The weaponisation of food echoes the horrors of the Jewish ghettos, as Palestinians are pushed beyond the limits of human endurance, writes Soumaya Ghannoushi. This article was first published at <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/war-gaza-how-israel-replicating-nazi-starvation-tactics">Middle East Eye</a>.
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A woman <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DKUjoFXMjiV/?igsh=aDRhcnAxM3hrZTEw" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">kneels</a> in the dust.
She is thin, trembling—not old, but famine has aged her. Her bones protrude through a threadbare dress. Her face is ash. Her fingers claw at the ground. 
Around her, others bend too—not in prayer, but in desperation, scraping at the dirt for flour. Not even full grains. Just remnants. Scraps. Whatever the wind and boots and bombs have not yet claimed.
Then she breaks.
She sinks fully to the earth, as if the weight of hunger is too heavy to carry. And she cries, not softly, but with a violence that cuts through the silence of the ruined street: “My kids will eat flour scraped from the floor”.
She weeps into the gravel.
This is not just starvation. It is the calculated breaking of a people, pushing them beyond the limits of human endurance.
This is what Gaza’s “aid” looks like.
Not distribution, but oppression. Not relief, but ritual debasement.
Rations of suffering
The flour had been withheld for weeks—stockpiled, blocked, used as bait. Exhausted families walked for miles, past corpses and craters, to reach the drop sites—only to find cages, soldiers and drones. When they ran towards the food, <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-kills-32-starving-palestinians-latest-us-aid-point-massacre" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">they were shot</a>.
More than 30 <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/palestine" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Palestinians</a>
were massacred on Sunday, and more than <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/06/01/israel-gaza-aid-rafah-shooting/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">170 were wounded</a> near an aid distribution site in Rafah, as <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/israel" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Israeli</a>
forces opened fire on starving civilians trying to collect food. The drop was coordinated by the <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/us" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">US</a>-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
Aid has become a trap. And hunger, a pretext for slaughter.
They have built a bureaucracy of starvation, calling it a “humanitarian foundation”.
But let’s call it what it is: the GHF doesn’t deliver aid, but control. It rations not food, but suffering.
Even the food they promise, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/the-u-s-backed-gaza-aid-plan-has-started-operating-why-are-so-many-humanitarian-groups-opposed-to-it" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">1,750 calories per person</a>, is not enough to stave off malnutrition. The World Health Organisation sets the emergency minimum at 2,100 calories.
But most Palestinians in Gaza receive far less than that because the food never comes.
In April 2024, people in northern Gaza were surviving on an average of<a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/people-northern-gaza-forced-survive-245-calories-day-less-can-beans-oxfam" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> 245 calories a day</a>, less than a can of fava beans, according to Oxfam.
Grandparents chew flour laced with sand. Toddlers are fed leaves.
The body begins to consume itself: the mind flickers, the breath slows.
Death comes not with a bomb, but with a whisper in the stomach: empty, empty, empty.
And all of this is not accidental. It is replication.
No one spared
In the weeks leading to <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/germany" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Germany</a>’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Reich Minister of Food Richard Darre and his state secretary, Herbert Backe, developed the <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34907689/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hunger Plan</a>, a strategy of deliberate starvation to exterminate Soviet civilians and Jews while feeding German troops.
It killed at least 7 million people, not as collateral, but by design.
The Nazi regime’s food ration system reflected a <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34907689/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">racial hierarchy</a>: 100 percent for Germans, 70 percent for Poles, 30 percent for Greeks and 20 percent for Jews.
In the Jewish ghettos, food was weaponised. Access to meat or bread was controlled. Shops were empty. Hunger was not a failure—it was policy. 
“That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally”, <a href="https://www.nobelpeacecenter.org/en/news/hitler-s-hungerplan" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Hans Frank</a>, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, wrote in a diary entry.
Today, more than 2 million Palestinians in Gaza—the territory’s entire population—are being forced, by design, into famine.
Not one million. Not most. All of them.
Women and men, infants and the elderly. No one is spared.
