By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

What Gazans Want

In early March, as its cease-fire with Hamas began to unravel, Israel again turned to a tactic it had used earlier in the war in Gaza: imposing a total blockade on the territory, including a cutoff of all deliveries of food, medicine, fuel, and electricity. The aim, according to Israeli cabinet officials, was to make life unbearable for Gaza’s two million citizens to force Hamas to accept Israeli demands in talks on a cease-fire extension. On social media, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, echoing statements by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, defended the government’s decision to “completely halt” the flow of humanitarian aid, calling it a way to open the “gates of hell . . . as quickly and deadly as possible.” This was not an isolated remark; Smotrich had previously suggested that blocking aid to Gaza was justified even at the cost of mass civilian starvation. Seven weeks into the new siege, as the UN World Food Program announced that border closings had caused all of its food stocks in Gaza to run out, Moshe Saada, a Knesset member from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party, told Israel’s Channel 14 TV that that was the intention: “Yes, I will starve the residents of Gaza, yes, this is our obligation,” Saada said.

Amid a war in which tens of thousands of civilians have been killed by more direct means, Israel’s serial blockades of Gaza may at first appear a secondary issue. But the tactic - and the justifications Israeli officials have offered for using it - has become a major test for international law. This week, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is holding hearings on the issue, following a UN General Assembly request to investigate whether Israel violated the UN Charter by blocking UNRWA, the principal UN aid agency in Gaza. And in November, the International Criminal Court (ICC) already issued international arrest warrants not only for the leaders of Hamas but also for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In the case of Hamas, the ICC charges related to atrocities committed in the October 7, 2023, attack on Israeli civilians. At the heart of the charges against Netanyahu and Gallant, however, is a different, and rarely invoked crime: the ICC’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, accuses them of orchestrating a criminal starvation policy against Gaza’s civilian population.

In its classification of war crimes, the Rome Statute, the 1998 treaty that established the ICC, includes “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare,” a tactic that can involve “willfully impeding relief supplies.” By publicly declaring Israel’s intention to impose a total siege of Gaza and then enforcing measures that deprive Gazans of food and other goods that are indispensable to civilians’ survival, the ICC prosecutor alleges, Netanyahu and Gallant have committed the war crime of starvation. It is the first time in history that a major court has centered a war crimes prosecution on this particular charge.

As the war in Gaz has unfolded, the consequences of the blockades have been far-reaching. In October 2024, after a year of war during which aid shipments often slowed to a trickle, a UN-backed food assessment found that roughly four-fifths of Gaza’s 2.2 million population were facing “extreme hunger.” Now, as the Israeli military dramatically escalates its new ground offensive, fears are rising that the humanitarian crisis could again reach, or even exceed, those catastrophic levels. Already in early April, the World Food Program announced that all 25 of the bakeries it supports in Gaza, many of which had been vital for civilian survival during earlier phases of the war, had been forced to shut down because of a lack of flour and fuel. Since fuel and electricity are needed to run the desalination plants that provide much of Gaza’s drinking water, an estimated 91 percent of the population also faces water insecurity, aggravating the food shortages and reviving the specter of disease. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the people of Gaza are now entering the longest period without relief aid since hostilities began in October 2023. “Right now, it is probably the worst humanitarian situation ever seen throughout the war,” a spokesperson for OCHA said last week.

Formularbeginn

Formularende

Despite these plainly visible effects of Israeli policies, the ICC faces a steep uphill battle. For one thing, it has never attempted to prosecute the leader of a Western country. The arrest warrants have placed ICC member states, especially Israel’s European allies and Canada, in a precarious position. If Netanyahu—or Gallant—enters one of those countries, its authorities are legally required to detain him. (Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban flouted this requirement when he hosted Netanyahu in early April.) For its part, the United States has strongly opposed the case against the Israelis from the outset, and President Donald Trump has set out to destroy the ICC itself, withdrawing U.S. support for a war crimes prosecution of Russian President Vladimir Putin and authorizing sanctions on ICC officials in February that are aimed at making it extremely difficult for the court to operate. Fearing that its future could be in jeopardy, the court has rushed to pay staff salaries in advance and made an appeal to EU member states for emergency aid. Paradoxically, the very weapon the ICC tries to prosecute, economic coercion, is now being used against the court itself. “The court is facing an existential threat,” ICC’s president, Tomoko Akane, told the European Parliament in March.

Equally challenging, however, is the substance of the ICC case. Despite its long and devastating history, intentional starvation of a civilian population is notoriously difficult to prove, and belligerents that have used the tactic have rarely been held to account. Thus, the ICC’s actions highlight both the acute urgency of the mass hunger crisis in Gaza and the persistent challenges in prosecuting starvation as a crime. Notwithstanding these daunting legal obstacles, the ICC prosecutor’s move has drawn international attention to a particularly dangerous form of warfare against civilians, one that has until now gone too often under the radar. Whether or not the ICC case succeeds, the precedent it establishes could redraw the legal boundaries of war and force states to reckon with rules they once thought would never apply to them.

 

The West’s Favorite Weapon

Although millions of civilians died in the twentieth century as a result of siege and starvation strategies, the effort to treat starvation as a war crime is surprisingly recent. Unlike other war crimes codified in the aftermath of the two world wars, the use of starvation as a weapon of armed conflict was not formally prohibited in international law until 1977. Since then, despite the explicit ban, prosecutions of this crime have been exceedingly rare. Most post–World War II international criminal tribunals, including the one established in the early 1990s for wartime abuses in the former Yugoslavia, did not include forced starvation in their founding statutes, let alone seek to prosecute it.

