British hunger experiments, historical blueprint      

In 2006, when Hamas won the Palestinian election, Israel and the Middle East quartet—US, Russia, the UN and EU—launched economic sanctions against the Palestinians. The blockade was the result of Israel’s deliberate attempt to push the Palestinian economy in Gaza “to the brink of collapse,” according to a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

Off the record, Israeli officials repeatedly told American diplomats that as part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza, “they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.” With the inception of its blockade in 2007, the Israeli government estimated how many daily calories were needed to prevent or to cause malnutrition in Gaza.

The average daily calorie intake critical to survival is estimated at 2,100 kilocalories (kcal) per day. The Israeli ‘Red Line’ document used a higher calculation of 2,279 calories per person, taking into account the presumed domestic food production in Gaza. Such calculations have a long and dark history in colonial settler societies.

After an intense drought and crop failure in the Deccan Plateau in 1876, the Great Southern Indian Famine lasted for two nightmarish years, spreading northward. 

At the time, the British Famine Commissioner Sir Richard Temple implemented human experiments, with “strapping fine fellows” starved until they resembled “little more than animated skeletons … utterly unfit for any work.” 

To maximise British revenues, Temple sought to determine the minimum amount of food for survival, which he projected at around 1,627 kcal in Madras in 1877.

Yet, the excess mortality related to the famine has been estimated at up to 8 million.

The 2008-2009 Soah in Gaza

In Gaza, Israel’s intent was to keep the economy “on the brink of collapse” while avoiding a humanitarian crisis. 

The Netanyahu cabinet sought to put the Palestinians “on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” 

During the 2008–2009 Israeli War on Gaza, the enclave was subjected to a “Shoah” (Hebrew for Holocaust), as Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilnai admitted.

The Israelis hoped this would turn Palestinians in Gaza against Hamas. The idea was to “send Gaza decades into the past,” said then commanding general Yoav Gallant, who 15 years later was targeted by an International Criminal Court warrant for alleged responsibility “for the war crimes of starvation as a method of warfare and of intentionally directing an attack against the civilian population; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”

In May 2018, the UN Security Council (UNSC) adopted unanimously resolution 2417 condemning the starving of civilians as a method of warfare and the unlawful denial of humanitarian access to civilian populations. 

Yet, in the course of the Gaza War, most tenets of UNSC Resolution 2417 have been violated, setting the stage for Israel’s genocidal atrocities in Gaza and for the complicity of the US-led West in these massacres.

From Nazi mass starvation to Israeli generals' plan    

In historical review, the Israeli total siege of the densely inhabited Gaza and its 2.3 million Palestinian refugees has not been unique. It has affinities with the siege of Leningrad and its 3.1 million people. 

Part of the Nazi Hungerplan by SS ideologue Herbert Backe, the original grand objective was to forcibly starve around 31 to 45 million Soviets and Eastern Europeans by capturing food stocks and redirecting them to German forces.

Along with American eugenics and white racism, it was the US treatment of Native Americans that inspired the hunger policies in Hitler’s Germany. 

The lethal power of hunger weaponisation had been taught to a generation of Germans in 1914–19, when the British imposed a blockade against Germany. 

It aspired to obstruct Germany’s ability to import goods and thus to starve the German people and its military into submission.

In Gaza, the original Israeli ‘Generals’ Plan’, premised on the blocking of food supplies and epidemics, could not be carried out in full due to international opposition. 

But even its partial execution drove the enclave to the risk of famine already in October 2024, with top UN officials describing the situation in northern Gaza as “apocalyptic” because everyone there was “at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence”.

Dark parallels   

In a strongly worded letter, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave Israel an ultimatum of 30 days to ensure more aid trucks reached Gaza daily. Israel missed the US deadline in early November, according to the UN. Yet, the (then) Biden administration did nothing, while Blinken looked the other way.

A comprehensive study of food availability in Gaza shows that between October 2023 and April 2024, food trucks entering Gaza remained below pre-war levels. But how serious was the situation in Gaza relative to its precedents?

In his classic Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), Raphael Lemkin, the pioneer scholar of mass atrocities and the father of Genocide Convention, warned that “the Jewish population in the occupied countries is undergoing a process of liquidation (1) by debilitation and starvation, because the Jewish food rations are kept at an especially low level; and (2) by massacres in the ghettos.”

Lemkin bolstered his case with data from a 1943 US report, which showed how Jews got only a tenth of the normal calorie intake – about the same portion as many Palestinians in Gaza eight decades later.

Prelude to ethnic cleansing and genocide

Set in comparative historical context, the weaponisation of mass starvation has long been associated with imperial and colonial activities, setting the stage for genocidal atrocities. 

In this view, even the Nazi concentration camps can be traced to genocidal atrocities in colonial concentration camps, such as the British camps during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) followed by the Herero and Namaqua genocide (1904–1908) under the German Empire.

From the British Empire in India to German South West Africa (now Namibia), famine and starvation have served as a prelude to the final genocide, as Lemkin stressed: “The most direct and drastic of the techniques of genocide is simply murder. It may be the slow and scientific murder by mass starvation or the swift but no less scientific murder by mass extermination in gas chambers, wholesale executions or exposure to disease and exhaustion.”

Historically, mass starvation and genocides entered a new stage in the Nazi era, thanks to industrial atrocities, greater efficiencies in assembly-line mass murder and scientific innovation. 

In a surreal manner, concentration camps and mass starvation went hand in hand with modernity in the West. One (very rough) way of comparing such efforts across time and place is the calorie count.

Calorie intake from concentration camps to Gaza       

The Nazi siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) from fall 1941 to January 1944 was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history. 

When German armies prevented food supplies from reaching the city, half of the city’s population of 2.4 million died, mainly as a result of starvation. During the fatal ‘Hunger Winter’ period, the average daily ration was barely 300 calories.

An even lower official calorie count was documented in the Warsaw Ghetto hunger study in 1942. Determined to starve the ghetto in just months, the Nazis only permitted a daily intake of 180 calories per prisoner, withholding vaccines and medicine necessary to prevent the spread of disease in the densely-inhabited ghetto. 

Hence, the thriving black market, which supplied 80 percent of the ghetto’s food and a network of 250 soup kitchens. Whatever the ultimate daily intake, it paved the way from starvation to death. 

Weaponisation of starvation is often associated with ethnic cleansing, as Lemkin noted, “after removal of the population and the colonisation of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.”

What about Gaza? Measured in terms of total food deliveries into the enclave since October 2023, the calorie intake was about 860 kcal, a third less than in the Nazi camps over eight decades ago.

As the German invasion of the Soviet Union failed and the tide of World War II shifted, the Nazi camps deteriorated, with the daily intake shrinking to 700 kcal in 1944. 

That’s almost three times the intake of 245 kcal in northern Gaza in the first half of the year 2024, when the New York Post famously headlined that there was no famine in Gaza. 

(This excerpt is from Dr. Dan Steinbock’s latest book,The Obliteration Doctrine and provided exclusively to TRT World.)