Has Israel Continued to Use Starvation as a Weapon of War in Gaza? Reading the Determinations Issued and Each Party’s Own Counts

Between December 2023 and August 2025, five dated determinations by monitoring organizations and United Nations bodies held that Israel used starvation of civilians as a method of warfare in the Gaza Strip, and the two issued in 2025 stated that the conduct had continued; no court has entered a judgment on the question. Gaza health officials’ own tally records starvation-attributed deaths rising from 4 in 2023 to 49 in 2024 and 422 in 2025. Israel’s own agencies publish a different quantity: the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) recorded 1,778,363 metric tons of food entering Gaza between 10 October 2025 and 7 June 2026, on tonnages declared by suppliers rather than weighed at the crossings. The determinations and the tonnages describe the same period and count different things, which leaves the reader with a plain question: what, between the first determination and the last, was actually measured?

Key Findings

• COGAT recorded 1,778,363 metric tons of food entering Gaza between 10 October 2025 and 7 June 2026, COGAT’s own count, resting on self-declaration by humanitarian organizations and private providers rather than weighing at the crossings.
• The Israel Defense Forces state that over 1.9 million tons of aid was delivered from the start of the war to 19 August 2025, a self-published floor rather than an exact or audited total.
• The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification placed 470,000 people in Gaza in Phase 5, its most severe classification, in its 2025 assessment as reported by the BBC in 2025, with the whole population of more than 2 million assessed as acutely food insecure.
• Gaza health officials’ own tally records 422 starvation-attributed deaths in 2025, against 49 in 2024 and 4 in 2023, a count kept by a party to the conflict and not independently verified.
• In 4,500 comments beneath leading British, French and German media Facebook pages during the May 2021 escalation, Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) coded 26.9% of 1,504 UK comments as antisemitic under an IHRA-based scheme, with child murder or blood libel framing appearing in 8.1% of those.

Which bodies say the starvation continued into 2025?

Two organizations issued that determination in 2025. Amnesty International stated in July 2025 that the evidence it gathered demonstrates Israel has “continued to use starvation of civilians as a weapon of war” in Gaza, and Human Rights Watch, in August 2025, called the humanitarian situation there a “direct result” of Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war and its continued deprivation of aid and basic services. Each is that organization’s own determination on its own criteria.

A third statement came the same summer. In July 2025, UN experts, publishing through the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, described Israel as using “thirst as a weapon” and condemned what they called the “deliberate dehydration and starvation” of Palestinians in Gaza. Earlier, on 14 November 2024, the UN Special Committee said Israel was “intentionally causing death, starvation and serious injury, using starvation as a method of war.”

An organizational determination and a judicial finding are different instruments, and the distinction is load-bearing here. No court has entered a judgment on whether starvation was used as a method of warfare in Gaza. The nearest step in any court record is the International Criminal Court’s pre-trial decision of 21 November 2024 issuing arrest warrants, which records the judges’ finding of reasonable grounds to believe, the threshold that a warrant requires, and not a conviction. The BBC reported in March 2024 that the UN human rights commissioner described the case that starvation was being used as a weapon as “plausible,” a third and lower standard again.

None of these statements is a measurement. Each characterizes conduct; the quantities that circulate with them, the deaths recorded, the food-insecurity classifications, the tonnages entering the crossings and the deaths at distribution points, are produced by other bodies, on other methods, and the sections below take them in turn. The same separation applies to the narrower question of starvation and children in Gaza, where the determinations and the counts again come from different hands.

Is it often said the deprivation never stopped?

It is often said that the deprivation described in Gaza in late 2023 never stopped, and the published sequence supports the repetition: five dated determinations run from December 2023 to August 2025. Human Rights Watch issued one in December 2023, B’Tselem in April 2024, the UN Special Committee on 14 November 2024, Amnesty International in July 2025 and Human Rights Watch again in August 2025.

The wording in each is direct. Human Rights Watch in December 2023 said the Israeli government was “using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare” in Gaza and called it a war crime. B’Tselem in 2024 wrote that “for months, Israel has been committing the crime of starvation.” The 2025 statements, quoted above, add the word continued.

Five determinations across three calendar years is a record of five determinations, not five measurements of one quantity. Each rests on the issuing body’s own gathering, its own criteria and its own evidentiary standard, and those standards differ from one another and from the “plausible” formulation the UN human rights commissioner used in March 2024. Three of the five were issued by organizations that publish findings as part of their advocacy mandate; two by a United Nations committee and a group of UN-appointed experts.

