Shameela Islam-ZulfiqarWhat we are witnessing today in Gaza is not the tragic by-product of war. It is a strategy of deprivation and control, with children and mothers paying the ultimate price.
I was last in Gaza in 2012, working as a medical doctor and humanitarian aid worker just days after what had been one of its most devastating escalations at the time. As a doctor, I saw not just the symptoms, but the cause. As a humanitarian, I saw the structures enabling this cruelty. And today, as a mother, I see on our screens the unbearable injustice of watching a child cry from hunger, with no relief in sight.
More than a decade ago, civilian buildings were targeted by Israeli forces, while my colleagues and I treated survivors inside Al Shifa hospital—their bodies broken by the war machinery then available.
But today the situation is exponentially worse; vast swathes of Gaza reduced to rubble, whole neighbourhoods wiped off the map. The damage to human bodies is unimaginable, with some completely disintegrated, vanished without a trace through the experimental targeting with American-made bombs designed to erase.
This is not an escalation, but systematic genocide. The scale of destruction, the targeting of every facet of civilian life, the starvation and siege; it is the obliteration of a people in real time. What I saw then was a tragedy; what we see now is the cold, calculated erasure of an entire nation.
As of August 11, 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry reports that more than 61,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023, including 18,592 children and 9,782 women. At least 145,870 people have been wounded. Starvation is now a leading cause of child deaths — with 100 children already dead from hunger and related complications, and hundreds more in the final stages of organ failure.
Since the imposition of a near-total blockade by Israeli authorities on March 2, 2025, Gaza’s civilian population (more than two million people, half of them children) has been subjected to the systematic denial of food, fuel, water, electricity, and medical supplies.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) reports that 470,000 Palestinians face catastrophic hunger, the most severe classification on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) scale.
In just three months, rates of acute child malnutrition have almost doubled, rising from 5.5 percent in March to 10.2 percent in June, affecting nearly 6,000 children last month alone.
The Gaza Health Ministry confirms that at least 70 people, the majority of them children, have already died from starvation-related complications. In the past 72 hours alone, children have died for lack of formula, intravenous fluids, and access to basic foodstuffs. Hundreds more are on the brink of irreversible organ failure due to prolonged hunger.
Engineered famine
This is not a natural disaster or an unintentional humanitarian failure. Food insecurity is being weaponised. Withholding food is the weapon. Starvation is the end goal.
The deliberate denial of access to food, medicine, and humanitarian relief constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law. In May 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued binding provisional measures ordering the unimpeded provision of aid into Gaza. Orders that remain unmet.
Legal scholars, humanitarian leaders, and UN officials have called for urgent action to halt what they increasingly describe as crimes of intent. Whether or not the legal definition of genocide is ultimately upheld, the scale of suffering is undeniable, and so is the duty to act.
A growing number of legal scholars, humanitarian experts, and even Israeli human rights organisations have labelled the situation in Gaza as genocidal.
B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights watchdog, has accused the Israeli government of pursuing a policy of “erasing Gaza” through indiscriminate bombardment, siege, and mass displacement.
Prominent genocide scholars, including Raz Segal and Martin Shaw, have publicly stated that Israel’s actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide under international law.
These warnings are not made lightly; they reflect the scale, severity, and systemic nature of the violence inflicted on a trapped civilian population. The mere fact that such terminology is being invoked by respected voices, including from within Israel itself, should shock the conscience of the international community into immediate action.
We know the cause, and we know the cure
In my humanitarian work, I have treated cholera in Pakistan, patched trauma wounds in Syria, and comforted mothers who had lost everything. But Gaza's suffering today is of a different magnitude, prolonged, systematic, and with impunity.
Our teams in Gaza describe exhaustion etched onto every face. They report families surviving on animal feed, grass, and raw herbs, rationing stale bread between ten people. Mothers go without meals for days so their children might eat. Some infants, unable to be breastfed due to maternal malnutrition, have perished for lack of formula.
Medical staff themselves are gaunt and injured, carrying the dual burden of caregiving and survival. Hospitals, where they function at all, are barely able to keep lights on, let alone treat trauma or acute malnutrition.
This is not just about hunger; this is a total societal collapse and the industrial-scale removal of human rights.
The cost of basic goods in Gaza has soared: flour and cooking oil up 1,400 percent, with bakeries closed for lack of fuel.
Food convoys wait at the border, but entry remains sporadic and insufficient. UN and NGO aid trucks are often blocked, looted, or hit in transit by Israeli forces. Aid warehouses have been destroyed. Health and nutrition services are being suffocated.
This is engineered disappearance. It is the slow erasure of a civilian population through hunger, disease, and despair.
International humanitarian law is unambiguous: the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is a war crime. And yet, the siege continues, day by day, violation by violation, dead child by dead child.
At Action For Humanity, we are desperately calling for:
Immediate ceasefire to allow safe, full-scale humanitarian access.
Guaranteed protection of aid convoys, medical facilities, and personnel under international law.
Reopening of all border crossings for unrestricted food, water, fuel, and medical supply entry.
Scaled-up maternal and child nutrition funding, focused on emergency feeding, formula distribution, and mobile health units.
International accountability mechanisms to investigate and prevent starvation-based warfare.
This famine is not theoretical. It is already killing. It is already scarring an entire generation of Palestinian children, many of whom will never fully recover physically, emotionally, or developmentally.We cannot continue to debate language while people starve. Whether labelled war crime or atrocity, the outcome is the same: avoidable suffering, measurable in funerals and empty plates.
The trucks are waiting. The grain is available. The solutions are known. What is missing is political will.
We must act now. Not only to save lives, but to salvage our shared humanity.
