Front Burner - When hunger is a weapon

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

Since October 7, access to food in Gaza – and its systematic restriction by Israel – has been the subject of international condemnation. The most recent incident is the killing of dozens of Palestinians attempting to obtain food from an aid distribution centre.Israeli settlers have blocked roads, and aid delivery. Aid convoys and workers have also been targeted with violence. And as of March, Israel established a full scale blockade on aid into the Gaza strip. Today a trickle has been allowed into the territory.International organizations have been warning of famine in Gaza for more than a year. Alex de Waal is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, and author of ‘Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.’ He joins the show for a discussion about starvation crimes, why the weaponization of food during wartime continues, and how famine has proven difficult to prosecute in court.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

At Desjardins Insurance, we know that when you're a building contractor, your company's foundation needs to be strong. That's why our agents go the extra mile to understand your business and provide tailored solutions for all its unique needs. You put your heart into your company, so we put our heart into making sure it's protected. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Dejardin.com slash business coverage. This is a CBC podcast. At the moment, the locals are quoting anything from 200 to possibly 100 injured people.

These are all gunshot wounds. And as you can see behind me, we've got all the bays are full and they're all gunshot wounds. It's absolute carnage here. What you're hearing is the sound of a British doctor, Victoria Rose, who is working at the Nasser Hospital in the Gaza Strip. She's reacting to an incident that has been described by Doctors Without Borders as a massacre. At the time of recording, at least 30 people are dead

after Israeli forces opened fire on people trying to get food from an aid distribution center in Southern Gaza on Sunday. It's part of a new Israeli-backed food program run by U.S. security contractors. Other videos from last week show hundreds of people contained in this fencing, with bowls in their hands, arms extended, waiting to be poured food. Since the early days of the war, Israel's restriction of food in Gaza has been the subject of international condemnation. Israeli settlers have blocked roads and aid convoys carrying food to refugee camps.

Aid distribution and workers have also been targeted with violence. In March, Israel blocked all aid into Gaza. Today, a trickle is allowed to get inside the territory. International organizations have been warning of man-made famine in the Gaza Strip for more than a year now. Alex Deval is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, and he is the author of books like Mass Starvation, The History and Future of Famine. He is one of the world's authorities on the issue of famine and wartime starvation crimes. And he joins me today to talk about the issue of manmade hunger, what that looks like in

Gaza through history, and what happens when people turn food into a weapon of war. Alex, thank you very much for joining me today. It's great to be with you. So nearly a decade ago now, you began to believe that we had moved beyond this question of famine and large-scale starvation crimes. You wrote this piece in The New York Times titled, Is the Era of Great Famines Over? And just before we get deeper into this episode, I wanted to know where

that optimism or belief in what the future was to hold came from. So I started working on the issue of famine as a scholar and a humanitarian practitioner back in the 1980s. And I was monitoring and being very closely engaged with the numbers of famines that were happening worldwide. And in the first decade of this century, after about 2000 or so, the number and the lethality of the famines that we have been seeing dwindled almost to zero. There were just a handful of outstanding cases. And it looked as though we were on track to eliminate famine completely from the world. And I was hopeful that this could be done in the coming few years. And the main reason why this could be done was that famine as a weapon of war was becoming less and less used and more and more stringently

outlawed by international practice and international law. And so by 2016, actually, when I began to write my book, Mass Starvation, it was going to be called The History of Famine. Then as I was writing it, famine made a comeback and I had to add in some less pessimistic projections into the future. When you say famine made a comeback, can you just tell me what you're referring to there?

What are you thinking about there? So during the year 2016, the UN began to warn of likely famines in several locations around the world. In northern Nigeria, where there was a vicious war going on between the jihadist group Boko Haram and the Nigerian government. Intense fighting against the Boko Haram insurgency has prevented farmers from growing and harvesting crops, sometimes for years in a row. It's also made it

difficult for humanitarian convoys carrying food and medicine to reach isolated communities. In South Sudan which was in the depths of civil war, for months all we have been eating are leaves and palm fruits. Over half the population here is at risk of starvation. Such alarming levels of hunger are new to northern Bahar al-Ghazal, a relatively stable region of South Sudan. In Somalia where there was a collapsed state and there was a very severe drought.

