“The inhabitants of Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are traveling corpses.” These freezing remarks were reported on Wednesday July 23, 2025 by Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the United Nations Agency for Refugees (UNRWA), about the in progress in the Palestinian enclave.
While Gazani cannot leave their territory, agriculture is prevented by war and Israel prohibits fishing, all the food necessary for the survival of the population comes from outside. The British daily The Guardian demonstrates in an article that the current famine is well organized mathematically by Israel, since the latter blocks the supply when he knows exactly how much food is lacking in the population to survive.
The Israeli government has long known how to control the hunger of the Gazaouis. For decades, it has calculated food deliveries to exert pressure while avoiding famine. Already in 2006, a main advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister of the time, Ehud Olmert, admitted: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on the diet, but not to kill them of hunger.” Two years later, an Israeli court ordered the publication of documents detailing these macabre calculations, at the calorie.
COGAT, the Israeli agency which still controls the deliveries of aid to Gaza, had then calculated that the Palestinians needed an average of 2,279 calories per person per day, which could be provided by 1.836 kg of food. Today, humanitarian organizations are demanding an even more reduced minimum ration: 62,000 tonnes of dry food preserves to meet the essential needs of 2.1 million people each month, about 1 kg of food per person per day.
Famine’s “worst scenario”
While Gaza is sinking into famine this summer, Israeli officials successively denied the existence of massive famine and affirmed without evidence that Hamas was flying and stored aid or imputed hunger to the UN in distribution. However, the data compiled and published by the Israeli government itself clearly show that it hits Gaza: according to the Cogat archives, between March and June, Israel has only authorized entry into the territory of 56,000 tonnes of food, less than a quarter of the minimum needs of Gaza for this period.
Thus, even if each bag of UN flour had been collected and distributed, and the Gaza humanitarian foundation (GHF, a private organization founded by the governments of Donald Trump and Benyamin Netanyahu) had set up safe systems for fair distribution, famine was inevitable. THE “Worse scenario” Famine is currently taking place in Gaza, according to food security experts supported by the UN. Food deliveries are “Much lower than needs”in a context of “Drastic restrictions at the entrance to supplies”said the integrated Food Security classification frame (IPC) in a report citing Israeli figures on aid.
The famine examination committee, a group of independent experts integrated into the IPC, pointed out the humanitarian foundation of Gaza: “Our analysis of food packages provided by GHF shows that its distribution plan would cause massive famine, even if it was operational without the appalling levels of violence reported.” In March and April, the Gaza Strip was completely besieged and no food entered.
A few weeks of additional help during the ceasefire in January and February of this year had provided enough calories to get Gaza out of the edge of the famine, according to UN data. However, in May, only a tiny part of the food has returned and in quantities which only served to slow down the descent from Gaza to famine, but not to stop it.