What the record does not contain is a single continuous series measuring food entering, distributed and consumed across Gaza month by month over those three years, which is the quantity a continuity claim would rest on if one existed. The published series that do run year by year are narrower: a starvation-attributed death tally kept by Gaza health officials, a food-security classification issued at assessment points, and Israel’s own tonnage records for the crossings. Each measures one thing, and the three are not versions of each other.

Did the recorded hunger deaths rise each year?

Gaza health officials’ own tally records 422 starvation-attributed deaths in 2025, against 49 in 2024 and 4 in 2023, as reported in February 2026. The figures are the count of a party to the conflict, kept on that party’s own attribution of cause, and are not independently verified.

What the series measures is deaths that health officials attributed to starvation or malnutrition and recorded as such. It is not a count of hunger, and it is not a subset of any wider death toll published on a different method. The 2023 figure covers roughly the last twelve weeks of that year, the 2024 and 2025 figures full calendar years, so the first point and the later two do not span equal windows.

A separate official Palestinian series measures a different thing again. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported that Gaza stood at about 2.13 million people at the end of 2025, a decline of approximately 254,000, which the Bureau states is a decrease of 10.6% against pre-aggression population estimates. The Bureau attributes that change to war-related deaths, missing persons, reduced births and forced out-migration together, so it is a demographic net decline and not a casualty count. The same brief reports roughly 2.2 million people living in Gaza on the eve of the war, and separately reports 70,942 deaths in Gaza by the end of December 2025, a figure it attributes to the Palestinian Ministry of Health rather than measuring itself.

Three official or party-published series therefore sit alongside one another: a starvation-attributed death tally, a ministry death toll relayed by the statistical office, and a demographic net decline. None can be added to or subtracted from another.

When did famine monitors classify catastrophe in Gaza?

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification placed 470,000 people in Gaza in Phase 5, the most severe level on its five-phase scale and the one it labels catastrophe, in its 2025 assessment as reported by the BBC in 2025. The same reporting summarized the classification as finding the entire population of more than 2 million in acute food insecurity.

The classification is a graded assessment of food-security outcomes, built from indicators of food consumption, malnutrition and mortality and expressed in phases rather than in a single headline number. Phase 5 is defined by extreme food gaps together with starvation and death, which is why the count of people placed in it, rather than the total in acute insecurity, is the figure that carries the severity.

What the classification does is describe a population’s condition at an assessment point. It attributes no cause and names no responsible party, so it cannot function as evidence about intent or policy, and a determination that starvation was used as a method of warfare is a separate instrument resting on separate material. The two are frequently reported in one breath and measure different things: one the state of a population, the other a characterization of conduct.

The classification also comes with a timing property that matters for a question about continuation. Assessments are issued at intervals rather than continuously, so the series they form is a set of dated snapshots. A figure of 470,000 at catastrophe in 2025 is a statement about the period the assessment covers, and neither that figure nor any other in the published record supports a month-by-month reading of severity across the whole war.

How many were killed seeking aid during 2025?

United Nations figures for 2025 record at least 859 Palestinians killed while attempting to obtain aid at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution sites between 27 May and 31 July 2025, a count the United Nations produced and Human Rights Watch quoted in its August 2025 report. The window is 66 days.

The figure measures deaths at or near aid distribution points over that window. It does not measure food delivered, food withheld, or the cause of any individual death, and it is stated by its publisher as a floor. It is the dated 2025 quantity that the continuation statements are most often read against, and it belongs to a different category from both the food-insecurity classification and the starvation-attributed death tally.

Israel’s own accountability record supplies the counterpart tier, and it comes with a stated threshold. The Israel Defense Forces Military Advocate General’s Corps reported that, as at 3 August 2024, 74 criminal investigations had been opened in connection with the war in Gaza: 44 concerning the death of detainees held by the IDF, 8 alleged detainee mistreatment, 13 alleged pillaging or stealing, 6 alleged illegal use of force and 3 alleged destruction of civilian property without military necessity. Over 1,000 incidents had been referred to the General Staff’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism for factual assessment, with hundreds still in collection at the time of writing.

The Corps states the standard that governs those numbers in its own words: in armed conflict, “death or injury to a civilian or harm to civilian objects, while tragic and regrettable, in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct, as they can be explained as reasonable aftermath of lawful operational activity.” The investigation count is a function of that threshold, so the two travel together. These are counts of investigations opened, published by a party about its own processes and not independently audited, and they are not counts of findings, indictments or convictions. Broader claims about war crimes in Gaza rest on the same divided record.

What does Israel’s own reporting record about aid entering Gaza?

