Is Israel Carrying Out a Deliberate Campaign of Starvation in Gaza? Reading the Determinations, the Treaty Standard and Each Party’s Own Counts

Four organizations put the determination on the record by name between December 2023 and 2025: Human Rights Watch in December 2023 and again in December 2024, B’Tselem in April 2024, Amnesty International in 2025, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food in 2024 and 2025, each concluding on its own published standard that the deprivation of food in Gaza was deliberate. No court has tried the question. The furthest the judicial record reaches is the arrest-warrant decision of the International Criminal Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber I on 21 November 2024, issued on a “reasonable grounds to believe” threshold that governs arrest rather than guilt, and Israel, which is not a party to the Rome Statute, rejects the jurisdiction and the characterization while publishing its own tonnage counts. The dispute is not over whether Gazans went hungry; it is over what the record establishes about intent, and over which window and which part of the Strip each figure measures.

Key Findings

• The Rome Statute of 1998 lists as a war crime, at Article 8(2)(b)(xxv), “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions,” the treaty text against which every determination on this question is measured.
• Israel’s 2024 submission to the United Nations reported more than 875,000 tons of aid entering Gaza since the start of the war, including more than 740,000 tons of food and water, a count produced by the party that administers the crossings and not independently verified.
• COGAT’s own records, as tabulated by The Guardian in 2025, show 56,000 tonnes of food entering Gaza between March and June 2025.
• The IDF Military Advocate General’s Corps reported, on its own count, 74 criminal investigations opened as at 3 August 2024, of which 3 concerned alleged destruction of civilian property without military necessity, alongside over 1,000 incidents referred for factual assessment; the Corps states that civilian death or damage “in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct.”
• An estimate by 99 American healthcare professionals in 2024 put likely deaths from starvation and its complications at 62,413 by 30 September 2024, an appendix estimate attached to an open letter rather than an official death count; no official statistical series publishes a starvation-specific mortality figure for Gaza.

Which bodies call it a deliberate starvation campaign?

Four are on the record by name across two years. Human Rights Watch published on 18 December 2023 that starvation of civilians was being used as a weapon of war in Gaza, and returned to the finding in a December 2024 report. B’Tselem published “Manufacturing Famine” in April 2024, using the war-crime framing in its title. Amnesty International published in 2025 that the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza was a deliberate policy.

The fourth is the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, whose July 2024 report to the United Nations used the language of an intentional and targeted starvation campaign, a phrasing repeated by UN experts in a March 2024 press release and again in 2025. Amnesty International’s 2025 statement is the most explicit on intent, describing the outcome as one that Israeli policies were designed and implemented to produce.

Each of these is an organizational determination reached under a standard the organization itself sets and publishes, not a judicial finding, and each carries its issuing body’s own definitions of what counts as an incident and what counts as deprivation. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem are monitoring and advocacy organizations; a UN Special Rapporteur is an individual mandate-holder reporting to an intergovernmental body, not a court. The determinations were reached separately, on separately assembled documentation, which is why they are counted here as four and not as one position restated.

What none of them is, and none of them claims to be, is a verdict. The distinction matters for the reader trying to weigh the question, because the same words, “deliberate” and “campaign,” carry one meaning in an organizational report and a narrower, element-by-element meaning in the treaty text quoted below. The bodies above assert the first. The second has been tested only to the threshold described in the section on war crime determinations and the legal record that follows.

Is it often said Israel has starved Gaza deliberately for two years?

Yes, and the record supports the shape of the claim: at least five dated publications between December 2023 and 2025 state it, issued by four separate bodies, on documentation each assembled independently. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification separately reported in 2025 that two of the three technical famine thresholds had been reached in Gaza.

That is the concession, and it should be made plainly rather than qualified away. A reader who has encountered the claim has encountered something numerous, dated and consistently worded across sources that do not share a method.

The reframe is what each of those figures was produced under. The determinations apply evidentiary standards their authors set, which differ from one another and from the elements of the treaty offence; nothing in the treaty makes an organizational conclusion a finding of law. The famine assessment itself moved across the period. The UN Famine Review Committee stated in June 2024 that the available evidence did not indicate that famine was then occurring, after Integrated Food Security Phase Classification analysis in 2024 had reported that famine thresholds for food consumption were reached in most of Gaza. The 2025 classification reported two of three thresholds reached, and UN reporting in July 2025 described mounting evidence of widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease.

