Starvation as a Weapon: Gaza’s Famine and America’s Silence

On August 22, 2025, the United Nations declared famine in Gaza. For the first time in the Middle East, famine has been officially confirmed, with more than half a million people trapped in starvation and projections that 640,000 will face catastrophic hunger by the end of September. Children are dying of malnutrition, parents are skipping meals for days to feed their families, and one in five babies is being born underweight or premature.

This is not a natural disaster. It is not the result of drought or climate change. Gaza’s famine is man-made—produced by siege, bombardment, and deliberate obstruction of food and aid. Nearly all farmland has been destroyed. Food convoys are blocked, looted, or restricted. The health system is collapsing under the weight of hunger and disease. As the World Health Organization’s Director-General put it: “The world has waited too long, watching tragic and unnecessary deaths mount from this man-made famine.”

Why the U.S. Looks Away

The United States cannot claim ignorance. Washington has access to the same reports that UNICEF, the World Food Programme, and the World Health Organization are issuing with growing alarm. It knows famine has been building for months. And yet, the Biden administration continues to send weapons to Israel, shields it from accountability at the UN, and offers only empty calls for “restraint.”

The silence is deliberate. To acknowledge famine in Gaza would mean acknowledging Israel’s responsibility—and by extension, America’s complicity. But U.S. leaders are unwilling to confront their closest ally, even when entire communities are being starved.

There is also a deeper hypocrisy at work. When Russia invaded Ukraine, U.S. officials swiftly condemned Moscow for war crimes. Yet in Gaza, where hunger is being wielded as a weapon of war, Washington avoids even the word “famine.” The difference is not about principles; it is about politics. Palestinian lives do not carry the same weight in the U.S. political imagination as European ones.

Starvation as Policy

International law is clear: starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a war crime. The Geneva Conventions prohibit it explicitly. Yet the siege of Gaza has reduced food access to the point where parents are forced to watch their children waste away. UNICEF describes babies too weak to cry or eat, children dying of diarrhea because their bodies can no longer fight simple infections, and mothers with nothing left to feed their newborns.

Starvation here is not “collateral damage.” It is policy. When aid convoys are blocked, when cropland is destroyed, when food, fuel, and medicine are systematically denied, famine is the intended outcome.

The Global Consequences

America’s silence carries consequences far beyond Gaza. First, it sets a dangerous precedent: that famine can be engineered in plain sight and still escape accountability if the perpetrator has powerful friends. Authoritarian governments are watching closely.

Second, it shatters the credibility of international institutions. UN agencies have issued their starkest warnings in decades, but their calls for ceasefire and aid mean little without political enforcement. When the U.S. blocks action at the Security Council, it renders the global system toothless.

Finally, it erodes America’s own moral standing. Washington justifies its global role by invoking a “rules-based international order.” But how can that order mean anything if mass starvation, broadcast daily to the world, is tolerated because the victims are Palestinians?

A Moral Collapse

The UN has made clear that famine in Gaza is not inevitable. It can be stopped with an immediate ceasefire, open humanitarian corridors, and the restoration of food systems. Every day of U.S. silence pushes Gaza deeper into catastrophe.

The question is no longer whether famine exists—it does. The question is whether the U.S. will continue to shield Israel as it enforces starvation, or whether it will finally treat food as the human right it claims to be.

History will not forget the images of skeletal children, desperate parents, and newborns too weak to survive. It will remember not only the policy that created famine, but also the silence that allowed it. America cannot claim to defend human rights abroad while watching Gaza starve.

Access to food is not a privilege. It is a right. And right now, that right is being deliberately denied. The world’s failure to act, led by America’s silence, is not just complicity in famine—it is complicity in a crime.