The drought compounds an already challenging humanitarian situation in the area and has brought the estimated number of people who face acute food security crisis and emergency in Somaliland and Puntland to 385,000. Another 1.3 million people are at risk of sleeping into acute food insecurity. And in Yemen, where a coalition led by Saudi Arabia was waging a war of hunger against the Houthi rebels in that country, but causing famine much more widely than just the targeted Houthis. In the villages of Yemen, it's the children who suffer most.

Wherever you go, you can see the human cost of this war. I think it might be helpful for us just to make clear or for me to ask you exactly what famine is. How is it measured? And I just, if you could provide some insight into what is meant by the word famine, how famine determinations are met, what threshold has to be met in order to declare a hunger crisis or a famine? So famine is basically mass starvation, an episode of extreme hunger where people are deprived of food. There may be food around, but people are prevented from getting it or it's too expensive for

them to buy in the market. And very often what we've seen in situations of historic famine is you then get epidemics of infectious disease on top of that, which are actually the major killers. Now, when I started my career in famine, there was no established mechanism or there was no threshold agreed for what was and what wasn't a famine. It was really who cried loudest or where the worst pictures of starving children could be located. But in the early 2000s, a group of nutritionists and food security experts got together and said, we need to be able

to target food much more effectively on an objective basis. And they established something called the integrated food security phase classification system, which is a real mouthful. It's called the IPC for short. And what they do is they integrate information about how hungry people are, where they're getting their food from or not getting their food from, rates of malnutrition among children, and whether there's been an increase in the death rate. And then they put this on a scale. And the worst point on the scale, phase five, they call famine, when 20% of a population in a given area has

complete lack of food, high rates of malnutrition, and elevated mortality. So that was agreed by a consensus of experts. But it has no standing in law. It's just a tool of convenience for the purposes of humanitarian aid donors and the like to ascertain how bad things are in particular places. Has anybody placed Gaza on that scale at the moment? So beginning a few weeks after the October 7th Hamas terrorist attacks and the Israeli response, this IPC system kicked in and they've made now five different assessments of the situation in Gaza. Each time what they found is very, very widespread levels of extreme food insecurity, high levels of hunger, high levels of malnutrition. They've not classified it as famine. And it seems to be that it's just

teetering on the edge of what they would call famine. But it may also be, as some Palestinians from Gaza say, that they're just not able to get the data, that the information, particularly about mortality among children, simply hasn't been collected. And therefore, because of that particular technical reason, Gaza hasn't crossed the threshold as they measure it. When people hear the word famine, they might think of like a natural disaster, something like a drought maybe, but you have written quote, almost all famines are principally caused by war and political repression carried out with disregard for human life. And

what do you think is missed when famine and starvation are presented as crimes of nature rather than crimes of man? So historically, of course, if we go back hundreds of years, when the annual harvest was the heartbeat of the economy, and if an agrarian society like the first settlers in New England missed two harvests in a row. Yes, they would go hungry. Yes, they might starve. And back in the 70s and 80s, there were serious hunger crises caused by drought. And for charities, it was always much more convenient if they're raising money to point to the weather as the culprit. It made a simpler story. It was easier for people to give.

But the sad reality has been that for 150 years, if not longer, most flamens are caused by a government policy, particularly communist governments were notorious for this, or by war, by colonialism, by the world wars, by the deliberate use of starvation as a weapon. And it's only, I think, fairly recently that that truth has begun to sink in. And if we continue to see famines as primarily a natural disaster, we simply treat them as

anomalies needing charity, not scandals needing political action. At Desjardins Insurance, we put the care in taking care of business. Your business, to be exact. Our agents take the time to understand your company so you get the right coverage at the right price. Whether you rent out your building, represent a condo corporation, or own a cleaning company, we make insurance easy to understand so you can focus on the big stuff,

like your small business. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at desjardins.com slash business coverage. We're all looking for great places to visit in Canada. One of my favorites is the Stratford Festival. The theater is truly of the highest caliber and there's so much selection. They have 11 large-scale shows on stage and trust me, whatever is on when you're there will be exceptional.

