He has come under “inappropriate” pressure from some of Israel’s most loyal friends, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, after US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called for early elections and US President Joe Biden accused Bibi of doing more harm than good to his country. Netanyahu is right, of course, that it is up to Israelis to decide whom they elect and when to do it. Yet at this point, diplomatic protocol seems like a footnote — and the least of the prime minister’s problems should he allow famine to take hold in Gaza.
According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a two-decade-old organization whose assessments are used for planning by the UN and international aid organizations, as many as 1.1 million residents of Gaza — roughly half the population — are at risk of catastrophic food insecurity by July, and 210,000 in the north are likely to fall into the formal definition of famine between now and May. It also said that the threshold for acute malnutrition among children, one of the criteria required for it to declare a famine, has already been passed.
The Israeli agency in charge of supplying Gaza — Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) — said the IPC information is out of date, because access improved over the last week or two and COGAT is now admitting 80 percent more trucks carrying food into the Gaza Strip than before the conflict began. The organization posted photographs it said were of heaving Gaza market stalls to support its case and said much of the problem lies with the lack of distribution capacity among aid organizations inside Gaza.
Illustration: Yusha
Without more independent journalists allowed into Gaza to verify what is happening, it is hard to be certain what those claims and pictures mean. This much is certain, though: Even COGAT’s account acknowledges there are problems with getting sufficient critical aid to northern Gaza, where Israel has so far refused to reopen border crossings.
There are children with prior conditions weakened by malnutrition in hospital wards in the south, an in-person report by Reuters said.
A number of academic studies have shown that most wars create many more casualties through hunger and disease than bullets and bombs.
The average multiple was four indirect deaths for every fatality caused directly by combatants, across 13 conflicts examined, data from one of the largest such surveys by the Swiss-based Geneva Declaration showed. The highest multiple, 15.7, was in Sierra Leone in 1999 to 2002.
Applying this average to the Hamas-run Gaza health authority figures for casualties to date, including the roughly one-third that the Israel Defense Forces say were Hamas fighters, a famine could be expected to bring the total number of casualties in Gaza to more than 100,000.
Israel’s “extensive restrictions” on the passage of aid to Gaza “may amount to the use of starvation as a method of war, which is a war crime,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Australian lawyer Volker Turk said.
The relationship between the UN and Israel is utterly broken. However, Netanyahu should take these claims seriously, because Gaza is unusual: Unlike many other conflicts where indirect deaths were attributable to a range of factors outside the immediate control of protagonists — such as crop failure — this crisis would be entirely man-made. So long as Israel refuses to open access points in the north, allowing trucks to bring aid in without having to cross the entire war zone to reach Gaza City, it is impossible for even COGAT to argue that Israel is doing all that it can or should.
If we take Israel’s government at its word, the fact that food is not getting where it needs to is due to the chaos and insecurity of war.
Some of this is because Hamas is sequestering food for its fighters, Israel said. Of course it is. However, not even COGAT claims that Hamas is destroying food to starve civilians, and if its numbers on the amount of aid entering by truck every day are correct — 3,665 tonnes, or 8 million pounds, of food on March 17, for example — that is enough for hundreds of thousands of people. There are only a few tens of thousands of Hamas fighters to feed, at most.
More than 1 million people have taken refuge from war in Rafah, so if Netanyahu orders the IDF into the city to destroy the four Hamas battalions he said are holed up there, the chaos and insecurity already faced by civilians and aid workers in Gaza would increase exponentially. Unless it first mounts a major operation to clear the city of civilians and move them to well-supplied and organized camps away from the fighting, famine would come.
Netanyahu had no choice but to send troops into Gaza after Oct. 7, despite what Hamas apologists might want to believe. How and when to attack Hamas’ strongholds though, and what steps to take to reduce civilian casualties, were choices for Netanyahu to make. It remains a choice not to open more entry points into the Gaza Strip.
Egypt and the European Parliament recently called on Israel to open the six land crossings to Gaza that it is keeping closed, and COGAT ran a six-truck test from the north. Doing so is the only effective way to get enough aid distributed to Gaza’s two-million-plus population, other than a ceasefire. There are other methods to deliver aid, including air drops and deliveries by sea. Yet, the first ship brought in just 200 tonnes of aid — compared to thousands per day by road — and the second 240-tonne sea delivery has been delayed by weather. Airdrops could do even less.
It is up to Netanyahu to prove the IPC’s famine predictions wrong. Israel might not be a member of the International Criminal Court, but if he fails to act and the worst happens, that would not stop its prosecutors from pursuing a well-deserved case against him.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.
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