So the phrase “for two years” compresses a sequence in which the technical classification tightened, loosened and tightened again, over areas and months that the classifications name and the organizational determinations mostly do not. Two years is the span of the publications. It is not the span of any single continuous measurement, and no body publishes a two-year series of the quantity the phrase implies.

What did ICC judges find about starvation in Gaza?

One judicial step exists. On 21 November 2024, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants whose listed charges included the war crime of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, on the “reasonable grounds to believe” threshold that the Rome Statute sets for arrest. That threshold is the lowest in the Statute’s hierarchy, and no trial on the charge has taken place.

The offence itself is defined in the treaty text, at Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute of 1998: “Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions.” Three elements sit in that sentence: intention, deprivation of indispensable objects, and, as one listed means, the wilful impeding of relief. Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute and rejects the Court’s jurisdiction over the matter.

The domestic record runs on a different track and publishes numbers. The IDF Military Advocate General’s Corps reported that, as at 3 August 2024, it had opened 74 criminal investigations arising from the Gaza war: 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. The Corps also reported over 1,000 incidents referred to the General Staff’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism, with hundreds still under assessment at the time of writing.

These are the IDF’s own counts of its own processes, and they are counts of investigations opened, not of findings, indictments or convictions. The threshold that produces them travels with them, in the Corps’ 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.” No investigation in the published breakdown is categorised as concerning deprivation of food or the impeding of relief.

How many incidents do the campaign findings rest on?

One number circulates as a magnitude, and it is an estimate: 62,413 people likely dead of starvation and its complications by 30 September 2024, produced by 99 American healthcare professionals in 2024 as an appendix to an open letter and carried in later organizational reporting. It is not an official death count, it was not produced by a statistical agency, and the professionals who produced it presented it as an estimate of likely deaths rather than an enumeration.

Beneath the determinations themselves, the documentation is described by type rather than counted in a total. Human Rights Watch’s December 2023 and December 2024 publications rest on documented instances of blocked or restricted water, food, fuel and electricity, presented case by case. Amnesty International’s 2025 statement rests on testimonies gathered from people in Gaza and on documented incidents of aid denial. B’Tselem’s April 2024 publication argues from the pattern of restriction rather than from a tally.

None of those publications carries the figure a reader looking for scale would want: a denominator. There is no published count, from any of the four bodies, of aid consignments requested against consignments denied, or of days of closure against days of entry, set out as a rate. The determinations are qualitative arguments built on named incidents, and they are explicit about being that. The absence of a rate is a fact about the documentary record on this question, and it is why the tonnage figures in the next section, produced by the party administering the crossings, are the only continuous quantities on the table at all. The same asymmetry runs through the documentary record of civilian harm in Gaza more broadly: dense case documentation on one side, party-produced aggregates on the other, and few places where the two measure the same object.

How much food entered Gaza, by each party’s count?

Israel’s 2024 submission to the United Nations reported more than 740,000 tons of food and water entering Gaza since the start of the war, within a stated total of more than 875,000 tons of aid. That is the count of a party to the conflict, produced from its own crossing records and not independently verified.

The same submission put food alone at 272,000 tons by the six-month mark, and stated that this was more than double the amount required according to World Food Programme figures. Later Israeli publications extend the series in their own units and windows. The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported over 70,000 tons of aid entering Gaza cumulatively as at 16 December 2023. The Israel Defense Forces reported over 1.9 million tons of aid delivered as at 19 August 2025, including 7,800 tons by the aerial route. Israel’s Permanent Mission to the Multilateral Organizations in France reported more than 106,000 aid trucks carrying over two million tons as at 14 September 2025.

COGAT’s own records, as tabulated by The Guardian in 2025, show 56,000 tonnes of food entering between March and June 2025. COGAT’s own July 2026 report records 1,778,363 metric tons of food entering between 10 October 2025 and 7 June 2026, which it sets at nearly threefold the World Food Programme’s monthly requirement benchmark. COGAT states that its tonnages rest on self-declaration by humanitarian organizations and private-sector providers rather than on weighing at the crossings.

Did the restrictions and the famine findings move together?