People always think Shakespeare when they think of Stratford, but it's so much more. Broadway musicals, family shows, classic comedy and drama. You have written really powerfully about what starvation and hunger can do to a person, how it subjects a person to a kind of humiliation and shame, how it turns the body against itself, how it forces people to make impossible decisions like which child to feed today, how victims and survivors are often looked at as second-class victims. You've talked about this sense of shame everywhere from Ireland to South Sudan, where many victims of hunger are not actually buried. And just could you tell me more about what it does to its victims and how it can live with a group of people for many generations. So in a very biological sense,

if an adult, a healthy adult is deprived of food completely, within 60 to 80 days, that person will waste away and the body will consume itself, starting with the reserves of fat and then the vital organs and the brain functions will shut down. And people actually go crazy. There's a sort of starvation madness that can take over people.

And with children, it's that much quicker. Of course, what we usually see is not total starvation like that. We see a more protracted version extending over months and made worse often by infectious disease and dehydration and lack of shelter. But this social aspect, this sort of societal torture is perhaps what is most underappreciated because because as you mentioned, in order for people to feed themselves and their families, they break social taboos, they scavenge in garbage, they eat things that they shouldn't, they're not allowed to eat, they deny the basic courtesy, reciprocity, generosity to relatives. They turn away starving children from the door. They turn a blind eye to food theft, to young women and girls selling their

bodies for sex. And these traumas, these humiliations, last for generations. So that after the great hunger in Ireland in the 1840s, it was more than a hundred years before public commemoration of that famine was possible in Ireland. People only spoke about it in whispers, silently, only spoke about it in whispers, silently, very quietly at home, and refused, didn't want to face what starvation had done to them and to their society. I wonder if now we could spend some more time talking about Gaza specifically. The images coming out of Gaza right now are horrifying. Videos as I mentioned in the intro of hundreds of Palestinians with these silver bowls in their hands clawing and reaching through fencing. Uh, thousands of people descending upon UN facilities, stocked full of unused aid.

People kind of climbing over one another, screaming, fighting over sacks of flour. They're really scenes of complete desperation. And just what is your reaction to the current state of food availability in Gaza and who is responsible for it? So Gaza is a very unique situation. It's a situation in which one belligerent power, in this case Israel, has complete control over the amount of food that goes into the Gaza Strip, into the territory. It also has complete control over water, over fuel, over healthcare, etc. And immediately after October 7th, it put a complete blockade. And then it began occasionally relaxing that blockade, allowing sufficient food in. On the grounds that Hamas is consuming the food and Hamas is actually preventing food from getting to the civilian population, an allegation that is not supported by any evidence that has been presented to the United Nations or indeed to the the U.S. government, but is nonetheless made.

Have you seen evidence that it is Hamas stealing the food? No, not at all. Not in this round. Listen, these people are desperate, and they see a World Food Program truck coming in, and they run for it. This doesn't have anything to do with Hamas or any kind of organized crime or anything. It has simply to do with theas or any kind of organized crime or anything.

It has simply to do with the fact these people are starving to death. Israel has insisted that it take control of food distribution entirely into its own hands. It doesn't want the UN, which it sees as not neutral, as not partisan. The UN strongly refutes this, but Israel insists it wants complete control of this mechanism. It has put it in the hands of a new mechanism called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is run on the ground by private military contractors and protected by Israeli troops. And this is a form of control of food rations of a degree of intensity of granularity that I don't think we've ever seen before. Perhaps the only example would be something like the British operation starvation in Malaysia. And the stated public logic for Israel is first of all it will deny food to Hamas,

but also that it will provide enough food for Gaza to stop descending into famine. From day one, or the early days of the war, we decided on a policy. We are going after Hamas. We're not going after the civilian population, both in allowing it to leave the theaters of combat, but also by supplying them with essential requirements. Food, water, medicine. That's what international law and common sense requires. So we did. Now, humanitarian aid professionals concur that, let's put aside the ethics and the legality of this, but they concur that it won't work. And it won't work for

