It is Time for a Humanitarian Pause to Prevent the Coming Famine in Gaza

Supporters and critics of Israel should be able to agree on stopping the fighting at least temporarily to avoid this catastrophe.

On Thursday, the New York Times reported that “[t]he number of people facing possible starvation in the Gaza Strip in the coming weeks is the largest share of a population at risk of famine identified anywhere since a United Nations-affiliated panel created the current global food-insecurity assessment 20 years ago.” The story went on to say that it has been “generations” since the world had experienced “this level of food deprivation in warfare.” A separate article reported that UNICEF estimates that 7,000-8,000 children are “at risk of immediate death without treatment” and noted that a young child can move from “being reasonably OK” to life-threatening “acute-malnutrition” in a matter of days without food.

Preventing large scale starvation of Gazan children ought to be a cause that Americans can unify behind, no matter their view of Israel’s response to the Hamas mass terrorist attack on October 7. Letting people starve to death unnecessarily is immoral under any system of ethics. And the prospect of large-scale deaths emanating from the civilian population of Gaza can only reflect poorly on Israel and its handling of this entire horrid episode. It would also add to the growing sentiment that Israel is intentionally trying to force emigration from Gaza – what Palestinians would call a second Nakba – by creating such a large scale humanitarian crisis that Egypt is forced to accept Gazans as refugees. A humanitarian pause in the fighting is urgently needed to get emergency food assistance to those in desperate need.

Responsibility for this calamity rests with multiple parties in the region: Hamas and its sponsors – Iran and Qatar – as well as Israel. 

Qatar and Iran have provided billions in aid to Hamas in recent years. As Tom Friedman has pointed out, instead of requiring these massive infusions of money to be used for improved health care, transportation infrastructure, and investments that would spur economic growth and resiliency to disasters, Qatar and Iran allowed their funds to be used to create a terrorist infrastructure inside Gaza, including a 300-mile tunnel network underneath Gaza’s schools, hospitals, and housing. These tunnels were used to launch the October 7 attack and Hamas is now using them to hide armaments and its fighters from Israel, giving Israel a legal basis under the laws of war to target the civilian infrastructure that sits atop them. So, if we want to understand why Gazans are now starving, we can look first to Hamas. It failed to build a society that could properly support its civilian population, launched a mass terrorist attack, and now cowardly and illegally hides behind civilians in the provoked war with Israel.  

Israel is also deeply responsible for this humanitarian mega-crisis. Israel’s siege of Gaza, now spanning its fourth month, initially shut off all fuel, water, medicine, and food from entering the area. The siege wiped out the entire commercial sector and made almost two million people totally dependent on the meager international humanitarian assistance that Israel has allowed to cross the border and be distributed. Then, instead of mounting a surgical counteroffensive against Hamas’s leadership and the core military capabilities that enabled October 7 to transpire, Israel set the impossible goals of annihilating Hamas as an organization and destroying the entire tunnel network. Israel’s aerial bombardment of Gaza aimed at weapons caches, headquarters bunkers, and fighters in the tunnels, but by the end of 2023 had “destroyed nearly 70% of Gaza’s 439,00 homes.”  

It is clear to me that Israel is not taking its responsibility for the civilian population of Gaza as an occupying power seriously. When I read Israel’s official responses to allegations that it is mismanaging the humanitarian crisis, the verbiage has the feel that Israel has delegated this issue to its third-level Israel Defense Force (IDF) bureaucrats, while the articulate and highly skilled within the IDF are focused entirely on the war effort against Hamas. For every problem that is identified with the flow of food and other forms of aid, Israel’s C-Team spokesperson conveniently blames each on the inefficiency of the United Nations. This is the case even though Israel is conducting the inspections and Israel makes the final call on which trucks cross and which do not. One would think that if Israel dedicated its best captains of industry and high technology to creating an efficient, secure supply-chain to transport needed food and medicines into Gaza, it could do so with no difficulty. Indeed, two U.S. senators who observed operations at the border (both of whom support military action against Hamas) appear entirely frustrated with the arbitrary and inefficient way that Israel, not the U.N., is handling this life and death issue. They too have called for a humanitarian pause in the fighting to get more food and essential supplies into Gaza.

And then, one also learns from the Times article, that the entire inspection operation closes for one and a half days each week for observance of Shabbat. I am no Talmudic scholar, but one would think that providing food for weak and starving children would qualify for an exemption from the ban on “work” during the sabbath. I have also observed no “time off” in the bombings or the fighting in Gaza for sabbath observance; it seems only to apply to the provision of life-saving humanitarian relief.

The United States ought to sponsor a U.N. Security Council resolution for a humanitarian pause in the fighting over Israeli objections. I have no doubt that addressing the flow of humanitarian aid has been raised over and over again by Secretary Blinken, who must be extremely frustrated that Israel can’t seem to be bothered to get this crucially important part of the equation right. But at this stage, the United States needs to step forward because Israel’s failure to take effective steps to mitigate the impact of its military campaign on tens of thousands of children is having collateral damage on the United States’ image throughout the world. This erosion of U.S. soft power will only get exponentially worse when photos of starving Gazan children start circulating around the globe when there are trucks full of food just miles away on the other side of the border crossings. Enough is enough.   

Supporters of Israel who want it to emerge from this episode more secure rather than weaker should care about this issue, as Israel is going to pay a heavy price for its indifference towards human suffering in Gaza. The sense spreading around the globe that Israel does not care about excruciating deaths, hunger, and spread of disease among the Gazan population will only build the global anti-Israel movement that sees the war as an act of “genocide” and those who believe Israel is using this war as a means to rid the Gaza Strip of Gazan people. These are global attitudes that, if given the fuel to spread even more rapidly than they have, will burden Israel and the concept of Zionism for many decades to come.   

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I am hesitant to suggest to Perilous Times readers courses of action to take to address the issues I write about. But I will share an email I have written today to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield:

Dear Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield:

I am writing to recommend that the United States advocate for a Security Council resolution for an immediate humanitarian pause to allow more food to enter the Gaza Strip to stave off what many UN experts characterize as "the worst food deprivation in warfare" to take place in generations.  I write as an American Jew that supports Israel's right to take military action to effectively address the threat it faces from Hamas. But I do not support the breadth of military actions that Israel has taken to date and continues to take that inflict more harm on Gaza's civilians than is justified by the military advantage Israel gains against Hamas. Restricting the aid that flows over the border merely to prevent the slight benefits Hamas might gain from subverting this aid to its own use is both immoral and counterproductive. It is in both the United States' and Israel's interest to ensure that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza -- which is already quite dire -- does not spiral out of control and start causing massive deaths of children, the elderly and infirm.  I urge you to take whatever steps in your power to prevent this pending catastrophe.