The classifications and the entry volumes are separate series, measured by different bodies over windows that do not align, and the two move in a documented sequence: Integrated Food Security Phase Classification analysis reported famine thresholds for food consumption reached in most of Gaza in 2024, the UN Famine Review Committee stated in June 2024 that available evidence did not indicate famine was then occurring, and the 2025 classification reported two of the three thresholds reached.

UN reporting in July 2025 described mounting evidence of widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease. COGAT’s records for the overlapping months, as tabulated by The Guardian, show 56,000 tonnes of food entering between March and June 2025. The tighter assessments coincided with periods in which the reported entry volumes were low relative to the ceasefire period, when COGAT’s own July 2026 report records 1,778,363 metric tons of food over roughly eight months. That is a coincidence in time between two independently produced series, and it is stated as one.

Neither series was built to test the other. The classifications measure household food consumption, acute malnutrition and mortality against fixed thresholds, using data collected inside Gaza under conditions the assessing bodies describe as constrained. The tonnage figures measure declared cargo weight at crossings. A rise or fall in one is not a measurement of the other, and no published dataset joins declared entry against measured consumption on a common calendar.

The Famine Review Committee’s June 2024 statement is the part of the sequence most often lost when the period is described as a single continuous condition. It records that a technical review body, working from the evidence available to it at that date, did not confirm famine at that point, and it sits between two assessments that reported thresholds reached. A report that cites only the first and the third describes an assessment history that the record does not contain.

What reasons did Israel give for halting aid?

Israel’s published position is that no starvation policy exists: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said there is “no policy of starvation” and “no starvation in Gaza,” statements reported by PBS NewsHour in 2025. The rationale documents behind that position are published by four separate Israeli bodies, each stating what it says it did rather than why entry was withheld.

The Israel Defense Forces publication of 19 August 2025 states its own aid figures and describes coordination of deliveries, including 23,000 tons overseen in a single week and a new water line the IDF states will serve around 600,000 residents, a projection rather than a count of people served. The IDF’s separate human-shields materials state its position that Hamas sites military infrastructure, headquarters, launchers and weapons storage in residential buildings, hospitals, mosques and schools, and that Hamas broadcast messages telling residents to ignore IDF evacuation warnings. Neither publication carries a count of consignments inspected, delayed or refused.

Each row is a floor or an approximation as its publisher wrote it, and the four cover different windows and different cargo categories, so they are not stages of one series. What the set establishes is the shape of the official Israeli answer: a claim about volumes delivered, offered in place of a claim about volumes withheld.

Who disputes that the restrictions were coordinated?

One named Israeli analysis contests the classifications directly. The Institute for National Security Studies published “The Misleading Reports of the UN Over Famine in Gaza” in 2024, arguing that hunger is not famine, contesting the data-collection method behind the famine classifications, and rejecting the conclusion that starvation was intentional.

The Institute’s argument is methodological rather than definitional: it disputes how the underlying consumption and malnutrition data were gathered inside Gaza and what inferences the thresholds will bear, not the existence of the thresholds. Israel’s 2024 submission to the United Nations makes the adjacent economic argument, setting its reported aid volumes against market activity inside Gaza and stating that its 272,000 tons of food at the six-month mark exceeded World Food Programme requirement figures by more than double.

COGAT’s July 2026 report carries the price-based version of the same argument for the ceasefire period, reporting on its own count an approximately 72% decline in the Gaza food consumer price index between September 2025 and May 2026. The report does not identify the source of the price data it uses, so the figure travels as COGAT’s reported number without a stated collection method.

Where the two sides of this disagreement actually diverge is narrower than the public framing suggests. The classifications and the Israeli analyses are not measuring the same object: one measures household consumption and malnutrition against thresholds, the other measures declared cargo, market prices and requirement benchmarks. The Institute for National Security Studies challenges the reliability of the first; the Israeli submissions offer the second. Neither Israeli publication reports a count of denied or delayed consignments, and neither classification reports declared tonnage, so no published figure on either side directly answers the other. That is the state of the record, and it is why the argument has run for two years on parallel numbers rather than converging on one.

Which periods and areas do the findings cover?

No single dataset spans the war continuously. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification assessments are area-specific and period-specific, with the 2024 analysis concentrated on the northern governorates and the 2025 classification covering defined governorates and windows, while the organizational determinations by Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, Amnesty International and the UN Special Rapporteur describe the Strip as a whole.