COGAT recorded 1,778,363 metric tons of food entering the Gaza Strip between 10 October 2025 and 7 June 2026, which it presents as nearly threefold the World Food Programme’s monthly food requirement benchmark. The tonnage is COGAT’s own count, resting on self-declaration by humanitarian organizations and private sector providers rather than on weighing at the crossings; in the ratio, only the numerator is COGAT’s.

Source: each body’s own published count, produced by a party to the events it describes, none independently verified. Figures stated as “over” or “approximately” are floors or approximations and are not exact totals.

Three properties of this tier bear on the question. The counts record entry at crossings and, in the aerial case, delivery by air; none of them measures distribution or consumption inside Gaza, so a tonnage total does not answer what reached a household in a given area or month. The tonnages rest on declarations by the organizations and providers moving the goods, which is a different measurement act from weighing. And the reporting periods differ from one another, so the four rows cannot be combined into a single series.

COGAT also reports an approximately 72% decline in the Gaza food consumer price index between September 2025 and May 2026, without identifying the source of the price data, which is why that figure carries less than the tonnage it sits beside.

Which analyses reject the continued-starvation finding?

The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs published in 2025 a ceiling of at most 41,000 civilians in Gaza dying of war-related causes through October 2025, derived by subtracting estimated natural deaths and Israel’s count of Hamas fighters killed from the Gaza Ministry of Health total.

The page states plainly that neither the Hamas figure of 67,000 total deaths nor the Israeli estimate of 21,000 fighters killed has been independently confirmed, and the 41,000 is the publisher’s own arithmetic on inputs supplied by parties to the conflict.

The dissenting analyses contest three different things, and separating them matters. The Jerusalem Center contests the underlying counts and the characterization built on them. NGO Monitor, in its 2024 annual report published in 2025, contests the methods and networks of the organizations issuing findings, reporting that it identified 157 groups in the United States linked to an anti-Israel network with over 3,000 connections and 111 groups in Canada with over 1,800 connections, and attributing $28 million in funding cut off by government funders to its own work. Those are NGO Monitor’s own counts, self-attributed in the funding case, with the mapping’s inclusion criteria not stated. UN Watch publishes a standing response to the claim that starvation was used as a weapon of war in Gaza, as an advocacy organization stating its position.

The Israeli government’s own position is the fourth element. Guardian reporting in May 2025 recorded the Israeli government denying that it holds a policy of starvation, and Israel’s official statements on the war, cited in the table above, present aid facilitation totals as their answer to the question.

Israel also publishes the standard it states binds its soldiers. The IDF’s ethical code requires that a soldier “will not use their weapon or power to harm uninvolved civilians and prisoners and will do everything in their power to prevent harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.” That is doctrine, evidence of the requirement Israel states for itself, and it establishes nothing about conduct in any particular instance; the counts on conduct are the Military Advocate General’s, above.

Does the starvation framing appear in measured antisemitic discourse?

26.9% of 1,504 comments beneath leading British media Facebook pages reacting to the May 2021 escalation were coded antisemitic under an IHRA-based scheme by Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022), a peer-reviewed content analysis of 4,500 comments in three languages.

The comparable shares were 12.6% of 1,500 French comments and 13.6% of 1,520 German comments.

Within the UK antisemitic comments, the authors coded a specific distribution of framings, with the deprivation-and-harm tropes among them.

Thread context was needed to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of the UK antisemitic comments, so a share of the coded material reads as unremarkable in isolation. The categories are not exclusive and the shares are of the antisemitic subset, not of all comments.

Two later peer-reviewed studies measure how conflict framing relates to attitudes, both correlationally. Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh (2025), in two British experiments (N = 354 and N = 490) priming participants with war-in-Gaza material, report two separate pathways to anti-Jewish hostility: one running through social dominance orientation and one through out-group identity fusion with the Palestinian people, which they describe as conflating attitudes toward Israel with prejudice toward Jews. Enstad (2026), in two nationally representative Norwegian surveys (N = 1,575 and a preregistered replication at N = 1,653), found endorsement of Holocaust inversion, the belief that Israel treats Palestinians as badly as Jews were treated during the Second World War, associated with justification of harassment and violence against Jews.

Media exposure alone does not carry the association. Huesmann and colleagues (2012), surveying 89 Jewish American and 180 Arab American high-school students, found that total media exposure to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not directly predict ethnic stereotypes; the association ran through identification with the groups as portrayed. The apartheid analogy sits in the same measured set of framings.

Methodology and limitations

This report measures the determinations issued on the question, the standards each one applied, and the counts each body publishes. It does not resolve the legal question of whether the conduct meets the definition of starvation as a method of warfare, because no court judgment exists to record.

