On 22 August 2025, the United Nations finally declared famine in Gaza. By then, hundreds had already died of starvation. At least 273 confirmed, including 112 children. The real number is certainly higher. Israel’s war machine, armed by US imperialism, has manufactured famine in Gaza. The UN’s belated declaration exposes a crime not of nature, but of power — the latest chapter in imperialists’ long history of weaponizing hunger. The UN’s own famine monitor — the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) — found that more than half a million Gazans are in catastrophic famine. Another million hover on the brink.
And yet the declaration came late. Always too late. Bureaucrats counted bodies, spreadsheets, and reviewed debated definitions while people continued to succumb to prolonged hunger. By the time the world’s “independent monitors” act, famine has already done its work. This is not an accident of process. It is how the system is designed. Famine is only declared after it has killed — after imperialist states can pretend it was inevitable.
Starvation by Design
The UN report leaves no doubt: Gaza’s famine is ”entirely man-made.” Zionist Israel backed by US imperialism bombed bakeries, bulldozed orchards, razed farmland, cut off water supply, blocked aid. Ninety-eight percent of cropland is destroyed or inaccessible. Hospitals razed to rubbles. Food convoys turned back. 400 food distribution points opened by UN were shut down by invading Israeli authorities. They were replaced with four sites under the Israel–U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Not relief centers. Killing grounds. Deliberately placed in combat zones, where desperate civilians were gunned down while scrambling for bread. Between May and August 2025 alone, more than 2,000 were killed or injured at these sites.
And then was the grotesque theatre of airdropping food parcels. Packaged as “humanitarian relief,” they killed too: people crushed in stampedes, injured by falling crates, children trampled in chaos. Hunger is the show; aid showmaster.
This is not mismanagement. It is warfare. Hunger wielded as a weapon.
Famine in capitalism is social murder
Israel enforced the siege. US supplied the bombs. And then, together, they stage the optics of “relief.” This is typical imperialist machination: destroy with one hand, drop rations with the other. Both acts serve the same project — oppression and domination.
Global imperialism — capitalism makes this possible. Food is treated not as a human right, but as a commercial commodity. In a world of overflowing grain silos and industrial livestock feed, people starve because imperialist emperors maximize profit. As Great Marx had put it, famine under capitalism is “social murder” — preventable deaths engineered by the system itself. Gaza is not an aberration. It is the crime of imperialism-capitalism laid bare.
Charade of “Food Droppings”
Western media loves the image of parachutes drifting down. The spectacle reassures viewers that “something is being done.” But parachuted rations are not humanitarianism. They are humiliation.
Ghassan Kanafani, a prominent Palestinian author and considered to be a leading novelist of his generation in the Arab world, who was assassinated in 1972 by Mossad, the Israeli secret service agency, wrote decades ago that colonialism does not just kill. It starves, humiliates, infantilizes. The airdrop is the perfect neo-colonial gesture. Scraps tossed from the sky to a starving population stripped of dignity, stripped of land, stripped of the ability to feed itself. Hunger is not logistics. It is bred by nasty politics. And so is the act of “feeding” it.
Imperialists’ favourite Weapon
Gaza’s famine is not new. It belongs to a long lineage of famines manufactured by imperialism capitalism. In Bengal famine of 1943 orchestrated by the British imperialist rulers on the pretext of stocking ration for the army fighting the Second World War, caused over 30 lakh deaths. Winston Churchill, the then British Prime Minister sneered that Indians “bred like rabbits.” Ships left Kolkata full of rice as peasants ate grass and corpses lined the roads.
Sudan, the oil-rich mineral-rich East African country was a prime target of the US imperialists after Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Palestine.