a couple of reasons. First of all, there just isn't enough. There isn't enough food going in to feed everybody. And the people of Gaza have been subjected to so much deprivation, so much hunger, that the margin, the amount of food stores left, any scraps that might be available have basically disappeared. So people are now entirely dependent on what comes in. And what's coming in, even under the best case

with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, isn't enough. Now the UN's World Food Programme says that hoards of hungry people have broken into a food supply warehouse in central Gaza. Videos show chaotic scenes of people taking the supplies as shots were fired. The WFP says at least four people died in the incident and several were injured. It comes a day after a depot in Rafah run by the controversial US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was overrun by Palestinians desperate for food. Secondly, it's not targeting those who really need it. So it's not enough just to put in food. You also need specialized food stuffs and specialized care for those most malnourished children. They can't just eat regular pasta or canned tuna. They need specialized care.

And the humanitarian agencies provide it. These private military contractors can't provide that. They also can't provide clean water, the basic sanitation, the essential healthcare. But the other thing that's happening here is that the previous aid system, which was well-established, run by the UN and by well-established local Palestinian agencies like the Red Crescent and international ones had more than 400 distribution sites and was deeply embedded within the Palestinian society. So people knew what to expect. There was a social infrastructure for them having confidence in how this aid would work. Israel does not want to use that. It

wants to entirely bypass that and provide individualized rations based upon individualized screening. And what this means is that the ordinary people of Gaza who are desperately hungry simply have no confidence in this system. There's no way of them being assured that their regular sort of aid distribution is going to be there. And so of course they crowd around, they are desperate. All they know is that there are some supplies there in the hands of unfamiliar people and they want to get it. And of course then, law and order breaks down.

They said they would send aid to us. We went to receive the aid and we were surprised by the Israeli army killing us after bringing us to, as it were, a safe place. This is surveillance footage of the aid centre itself, apparently at dawn this morning. It shows Palestinians running across the sand to collect food. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is backed by America and Israel, says it's peaceful and that reports of dead and injured are fabricated by Hamas. And whether deliberately or because you have overwhelmed

and panicked and underprepared military contractors or troops on the ground who don't know what to do, you have these terrible crimes and tragedies of people getting shot. I should just ask you the question I think many people probably have right now listening to you. Do you believe Israel to be using food as a weapon of war? Are these war crimes?

Israel is using food and using hunger, surpassing what it is legitimately allowed to do so in pursuit of its political and military objectives. I do believe Israel is breaking international law in the way that it's using food. Another facet of this is what appears to be Israel's targeting of aid workers. So earlier this year, the head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs wrote that statements by Israeli authorities vilify our aid workers, even as the military attacks them. Community volunteers who accompany our convoys are being

targeted. Israel has also led a campaign against UNRWA, the organization most commonly associated with administering food to the region. UNRWA employs over 1,200 Hamas members, including terrorists who carried out the October 7th massacre. This isn't aid. It's direct financial support for terror. Last year, vehicles carrying staff of the NGO World Central Kitchen were fired on, killing seven aid workers. In the words of the World Central Kitchen, this was a targeted attack, a direct hit on the group's armored vehicle, incinerating everything and everyone inside. The UN says more than 330 aid workers have been killed in Gaza since the war began.

aid workers have been killed in Gaza since the war began. NGOS and aid workers abide by comprehensive systems when working in conflict zone systems they rely on all over the world for safety. But these systems don't appear to be or hadn't been holding up. And what role do you think violence plays in the broader effort to feed a starving population. So Israel will argue that humanitarian aid workers often fall as casualties in conflicts. Mama, I am a target. Unfortunately, in the last day, there was a tragic incident of an unintended strike

of our forces on innocent people in the Gaza Strip. This happens in war. We are checking this thoroughly. We are in touch with the governments and we will do everything for this not to happen again. As you say, there are established protocols for de-confliction, for communication, et cetera, between those aid agencies and the controlling militaries

to try and minimize that. And Israel has a very sophisticated communications and command and control system. What's very shocking is that the numbers of aid workers killed in the line of duty around the world, which has always been too high. In the last 18 months, well over half the entire number worldwide have been killed just in this one conflict, Gaza. Far more have been killed there than in the next worst countries like Sudan or South Sudan or Congo, far more than in Syria in the worst of those days. And the argument that they are collateral damage,

