The IPC and UN-backed declaration of famine in Gaza City announced today is a formal recognition of what humanitarian actors, researchers, and Gazans themselves have been documenting for months: famine.
This is not the result of natural disaster or logistical breakdown. It is the outcome of a 22-month long strategy in which food, water, and medicine have been deliberately withheld and used as instruments of collective punishment. According to the Rome Statute, genocide is defined by “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Starving an entire population, alongside countless other atrocity crimes, further meets the threshold of genocide.
Gaza under siege
We must therefore be crystal clear: Gaza is under siege. The Israeli government has systematically blocked the entry of humanitarian goods, bombed food warehouses, destroyed water and agricultural infrastructure, and killed humanitarian workers. According to the latest Aid Worker Security Report, Israel has killed nearly 300 aid workers in Gaza and Lebanon over the past year—an unprecedented figure in modern humanitarian history.
In any famine or conflict zone, secure humanitarian access is not optional: it is a legal obligation. Under international humanitarian law, and particularly as the occupying power, Israel is required to ensure the provision of aid to civilian populations. That obligation exists regardless of military operations, ceasefires, or political negotiations. Starvation as a method of warfare is explicitly prohibited under international law. The Rome Statute classifies it as a war crime. The international system continues to equivocate as the Israeli government continues to act with impunity. We are going to have to explain our collective failure for generations to come. For this is, as IDS Honorary Associate and former UN Aid Chief, Martin Griffiths, has said the worst crime of the 21st century.
Disputing reality
Yet rather than meet its obligations, Israeli officials have accused the international community of using starving children as ‘propaganda’, insisted that aid is now being facilitated by the so-called ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ and questioned the ‘validity of the IPC data’. But these claims collapse under the slightest scrutiny.
First, the government of Israel continues to tightly control and drastically limit the flow of aid—closing key crossings, rejecting entire shipments over minor technicalities, and imposing arbitrary inspection delays. It claims this is to prevent Hamas from diverting supplies, yet it has produced no credible evidence for that. Even if such diversions were occurring, the standard humanitarian response would be to flood the territory with aid, reducing the incentive to hoard or steal. By restricting it, Israel has created the very conditions it claims to be preventing.
Second, children are physiologically more vulnerable to acute malnutrition than adults: their high metabolic rate and small bodies mean they depend on more frequent, nutrient-dense intake to survive. That we are seeing soaring rates of wasting and death among infants is not propaganda: it is what happens in all famines, everywhere. And it is why wasting among children is a key indicator for famine.
Famine assessment measures
Third, the IPC system is a rigorous and relatively conservative famine assessment tool. Before today, since its inception famine has only been declared four times: in Somalia in 2011, in South Sudan in both 2017 and 2020, and in Sudan in 2024.
To meet IPC’s Phase 5 (famine) threshold, at least 20 percent of households must face extreme food shortages, and at least 30 percent of children must be acutely malnourished (based on weight-for-height), or 15 percent severely acutely malnourished (based on Mid-Upper Arm Circumference, or MUAC).
Israeli officials have accused the UN of ‘changing the goalposts’ by using the 15 percent MUAC measure. But this is a deliberate distortion. Both MUAC and weight-for-height are internationally recognised anthropometric indicators. IPC guidelines allow for either, depending on data availability and field conditions. MUAC is often preferred in emergencies because it is simple and fast.
If Israeli authorities support even more detailed research and granular needs assessments, then the response to that is quite simple: allow full and sustained humanitarian access, including UN monitoring teams. This is not a technical suggestion. The International Court of Justice’s ruling on 26 January 2024 already explicitly ordered Israel to “take effective measures…to not deny or restrict access by fact‑finding missions, international mandates and other bodies to Gaza.” Israel ignored that order, as it has all others.
Act Now
States that claim to uphold a “rules-based order” have also failed to act, red lines have not been enforced, and precedent is being set – for Gaza today, and for future wars tomorrow. Airdrops of aid facilitated by countries, including the UK, are not only not good enough, they are dangerous and a form of humanitarian camouflage. Strongly worded condemnations are likewise not good enough.
Instead, Responsibility to Protect should be fully invoked with immediate sanctions applied to Israel, raising to the possibility of collective military action, under a UN-flag, if the siege is not dismantled. Preventing genocide is the single overriding objective of the post-World War Two international system. And that system is not only failing, it is eroding before our eyes.
Humanitarian access must be immediate, full, and unfettered. And there must be international accountability for the policies and decision-makers who brought Gaza to famine. Future generations will ask us why, even when we knew, we did nothing.