1998. When unable to force the then Sudan government to bend before them US imperialists with British imperialists in tow, in a planned way, fomented mistrust and division among the different ethnic groups so that they are locked in internecine clashes, and remain ever poor, underdeveloped, weak and shattered. Throughout 2024, the population of Sudan suffered from severe malnutrition and famine conditions conditions as a result of the planted civil war. Earlier, in 1998, famine killed 70,000 in Bahr el Ghazal, Sudan,. Food convoys were blocked for weeks. Villages perished while UN trucks idled at borders. The declaration came after the fact — just as in Gaza. Similarly, Somalia is another site of an unfolding humanitarian nightmare— a massive famine that has cost tens of thousands of Somali lives in the past few months. Over 3 million people are affected right now, with more than 10 million at risk across the Horn of Africa. US imperialists hold Al-Shabab, a militant organization which has been battling Somalia’s US-backed Transitional Federal Government for the past four years, responsible for the crisis. Calling Al-Shabaab a terrorist organization, US counter-terror laws restricted aid to war-torn Somalia. Already 2.5 lakh people have died. “Anti-terror” priorities overrode survival. Famine was declared only after the deaths piled high.
Then Yemen, a small a small, very poor Arab country by the side of the Red Sea in West Asia, which borders the narrow Bab el Mandeb strait at the entrance to the Red Sea and the gateway to the Suez Canal, one of the world’s most important shipping lanes, has long been targeted by Western imperialism particularly US. There also the Houthi organization, who represents majority of the Yemenis staunchly opposed interference and aggressive posture of the US, Israel, and their associates. Despite six years of relentless bombing, use of anti personnel bombs, US naval blockade, economic sanctions and drone attacks, the US-Saudi alliance has utterly failed to defeat the Houthis. The Saudi Arabia blockade — armed and backed by the U.S. and Britain — starved tens of thousands. Ports bombed. Food shipments blocked. Hospitals flattened. From 2023, Yemen continues to face a humanitarian crisis, with two-thirds of its population, approximately 21.6 million people, requiring humanitarian assistance and protection services. This ongoing need stemmed from protracted war of aggression by imperialist powers and their allies, economic collapse, displacements followed by famine. The situation is critical there. Across these cases, the pattern is identical. Famine is never a “natural disaster.” It is a weapon of choice by war-monger imperialist-capitalist brigands.
Gaza in the Continuum
What makes Gaza unique is not the man-made famine itself, but the visibility of it. Satellite images of destroyed cropland circulate online. Videos of starving children hit TikTok before they hit UN reports. Journalists document queues for food that end in massacre. And still, official recognition lags. Still, Israel and its mentor US dismiss the famine as propaganda. Still, mainstream media echo Israeli talking points, recasting starvation deaths as “underlying conditions.” Gaza is at once singular and emblematic: singular in its exposure, emblematic in showing how imperialist sharks wield hunger — both as weapon and as image.
The Law, and Its Limits
Under international law, deliberate starvation of civilians is both a war crime and a crime against humanity. By declaring famine, the UN has produced hard evidence for prosecution. Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister and his Defence Minister Katz, and their army generals stand criminally exposed.
But law, under imperialist capitalist order, is fragile and one eyed. The United States shields Israel at every turn. Arms flow. Vetoes pile up. The same states responsible for famine are the ones who control the tribunals meant to punish the culprits. The famine declaration matters only if seized upon by movements — organised movements of suffering people — in the streets, in unions, in parliaments — to force rupture. Otherwise, it is one more document in the archive of imperialists’ impunity.
What Must Happen Now
The UN report could not be clearer: ”Any further delay — even by a day — will result in a totally unacceptable escalation of famine-related mortality.” The demands are not negotiable:
- A permanent ceasefire to allow unrestricted humanitarian access.
- Therapeutic food and medical teams — not just sacks of flour — to treat acute malnutrition.
- Restoration of agriculture and infrastructure to end manufactured dependency.
- Accountability: recognition that deliberate starvation is a war crime and must be prosecuted. Anything less is complicity.
So, the famine in Gaza is not a humanitarian crisis. It is an orchestrated political crime. It is the logical outcome of a system where empire starves the weak and calls it security, where capitalism treats hunger as collateral damage, where aid is weaponized as spectacle. What is different now is visibility. No government can claim ignorance. No politician can plead surprise. Every state sees the evidence. Every state knows what is happening.
The urgent call of the hour is not more parachutes. Not more platitudes. But rupture: break the siege, dismantle the imperialist architecture of hunger, and end the system that starves millions for profit and power. History will not judge famine as a natural disaster. It will judge it as a crime. And it will judge those who let it happen — harshly.