that these are errors, simply doesn't hold up when this is happening so persistently and when on each occasion or almost every occasion in which there is an investigation, it turns out that the agency in question was following the correct protocols. Or in the case of the Palestinian Red Crescent aid workers who were killed, it turns out actually they were killed in cold blood. That was a case earlier this year. The credibility of Israel's claims that these are unfortunate accidents or that these agencies are working with Hamas, they really don't stand up to scrutiny. I'd like to ask you about what you think the American role is here.

Your writing features anecdotes of US officials working essentially to obscure or ignore events on the ground. You write, for example, that senators like Bernie Sanders and Chris Van Hollen threatened to prohibit US assistance to Israel but were ultimately undercut by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, that there was this report on starvation in Gaza that was made public, then quickly deleted by USAID, as well as other instances

in which American officials publicly contradicted internal reports on hunger in Gaza. How would you characterize America's role in this? So under the Biden administration, America was very clearly on, on Israel's side, very hostile to Hamas and was giving Israel a great deal of latitude in pursuing its war aims using pretty much all means necessary. But the Biden administration was also very keen for the humanitarian situation in Gaza not to cross that threshold into famine. So on several occasions when its own senior aid officials or the UN's IPC warned that that threshold was being crossed or was at risk of being crossed, the US put a lot of pressure on Israel to allow in aid to lessen up the pressure. It's very hard to know what the strategy and position has been of the Trump administration since it took office. In the

first weeks, clearly, there was a ceasefire and a lot of humanitarian aid was going in. aid was going in. And more recently, since the ceasefire broke down, since the fighting resumed, since the blockade was put back in place, we've seen some statements, but it is not entirely clear whether the Trump administration has a policy of preventing Gaza starving in famine or not. That remains entirely opaque. Another way that we've seen countries defer the responsibility to deliver aid is through designations of terrorism. You've written about this in Ethiopia, where the government designated the most widely followed political party in Tigray, a terrorist organization. You've also written about this in Somalia, where the U S government's designation of Al-Shabaab as a terror group challenged aid organizations

working to provide food to the hungry. Much of the same is now true in Gaza with the terror designation of Hamas. And what role do you think these designations can have when talking about weaponizing food? – Governments over the years have always wanted to delegitimize insurgents by calling them bandits or terrorists and thereby to prohibit and criminalize providing them with assistance. And the U.S. Patriot Act passed shortly after 9-11 was a very powerful and actually very blunt tool that prevented, criminalized actually, any individual or agency, whether US or other, that provided any assistance material or otherwise willing or unwitting to a terrorist designated group. And that tool was used to cast a real sort

of chill over aid operations, notably in Somalia in 2011, preventing them from providing aid out of the fear, the suspicion that some of it might be taken by the terrorist group al-Shabaab and that contributed to a famine that was foreseen, that was well monitored and was unfolding. But aid agencies didn't dare cross that line until a famine had been declared when the Obama administration made what it called the humanitarian workaround saying, let's provide aid where there is a designated famine, even if some of this aid may fall into terrorist hands. We will obviously try and monitor it as scrupulously as we can.

And since that time, one of the fallouts of this has been that the UN and other international agencies are extremely scrupulous and careful in monitoring aid. And of course, that doesn't prevent all leakage. It doesn't prevent some manipulation, some theft, but the monitoring systems are by and large pretty good. And most of the aid professionals that I've spoken to think that they have stood up really well in Gaza, actually, that only very modest amounts of food aid going into another assistance going into Gaza have been stolen or hoarded or sold by Hamas. Some of them say that one of the impacts of the restrictions imposed by Israel

is that these monitoring systems actually can't function as well as they should be. Israeli restrictions actually are allowing more food to be looted, not particularly by Hamas, but mostly by the armed gangs that are now roaming and terrorizing the people there. When you were writing about northern Ethiopia's Tigray region, you said, quote, I have never witnessed in my professional career in my historical research such systematic, such ruthless, such cruel starvation, crimes perpetrated as those inflicted

on the people of Tigray. But despite this, Ethiopia's prime minister has said that there has not been a single death due to starvation. In Tigray, the country went so far as to host the UN-sponsored World Without Hunger conference last year. Israeli officials have produced similar denials of famine and widespread starvation. The museum dedicated to the siege of Leningrad was closed after the conclusion of the Second World War and a bid to suppress the story of what happened.