Source types, by tier. Official and primary records: COGAT’s ceasefire humanitarian situation report (2026), the Israel Defense Forces’ aid page (2025) and the Military Advocate General’s Corps publication (2024, updated August 2024), the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs statements (2023 and 2025), the IDF ethical code as published doctrine, and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics brief on the status of the Palestinian people at the end of 2025. Every Israeli and Palestinian figure here is a party’s own count of its own activity or territory, published by a party to the events, and none is independently verified. Peer-reviewed research: Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022), Huesmann and colleagues (2012); Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh (2025) and Enstad (2026) are peer-reviewed and carried here from their published abstracts, so no full-text detail is implied. Research-institute and monitoring material: the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs (2025), NGO Monitor (2025) and UN Watch, each with a stated mission, cited for its own arithmetic or position and labelled as such.

Determinations by monitoring organizations and United Nations bodies are named and dated in the body as each body’s own finding on its own criteria. They are characterizations rather than measurements, and the report’s figures come from the statistical, party-published and peer-reviewed tiers above.

Specific limitations. COGAT’s tonnages rest on self-declaration by suppliers rather than weighing at the crossings, and in its threefold ratio only the numerator is COGAT’s, the benchmark being the World Food Programme’s. The IDF totals are stated as floors, so “over 1.9 million tons” may not be restated as an exact figure. Gaza health officials’ starvation-attributed tally is a party’s own count on its own attribution of cause, and its 2023 point covers a partial year. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics decline of approximately 254,000, which the Bureau states is 10.6%, reconciles on the Bureau’s own base and is not a share of the 2.2 million pre-war residents the same brief reports; it is a demographic net decline covering deaths, missing persons, reduced births and out-migration, never a death toll. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification figure is carried as reported by the BBC in 2025 and describes outcomes at an assessment point, attributing no cause. The United Nations count of 859 deaths at distribution sites is stated by its publisher as a floor for a 66-day window. The Military Advocate General’s investigation count is a function of the threshold quoted alongside it and counts investigations opened, not findings.

No source consulted here publishes a measured share of Gaza’s food requirement met inside the territory, by area and by month, across the war. That series does not exist in the record, which is why the sections above report entry, classification and mortality separately rather than as one quantity.

Conclusion

So what changed between the first determination and the last? On the published record, the language did not: from December 2023 to August 2025, five bodies said in turn that starvation was being used as a method of warfare in Gaza, and the last two of them said it had continued. What changed underneath the language is measurable in three separate places, and each measures something different from the others.

The numbers, taken together, describe a record split along its sourcing. Gaza health officials’ own tally rose from 4 to 49 to 422 across the three years. A food-security classification placed 470,000 people at its most severe phase in 2025 and the whole population of over 2 million in acute food insecurity, while attributing no cause. The United Nations recorded at least 859 people killed seeking aid across 66 days of that summer. Israel’s own agencies recorded 1,778,363 metric tons of food entering the Strip after the ceasefire and over 1.9 million tons across the war, on declarations they collected themselves, and its Military Advocate General opened 74 criminal investigations against a threshold it states plainly excludes most civilian harm from criminal suspicion. No court has ruled, and the closest court record establishes reasonable grounds for a warrant rather than a finding of fact. Every one of those figures is checkable, and no two of them can be added.

That gap is where the language goes to work. Becker, Ascone and Troschke coded 26.9% of UK comments under mainstream media coverage of one escalation as antisemitic, with the child-murder and blood-libel framing appearing in 8.1% of them, and Enstad found in two national Norwegian samples that endorsement of Holocaust inversion tracked with justification of violence against Jews. A vocabulary of deliberate deprivation, once it leaves a determination and enters a comment thread, arrives among readers who have no access to which of these counts measured what. Whether that vocabulary is one of the inputs feeding the tropes those studies measured is a question the numbers here sharpen and hand to the reader, and it is the harder half of any account of this war.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes Gaza’s population figures, and what are they based on?

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics conducted the 2017 census, which counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza (1,899,291 in Gaza), and every later total in the international series is a projection off that measured base. The World Bank reports the combined West Bank and Gaza economy at about 5.29 million for 2024, and does not publish Gaza separately.

Why can Israeli and Palestinian counts of the same period not be added together?

They measure different acts with different instruments. COGAT’s tonnages record goods entering at crossings on suppliers’ declarations, while Gaza health officials’ tallies record deaths attributed inside the territory, so neither is a component of the other and no arithmetic relates them.

Which count of deaths in Gaza appears in Palestinian official records?

