In Gaza, the ongoing weaponized starvation, first planned by Israel almost two decades ago, plays a key role in the ethnic cleansing and the genocidal atrocities. In brutality, they are at par with Imperial Britain’s hunger experiments in India and the Nazi concentration camps, as Dr Steinbock shows in The Obliteration Doctrine.
In early June, a brief by the IPC, the global food-security watchdog, warned that by the summer all 2.1 million Gazans would face high levels of acute food insecurity, with half a million people suffering from catastrophic hunger and more than 1.1 million hovering amid food emergency.
Only a week ago, concerned international media reported that starvation is now killing what Israeli bombs have not.
Yet, as I show in my new book, The Obliteration Doctrine, this hunger inferno was first tested almost two decades ago and then implemented by Israel in Gaza toward the end of 2023. It is now at par with the famines induced by Imperial Britain’s human famine experiments in India in the late 19th century and Nazi concentration camps in the 1940s.
British hunger experiments, historical blueprint
In 2006 when Hamas won the Palestinian election, Israel and the Middle East Quartet—U.S., Russia, the UN and EU—launched economic sanctions against the Palestinians. The blockade was the result of Israel’s deliberate attempt to push the Gazan economy “to the brink of collapse,” according to a U.S. 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 maximize British revenues, Temple sought to determine the minimum amount of food for survival, which he projected at around 1,627 kcal in Madras 1877.
Yet, the excess mortality related to the famine has been estimated at up to 8 million.
British Hunger Games in 1876-78
Famine stricken people during the famine of 1876–78 in Bangalore
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WWHooperFamine1876-78GroupOfEmaciaedMenandOneWoman.jpg
The 2008-2009 Shoah 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 Gaza War, the Strip was subjected to a “Shoah” (Hebrew for Holocaust), as Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai admitted.
The Israelis hoped this would turn Gazans 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 U.S.-led West in these massacres.
From SS’s 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.
The Siege of Leningrad
A victim of starvation in besieged Leningrad suffering from muscle atrophy in 1941
Source: Wikipedia
Along with American eugenics and white racism, it was US treatment of Native Americans that inspired the hunger policies in Hitler’s Germany. The lethal power of hunger weaponization 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 Strip to 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 of “racial feeding”
In a strongly worded letter, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken gave Israel an ultimatum of 30 days to ensure more aid trucks reached Gaza daily. Israel missed the U.S. deadline in early November, according to the UN. Yet, the 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.
Racial Feeding in Nazi-Occupied Europe
SOURCE: Starvation Over Europe (Made in Germany), p. 47.
Prelude to ethnic cleansing and genocide
Set in comparative historical context, the weaponization of mass starvation has long been associated with imperial and colonial activities, setting the stage to 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.
Daily Calorie Intake in Extreme Situations: Selected Examples
Source: FAO (UN, 2023) and other sources; Gaza estimates from Oxfam
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.
Starvation from Warsaw Ghetto to Gaza
A photo documenting clinical research on hunger performed by a group of Jewish doctors in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942
Death of the 10-year old Yazan al-Kafarneh, a Plaestinian boy who died from malnourishment on March 4, 2024
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Yazan_al-Kafarneh#/media/File:Death_of_Yazan_al-Kafarneh.jpg
Source: Wikimedia
Weaponization of starvation is often associated with ethnic cleansing, as Lemkin noted, “after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.”
What about Gaza? Measured in terms of total food deliveries into the Strip 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.
The author of The Obliteration Doctrine and The Fall of Israel, Dr Steinbock is an internationally recognized visionary of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net
The original excerpt was published by TRT WORLD on July 21, 2025
BOX
The Obliteration Doctrine by Dr Dan Steinbock
The book has a dual focus. It centers on the Israeli military doctrine and the complicity of the Western powers, which led to the devastation of Gaza, and which was enabled by the West’s long failure of genocide prevention. The foreword is by Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s former PM. The endorsers include Ahmet Davutoğlu, former Prime Minister of Türkiye; Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece; professor William Schabas, perhaps the leading scholar of genocide, and many other leading experts.
For The Obliteration Doctrine: Genocide Prevention, Israel, Gaza, and the West (Clarity Press), click here For The Fall of Israel, click here