The party counts are windowed in a different way again. Israel’s 2024 submission to the United Nations reports a cumulative war-to-date total. COGAT’s records tabulated by The Guardian cover March to June 2025. COGAT’s own July 2026 report covers 10 October 2025 to 7 June 2026. The Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs figure stops at 16 December 2023. Those four windows do not nest, do not share cargo definitions, and cannot be summed or differenced into a series.

Mortality is the sharpest absence. No official statistical series publishes a starvation-specific death count for Gaza. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported in 2025 that Gaza’s population stood at about 2.13 million at the end of 2025, a decrease of approximately 254,000 against pre-aggression population estimates, which the Bureau states is a decline of 10.6%, and it attributes that change to war-related deaths, missing persons, reduced births and forced out-migration together. That is a demographic net decline and not a casualty figure, and the Bureau does not decompose it by cause. The 70,942 deaths the same brief reports to the end of December 2025 are attributed to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, not measured by the Bureau, and carry no starvation subfigure.

So the two-year characterization draws on assessments of particular governorates in particular months, determinations written about the territory as a whole, and tonnage counts from four non-overlapping windows. The way the counts each body publishes for civilians in Gaza are constructed is the reason a reader can hold two sourced figures on this subject that never meet.

Methodology and limitations

This report measures the documentary record on a contested characterization: what has been determined, by whom, on what standard, and what each published figure counts. It draws on four source types, labelled at each use.

Treaty text: the Rome Statute of 1998, Article 8(2)(b)(xxv), quoted directly as the definition of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare.

Party records: Israel’s 2024 submission to the United Nations, the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs humanitarian-efforts publication of 16 December 2023, the Israel Defense Forces publication of 19 August 2025 and its human-shields materials, the Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France as at 14 September 2025, COGAT’s July 2026 ceasefire report, and the IDF Military Advocate General’s Corps as at 3 August 2024. Every figure from these is the reporting party’s own count of its own activity, published by a party to the events, not independently verified, and several are written as floors (“over,” “more than”) rather than exact totals. COGAT states its tonnages rest on self-declaration rather than weighing at the crossings. The Military Advocate General’s counts are of investigations opened, not of findings or convictions, and are a function of the stated threshold quoted in the body.

Official statistics: the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics brief for the end of 2025, whose 254,000 figure is a demographic net decline attributed to multiple causes and is not a casualty count; its 70,942 deaths figure is attributed by the Bureau to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Named estimates and analyses: the 62,413 figure of 99 American healthcare professionals in 2024, an appendix estimate attached to an open letter, and the Institute for National Security Studies analysis of 2024, a research-institute publication that is not peer-reviewed.

Determinations by monitoring and advocacy organizations, UN mandate-holders and the International Criminal Court, and famine classifications by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification and the UN Famine Review Committee, are named and dated in the text as each body’s own conclusion on its own published standard. Where online activity, aid volumes and assessment outcomes move together in time, that co-occurrence is reported as coincidence in time between separately produced series; no causal relationship is measured here. Two quantities a reader may expect do not exist in the published record: a rate of aid consignments denied against consignments requested, and a starvation-specific mortality count from any statistical agency.

Conclusion

So does the record establish a deliberate campaign of starvation in Gaza? On the question as the words are usually meant, four bodies have said yes in dated publications between December 2023 and 2025, each on a standard it set itself, and one court has gone as far as “reasonable grounds to believe” on an arrest warrant and no further.

The rest of the record is a set of parallel quantities that never touch. The party administering the crossings reports more than 740,000 tons of food and water to its 2024 submission, 56,000 tonnes across March to June 2025 in the records tabulated from COGAT, and 1,778,363 metric tons across the ceasefire months, all self-declared and none weighed. Its own military legal system opened 74 investigations, none of them categorised as concerning food or relief, under a threshold that holds civilian harm in most cases insufficient to raise a suspicion of crime. The classifications tightened in 2024, were not confirmed by the Famine Review Committee that June, and reported two of three thresholds in 2025. The single large mortality figure in circulation, 62,413, is an estimate appended to a letter, and no statistical agency publishes a starvation death count at all. The determinations describe the Strip; the classifications describe governorates and months; the tonnage figures describe four windows that do not nest.

