Only a week ago, concerned international media reported that starvation is now killing what Israeli bombs have not. 

Yet, as I show in my new book, The Obliteration Doctrine, this hunger inferno was first tested almost two decades ago and then implemented by Israel in Gaza toward the end of 2023. It is now at par with the famines induced by Imperial Britain’s human famine experiments in India in the late 19^th century and Nazi concentration camps in the 1940s.        

In 2006 when Hamas won the Palestinian election, Israel and the Middle East Quartet, the United States, Russia, the United Nations and European Union, launched economic sanctions against the Palestinians. The blockade was the result of Israel’s deliberate attempt to push the Gazan economy “to the brink of collapse,” according to a US diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks.

Off the record, Israeli officials repeatedly told American diplomats that as part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, “they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.” With the inception of its blockade in 2007, the Israeli government estimated how many daily calories were needed to prevent or to cause malnutrition in Gaza.

The average daily calorie intake critical to survival is estimated at 2,100 kilocalories (kcal) per day. The Israeli “Red Line” document used a higher calculation of 2,279 calories per person, taking into account the presumed domestic food production in Gaza. Such calculations have a long and dark history in colonial settler societies.

After an intense drought and crop failure in the Deccan Plateau in 1876, the Great Southern Indian Famine lasted for two nightmarish years, spreading northward. At the time, the British Famine Commissioner Sir Richard Temple implemented human experiments, with “strapping fine fellows” starved until they resembled “little more than animated skeletons […] utterly unfit for any work.”

To maximize British revenues, Temple sought to determine the minimum amount of food for survival, which he projected at around 1,627 kcal in Madras 1877.

Yet, the excess mortality related to the famine has been estimated at up to 8 million.

In Gaza, Israel’s intent was to keep the economy “on the brink of collapse” while avoiding a humanitarian crisis. The Netanyahu cabinet sought to put the Palestinians “on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” During the 2008–2009 Gaza War, the Strip was subjected to a “Shoah” (Hebrew for Holocaust), as Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai admitted.

The Israelis hoped this would turn Gazans against Hamas. The idea was to “send Gaza decades into the past,” said then commanding general Yoav Gallant, who 15 years later was targeted by an International Criminal Court warrant for alleged responsibility “for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

In May 2018, the UN Security Council (UNSC) adopted unanimously Resolution 2417 condemning the starving of civilians as a method of warfare and the unlawful denial of humanitarian access to civilian populations. Yet, in the course of the Gaza War, most tenets of UNSC Resolution 2417 have been violated, setting the stage for Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza and for the complicity of the US-led West in these massacres.

In historical review, the Israeli total siege of the densely inhabited Gaza and its 2.3 million Palestinian refugees has not been unique. It has affinities with the siege of Leningrad and its 3.1 million people. Part of the Nazi Hungerplan by SS ideologue Herbert Backe, the original grand objective was to forcibly starve around 31 to 45 million Soviets and Eastern Europeans by capturing food stocks and redirecting them to German forces.

Along with American eugenics and white racism, it was US treatment of Native Americans that inspired the hunger policies in Hitler’s Germany. The lethal power of hunger weaponization had been taught to a generation of Germans in 1914–19, when the British imposed a blockade against Germany. It aspired to obstruct Germany’s ability to import goods and thus to starve the German people and its military into submission.

In Gaza, the original Israeli “Generals’ Plan,” premised on the blocking of food supplies and epidemics, could not be carried out in full due to international opposition. But even its partial execution drove the Strip to risk of famine already in October 2024, with top UN officials describing the situation in northern Gaza as “apocalyptic” because everyone there was “at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence.”

In his classic Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Raphael Lemkin, the pioneer scholar of mass atrocities and the father of Genocide Convention, warned that “the Jewish population in the occupied countries is undergoing a process of liquidation (1) by debilitation and starvation, because the Jewish food rations are kept at an especially low level; and (2) by massacres in the ghettos.”

Lemkin bolstered his case with data from a 1943 US report, which showed how Jews got only a tenth of the normal calorie intake, about the same portion as many Palestinians in Gaza eight decades later.

Weaponization of starvation is often associated with ethnic cleansing, as Lemkin noted, “after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.”

What about Gaza? Measured in terms of total food deliveries into the Strip since October 2023, the calorie intake was about 860 kcal, a third less than in the Nazi camps over eight decades ago.

As the German invasion of the Soviet Union failed and the tide of World War II shifted, the Nazi camps deteriorated, with the daily intake shrinking to 700 kcal in 1944. That is almost three times the intake of 245 kcal in northern Gaza in the first half of the year 2024, when the New York Post famously headlined that there was no famine in Gaza.

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The author of The Obliteration Doctrine and The Fall of Israel, an internationally recognized visionary of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. The original excerpt was published by TRT WORLD.