And yet—in a twisted echo of history—the <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-plan-to-initially-only-feed-60-of-gazans-as-they-endure-extreme-deprivation/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">GHF’s plan</a>, like the Nazi food hierarchies before it, will serve only 1.2 million people in its initial phase, excluding the rest of the population.
And that should never be noted marginally.
Even if the GHF achieves its goals, the average Palestinian in Gaza, by design, will receive fewer than 1,000 calories a day, when those receiving no food at all are taken into account. 
This is very close to what Jews in the <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-defiant-jewish-doctors-in-warsaw-ghetto-detailed-effects-of-nazi-starvation/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Warsaw Ghetto</a> were receiving, through both their allocated rations and smuggling. 
Mockery of the dying
Gaza is now the hungriest place on earth—the only area where <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/30/gaza-hungriest-place-earth-all-people-risk-famine-un" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">100 percent of the population is at risk of famine</a>, according to the United Nations.
Meanwhile, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declared in April that not even “<a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/smotrich-says-not-even-grain-wheat-will-enter-gaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a grain of wheat</a>” should enter Gaza.
In <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/countries/uk" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Britain</a>, the advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel grotesquely suggested that the war might help <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/10/uk-lawyers-for-israel-condemned-over-claim-war-may-reduce-obesity-in-gaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“reduce obesity” in Gaza</a>.
This is not just cruelty. This is contempt; it is mockery of the dying.
Even the man appointed as executive director of the Gaza Humiliation Foundation, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/54ec0009-5023-4130-b69e-300c7333e63d" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a former US Marine</a>, recently resigned, warning that the project is incompatible with humanitarian standards.
And no wonder. This is not a relief effort. It is a siege conceived by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, endorsed by US President Donald Trump, and inspired—in logic and layout—by the Nazi Hunger Plan.
Armed gangs loot aid convoys with impunity, moving freely in areas under Israeli control.
An internal<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/18/gaza-looting-aid-convoys-israel-famine/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> UN memo</a> seen by The Washington Post last year warned these groups “may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” or “protection” from the Israeli army.
When guards in Gaza tried to stop these gangs, Israeli air strikes <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfD4NK2Z3H4" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">killed twelve</a>—not the looters, but those trying to protect the food.
This is not chaos. It is a calculated breakdown.
It aims to turn hunger into disorder, starvation into surrender.
Stripped of dignity
There are conflicts in the world. There are wars, occupations, displacements.
But nowhere on Earth—not anywhere—is an entire population, young and old, locked inside a flattened, walled-off strip of land, bombed from the air, shelled from the sea, and systematically starved under total siege.
Gaza is not a battlefield. It is a prison. A graveyard.
Eighty years ago, a group of Jewish doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto documented the effects of hunger on the human body.
They called their book <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-defiant-jewish-doctors-in-warsaw-ghetto-detailed-effects-of-nazi-starvation/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Maladie de Famine</a> (The Disease of Starvation). In it, the project’s lead doctor, Israel Milejkowski, wrote: “I hold my pen in my hand and death stares into my room … In this prevailing silence lies the power and the depth of our pain and the moans that one day will shake the world’s conscience”.
This is exactly what doctors in Gaza are saying today.
They treat toddlers who haven’t eaten in days. They watch infants die with sunken eyes and protruding ribs. They speak to the world, but the world does not listen. 
That day is now.
After seeing their homes, schools and bakeries razed; after being displaced again and again, infants on shoulders, elders in wheelchairs, entire families turned to ash—they are now denied bread.
Gaza’s people are not just being starved. They are being stripped of the final thing left to them: their dignity.
They are treated worse than animals. Hunted when they gather. Shot when they eat.
Because Israel is not content with crushing Palestinian bodies. It wants to crush their souls. To erase not just their presence, but their will to exist.
And while the world looks away, somewhere, in a corner of the rubble, a mother kneels.
Still scraping. Still crying.
Trying to feed her children with flour dusted in dirt, and drenched in blood.
Soumaya Ghannoushi is a British Tunisian writer. This article was first published at <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/war-gaza-how-israel-replicating-nazi-starvation-tactics">Middle East Eye</a>.

Israel is replicating Nazi starvation tactics in Gaza

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