Similar denials were made during the siege of Srebrenica as well. What role do you think denialism generally plays during moments like this? I think denialism is absolutely key. And it was Stalin who, during the genocidal famine he inflicted on Ukrainians in the 1930s, the Holodomor said that infamous line, when one man dies of hunger, it's a tragedy. A million

deaths are a statistic. And consistently, those who are responsible for starvation, they know how emotive, how shocking, how the knowledge mass starvation is, especially how pictures of starving children move people to act. And so they always try and cover it up and deny it and play it down. The second one is that we have a policy of starvation. Did you hear that? You didn't? That's the current fad, the current lie. And it's absolutely critical that the journalists and others who document what is going on, who collect the data, are allowed to do their job. I know you might have already answered parts of this, but I think it would be helpful for

me to kind of ask this one to you straight. Some have compared Israel's siege on food in Gaza to the Allies' blockade on food in Nazi Germany, a systematic effort aimed at pushing the German public away from their Nazi leaders. You've written about starvation crimes in the US Civil War and the fact that the US blockade on Japan in 1945 is literally coden named Operation Starvation.

The fact that hunger has really always been a tool used by governments and militaries looking to control unruly or even insurrectionist populations. What is it about starving a perceived enemy or conditioning access to food on surrender that has made it a feature of war and conflict for so much of our history. Dr. Michael O'Brien Starvation is a very cheap way of inflicting misery and of achieving war goals such as weakening the enemy to the point of surrender. It's been the favored tool of Britain and the United States, and it's especially favored

when its impacts can be covered up, can be concealed. After World War II, there were some who thought that there would be, as part of the Geneva Conventions, as part of the raft of new international law associated with the UN. There were some who thought starvation as a war crime would be prohibited. But the British in particular were very keen to continue to be able to use hunger as a weapon.

And indeed, in Malaysia in the 1950s, they went so far as to call their counterinsurgency operations Operation Starvation. And it wasn't until 1970s that international humanitarian law, the Geneva Conventions, were revised to begin to outlaw it. And I think by the early 2000s, there was really an international consensus that this was unacceptable. And part of the reason for that was that international humanitarian organizations, especially the UN, the World Food Program, and others, were able to provide humanitarian aid in war zones in such a way that it was sufficiently monitored, sufficiently neutral

and impartial, that it didn't end up supporting war efforts. It was feeding civilians, but not becoming part of the overall war economy. Just on international law, you have written that the crime of starvation has not yet been tested in a court, so there is no case law. And you've also referred to it as a stagnant backwater of international criminal law. I think people listening might wonder, how can that be? How is it that killing a single person is considered a crime, but that the killing of many via intentional starvation is somehow

difficult to prosecute. It's an appalling historical reality that starvation was permitted in law from the the Lieber code, which was the code Abraham Lincoln had drawn up for the American Civil War and permitted starvation. The prosecutors at Nuremberg after World War Two wanted to prosecute, tried to prosecute a German commander for the siege of Leningrad, but the judges said regrettably it was not unlawful and he was acquitted of that charge. And because it hasn't been on the law books, there haven't been prosecutions. And it wasn't even outlawed in civil wars

in non-international armed conflicts until 2019, which meant that the international criminal tribunals for former Yugoslavia, for Rwanda, the International Criminal Court, looking at Darfur, for example, were not able to prosecute for starvation. And the charges that the prosecutor of the ICC has brought against Benjamin Netanyahu,

the Prime Minister of Israel, and his former defense minister, Yoav Galant, for the war crime of starvation, are the first case this is actually, first time this has actually happened in an international court. Alex Deval, I want to thank you very much for this. You are very welcome. Okay.

That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.