, if you can, for much more detailed analysis:

Biologically, poor water, sanitation and hygiene, as well as malnutrition itself, reduce the body’s ability to use what food it does get. Food consumption scores indicate that the population are consuming on average only one or two food groups per day, primarily rice, lentils or wheat flour. Vegetables, fruits, oils and animal source proteins are increasingly rare and limited to the wealthier. This poor- quality diet does not provide the body with sufficient nutrients to maintain the lining of the gut, more so in the face of very poor sanitation, making people increasingly vulnerable to ingested contaminants, and reducing the body’s ability to absorb key nutrients. Severe malnutrition and extended food deprivation as well as disease often reduce appetite so that severely malnourished children, adults who have not eaten for days and the ill often do not eat, even when food is available, worsening their health and nutrition status.

During times of inadequate food, the body will consume its own tissues. The longer a food deficit continues, the more depleted the body becomes, using not just reserves of energy and muscle, but also tissues and organs critical for life. The risk of death from causes that would otherwise not be fatal, increases with the severity of acute malnutrition. Increasing nutrition-related mortality and reports from surgeons on the inability of trauma patients to heal from blast and bullet wounds indicates that physical reserves among a large portion of the population, adults as well as children, are depleted.

Israel’s response: blanket denials that are beyond the bounds of any credibility

Despite the mountains of evidence establishing Israel’s genocidal intent and its starvation policies over the last 22 months, Benjamin Netanyahu rejected it as “an outright lie”, claiming, in a complete inversion of verifiable reality, “Israel does not have a policy of starvation. Israel has a policy of preventing starvation. Since the beginning of the war Israel has enabled 2 million tons of aid to enter the Gaza Strip, over one ton of aid per person.” He also claimed that the report’s findings were based on “Hamas lies laundered through organizations with vested interests.”

While we wait to see if the world will respond to the unprecedented urgency of Tom Fletcher’s call by finally taking decisive action to curb Israel’s apparently insatiable appetite for more and more of the lives of the overwhelmingly blameless civilian population of the Gaza Strip, today’s ringing of alarm bells is taking place against the backdrop of threatened military action by Israel in the very place identified as being the epicentre of famine — Gaza City itself.

On August 8, Netanyahu’s security cabinet approved a plan to militarily occupy and take control of Gaza City, one of the last places in Gaza, along with Deir al-Balah, that has not been occupied and completely erased by Israel, in particular over the last six months, as Israel has increased to around 86% the amount of the Gaza Strip that is under evacuation orders or within militarized zones, and with, as of July 12, nearly 80% of all buildings and 92% of residences damaged or destroyed.

Much of this destruction has been taking place through the deliberate demolition of all structures within the Israeli-controlled areas, as Arwa Mahdawi noted in an article for the Guardian on July 7, “Seeking bulldozer drivers to demolish Gaza: how a genocide is being outsourced”, in which she described how Israel was seeking to recruit bulldozer drivers through Facebook.

The scale of the destruction, as should be apparent, serves no credible military purpose. If Israel has succeeded, for 22 months, in pretending that it is legitimate to erase the whole of Gaza’s built environment because of the Hamas tunnels beneath, this claim is fatally undercut by evidence showing that, instead, the intent is, and always has been to make Gaza uninhabitable, to drive the surviving Palestinians into tent cities in smaller and smaller areas, where the illusion is that they will succumb to “voluntary migration”, even though no country in the world, beyond Israel’s fevered, solipsistic imaginings, will take in any significant number Palestinian refugees, either because it is ethnic cleansing on an unforgivable scale, or because of profound anti-immigrant racism.

And yet, even as Tom Fletcher called on the world to help, Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, “warned that Gaza City will be destroyed unless Hamas yields to Israel’s terms and releases all the hostages after disarming”, as France 24 described it.

In a post on X, Katz wrote, “The gates of hell will soon open on the heads of Hamas’ murderers and rapists in Gaza — until they agree to Israel’s conditions for ending the war,” threatening that Gaza City could “turn into Rafah and Beit Hanoun” — both completely erased by Israel — unless all the remaining hostages from October 7 are released, and Hamas agrees to disarm completely.

Since deliberately targeting and murdering the tireless Palestinian journalist Anas Al-Sharif and his colleagues on August 10, Israel has taken advantage of the subsequently media blackout to engage in horrendously savage bombing raids on Gaza City, largely unreported except via desperate posts by individuals on X.

This is disturbing enough, but the prospect of a full-scale invasion, for which Israel has called up 60,000 military reservists, from a population tiring of endless conflict and more concerned with securing the safe return of the remaining hostages, will plumb unparalleled new depths of depravity if it goes ahead.

Is no one able to stop it?

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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