A characterization built to be repeated does not carry any of that with it. Stripped of its window, its area and its evidentiary standard, “deliberate starvation” travels as a settled property of a people rather than a contested finding about a government’s conduct in named months, and the shortened version is the one that reaches a comment thread. Whether the compressed form becomes one of the inputs that feeds older accusations about Jews and food, about who withholds and who is withheld from, is a question the volume of its circulation now makes worth measuring, and it is measurable in a way the intent behind a crossing closure is not.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the treaty mean by “objects indispensable to survival”?

The Rome Statute of 1998 does not enumerate them in Article 8(2)(b)(xxv); it names the deprivation and adds “wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions” as one listed means. The Geneva Conventions supply the relief-supply reference, which is why any determination under this article turns on both the deprivation and the impeding of relief, not on hunger outcomes alone.

How does a famine classification differ from a legal finding of starvation?

A famine classification measures outcomes against fixed thresholds for food consumption, acute malnutrition and mortality; the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification reported in 2025 that two of the three had been reached in Gaza. The treaty offence requires intention and a means of warfare, so a threshold reached is not, by itself, an element of the offence, and the UN Famine Review Committee’s June 2024 statement shows the classification can move while the legal question stands still.

Which Israeli bodies publish aid-entry data?

Four: the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (over 70,000 tons as at 16 December 2023), the Israel Defense Forces (over 1.9 million tons as at 19 August 2025), the Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France (more than 106,000 trucks as at 14 September 2025), and COGAT (1,778,363 metric tons of food from 10 October 2025 to 7 June 2026). Each figure is the publishing body’s own count.

Why can these tonnage counts not be added together?

They cover four windows that do not nest, and they count different cargo: aid in general in two cases, food alone or food and water in others. COGAT also states that its tonnages come from self-declaration by humanitarian organizations and private providers rather than from weighing at the crossings, so the totals are declared weight, not measured weight.

How does Israel’s military legal system decide what to investigate?

The IDF Military Advocate General’s Corps states that 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.” That threshold produced 74 criminal investigations opened as at 3 August 2024 out of over 1,000 incidents referred for factual assessment, which is why the two counts differ by an order of magnitude.

Does any official series count starvation deaths in Gaza?

No. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported a net population decline of approximately 254,000 for Gaza at the end of 2025, attributing it jointly to war-related deaths, missing persons, reduced births and forced out-migration without decomposing it by cause, and its 70,942 deaths figure is attributed to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The 62,413 figure that circulates is a 2024 estimate by 99 American healthcare professionals, appended to an open letter.

Sources

• COGAT (The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories), 2026. Humanitarian Situation Report During the Ceasefire. gaza-aid-data.gov.il. Official record (Israeli Ministry of Defense unit, self-reported).
• The Guardian, 2025. The mathematics of starvation: how Israel caused a famine in Gaza. theguardian.com. Press analysis relaying COGAT records.
• Institute for National Security Studies, 2024. The Misleading Reports of the UN Over Famine in Gaza. inss.org.il. Research institute publication, not peer-reviewed.
• Israel Defense Forces, 2025. Clearing Up the Misconceptions: Everything You Need to Know About the Humanitarian Aid Situation in Gaza. idf.il. Official record (party’s own reported counts).
• Israel Defense Forces, undated. Hamas Use of Human Shields in Gaza, and evacuation-area publications. idf.il. Official record (a party’s stated position; no counts published).
• Israel Defense Forces, Military Advocate General’s Corps, 2024. Addressing Alleged Misconduct in the Context of the War in Gaza (published 24 February 2024, updated 3 August 2024). idf.il. Official record (party’s own reported counts).
• Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2023. Israel-Hamas Conflict 2023: Humanitarian Efforts. gov.il. Official record (party’s own reported counts).
• Ninety-nine American healthcare professionals, 2024. Estimate of likely deaths from starvation and its complications in Gaza to 30 September 2024, appendix to an open letter. Named estimate, not an official count.
• 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 (national statistical office).
• PBS NewsHour, 2025. Israel’s leader claims no one in Gaza is starving. pbs.org. Press report (cited for quoted statements).
• Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France, Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2025. Israel’s Objectives and Current Operation (updated 17 September 2025). embassies.gov.il. Official record (party’s own reported counts).
• Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998. Article 8(2)(b)(xxv). United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 2187. Treaty text, official record.
• State of Israel, 2024. Submission on humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip, UN document G.24-17359. Official record (a party’s own reported counts).