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported 70,942 deaths in Gaza by the end of December 2025, attributing the figure to the Palestinian Ministry of Health rather than measuring it itself. The Bureau’s own estimate is the separate demographic decline of approximately 254,000 people, which covers deaths, missing persons, reduced births and out-migration together.

How do European monitoring organizations count antisemitic incidents after October 2023?

Each counts on its own definitions and only what is reported to it. The Community Security Trust recorded 4,103 incidents across the United Kingdom in 2023 as first published, later revised to 4,296, with 2,699 of them on or after 7 October; Bundesverband RIAS verified 202 incidents in Germany connected to the attacks between 7 and 15 October 2023, against 59 in the same window a year earlier.

Does any official United States record measure antisemitic incidents?

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting programme recorded 1,938 anti-Jewish single-bias hate-crime incidents in 2024, the highest since collection began in 1991 and 69% of religion-based incidents. The FBI notes reporting is voluntary: of 16,419 participating agencies, only 3,127 reported any hate crime, so the count is a floor.

Has search attention to antisemitism in the United States changed since 2023?

Google Trends indexed annual averages for the query “antisemitism” in United States web search sat near 5 from 2015 to 2017 and reached 36 in 2023, 33 in 2024 and 38 in 2025, against a peak month indexed at 100. The index measures search attention only, within that one query, region and range.

Sources

• Becker, M., Ascone, L., and Troschke, H., 2022. Antisemitic comments on Facebook pages of leading British, French, and German media outlets. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. DOI 10.1057/s41599-022-01337-8. Peer-reviewed.
• Bundesverband RIAS, 2023. Antisemitische Reaktionen in Deutschland auf die Hamas-Massaker in Israel. report-antisemitism.de. Monitoring organization.
• Community Security Trust, 2024. Antisemitic Incidents Report 2023. cst.org.uk. Monitoring organization.
• COGAT (Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories), 2026. Humanitarian Situation Report During the Ceasefire. gaza-aid-data.gov.il. Official record, a party’s own reporting.
• Enstad, J. D., 2026. Holocaust inversion and justification of anti-Jewish aggression: evidence from two national surveys in Norway. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001704. Peer-reviewed, abstract-sourced.
• Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2025. Reported Crimes in the Nation, 2024 (Hate Crime Statistics). Crime Data Explorer. Official record.
• Google Trends, 2026. Search interest for “antisemitism” in the United States, 2015 to 2025. trends.google.com. Primary aggregated data source.
• Huesmann, L. R., Dubow, E. F., Boxer, P., Souweidane, V., and Ginges, J., 2012. Foreign wars and domestic prejudice. Journal of Research on Adolescence. DOI 10.1111/j.1532-7795.2012.00785.x. Peer-reviewed.
• Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, 2025. Acute food insecurity classification for the Gaza Strip, as reported by BBC News, 2025. Food-security classification body.
• Israel Defense Forces, 2025. Clearing Up the Misconceptions: Everything You Need to Know About the Humanitarian Aid Situation in Gaza. idf.il. Official record, a party’s own reporting.
• Israel Defense Forces. The Spirit of the Israel Defense Forces (ethical code). idf.il. Official record, a party’s own published doctrine.
• Israel Defense Forces, Military Advocate General’s Corps, 2024. Addressing Alleged Misconduct in the Context of the War in Gaza. idf.il. Official record, a party’s own reporting.
• Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2023. Israel-Hamas Conflict 2023: Humanitarian Efforts. gov.il. Official record, a party’s own reporting.
• Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France, 2025. Israel’s Objectives and Current Operation. embassies.gov.il. Official record, a party’s own reporting.
• Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, 2025. The Death of Genocide. jcfa.org. Research institute.
• NGO Monitor, 2025. Annual Report 2024. ngo-monitor.org. Monitoring organization, advocacy mission.
• Ozer, S., Obaidi, M., and Bergh, R., 2025. The impact of globalized conflicts: examining attitudes toward Jews among Britons in the political context of the war in Gaza. International Journal of Intercultural Relations. DOI 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2025.102184. Peer-reviewed, abstract-sourced.
• Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018. Population, Housing and Establishments Census 2017: final results. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record.
• Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. A Brief on the Status of the Palestinian People at the End of 2025. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record.
• The Guardian, 2025. Monday briefing: Is Israel using starvation as a weapon of war? theguardian.com. Press report.
• UN Watch. Claim 47: Israel is Using Starvation as a Weapon of War in Gaza. unwatch.org. Advocacy organization, position.
• World Bank, 2024. World Development Indicators: West Bank and Gaza population. data.worldbank.org. Official compiled statistical series.