One of the key reasons was that throughout the twentieth century, starvation blockades were integral to Western strategic thinking - and, as many statesmen saw it, to the maintenance of international order itself. During World War I, blockade planners in both Germany and the United Kingdom regarded civilian populations as the backbone of modern militaries: in a total war, they reasoned, cutting off food imports for enemy civilians was not only permissible but also perhaps necessary. Thus, beginning in 1914, the United Kingdom imposed a naval blockade on all the Central Powers that eventually resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Indeed, so terrifyingly effective was the tactic, known in German as the Hungerblockade, that both victors and vanquished viewed it as a war-winning weapon that had caused the societal collapse of Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1918.

In World War II, starvation campaigns became, if anything, even more important, and both the Allied and Axis powers explicitly acknowledged that their aim was to kill enemy civilians. As part of its all-out war against Japan, for example, the United States launched Operation Starvation, a submarine and air blockade cutting off food and raw materials. After the war, the Nazis were held accountable for civilian starvation actions at the Nuremberg tribunals, although such measures were subsumed under meta-crimes such as extermination. For the victorious Allied parties, there was no accountability at all.

The West’s strategic embrace of starvation lasted well beyond Hitler’s downfall in 1945, and discussion of the tactic was notably absent from much of the architecture of postwar international law. Neither the 1948 Genocide Convention nor the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, explicitly addressed the deliberate starvation of civilians. But it was the drafting of the Geneva Conventions that provides the clearest window into why starvation crimes were marginalized after World War II.

 

Blockader Rights and Wrongs

When state representatives met in Geneva in mid-1949 to draft conventions for protecting victims of war, many countries sought to enshrine stronger humanitarian safeguards for armed conflict. In particular, the International Committee of the Red Cross, along with many representatives from states that had been occupied during World War II, including the Soviet Union, pushed for guarantees of free passage for humanitarian aid and a prohibition on the destruction of objects essential to civilian survival. But the United States and the United Kingdom were adamant about preserving their ability to impose blockades and resisted any provisions that might limit their naval or air power. Envisioning possible future sieges against communist or anticolonial adversaries, they successfully watered down these proposals.

The resulting compromise helped lay the groundwork for a Cold War–era legal consensus on starvation blockades. While it fell short of prohibiting the tactic, the Geneva Conventions stigmatized the pillaging of land, protected aid workers, and nominally recognized the principle of humanitarian access - although the protection of that access was greatly weakened by restrictive conditions and sweeping inspection powers, allowing blockaders to obstruct aid on even the slightest suspicion that it might benefit the enemy.

legally tolerable under specific circumstances. The United States, for example, used starvation tactics on a large scale in the Vietnam War, with its systematic destruction of crops in areas suspected of harboring communist guerrillas. Within the emerging framework, a government at war could claim that starving enemy combatants remained legal and that as a result, incidental civilian deaths were tragic but nearly unavoidable outcomes of a legitimate method of modern warfare against totalitarian enemies. As is well known, few wartime famines can be described as deliberate from start to finish; more often, they are a consequence of blockade policies that prioritize military needs over civilian lives.

By the 1970s, however, a wave of newly independent countries, including in Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere, led a new push to further stigmatize starvation tactics, driven by direct experience of this kind of warfare by their former colonial overlords. In negotiations leading to the addition of two new protocols to the Geneva Conventions in 1977, these states pressed for robust rules against indiscriminate bombing, crop destruction, and starvation. Still, not all postcolonial states supported a comprehensive ban. Nigeria, for example, which had deliberately exploited the 1949 legal carve outs for blockades to devastating effect during the Nigeria-Biafra war of the late 1960s, recognized the tactical advantages of starvation in suppressing secessionist insurgencies. As a result, the new international legal architecture curbed starvation tactics in interstate wars and during occupations but stopped short of fully criminalizing the weapon, particularly when used by poorer states against insurgent groups in civil wars.

This outcome had dramatic consequences. Stateless or marginalized minorities - Biafrans, Darfuris, Kurds, Tigrayans - remained vulnerable to famine-inducing blockades by hostile governments. Even after the Rome Statute classified starvation as a war crime, the designation applied only to interstate armed conflicts. It took until 2019 for countries, including Germany, to formally recognize starvation as a crime in civil wars, as well. Still, until the ICC case against Israel, it had never been prosecuted as a standalone offense. Despite its codification in treaty law, charging a belligerent with starvation crimes was considered too politically sensitive, too entangled with the military strategies of powerful states. Deliberate starvation has persisted as a military strategy not just because it is cheap, simple, and brutally effective but also because it is so difficult to punish.

 

Cause and Effect

The ICC’s arrest warrants against Israel’s leaders seek to challenge this long-standing impunity. But the case also highlights the continuing difficulties of prosecuting starvation crimes: prosecutors need to prove that the Israeli leadership intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival. As with genocide, however, it is often extremely difficult to prove intent. In the event of mass famine in a conflict situation, political or military leaders may be able to frame any resultant deaths as simply an unfortunate consequence of modern warfare.

Moreover, the way blockades are imposed can also make the crimes harder to pin down. In a bombing campaign, for example, the source is usually unambiguous and the result immediate and often visually spectacular. By contrast, the destructive effects of blockades usually unfold indirectly, over time, and often out of sight. They are also the consequence of administrative routines—permits denied, crossings closed, shipments blocked—that are overseen by faceless bureaucrats. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, starvation tactics are the work of the “desk murderer”: methodical, concealed, and often masked by some alternative rationale, such as security imperatives or preventing weapons smuggling. This often hidden process has long shielded starvation campaigns from legal prosecution.

Consider Sudan’s two-year conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces militia, which has led to calamitous food shortages for even larger numbers of people than in Gaza. By the middle of 2024, the UN concluded that 18 million Sudanese were “acutely hungry,” including some 3.6 million children. This dire situation was the direct consequence of actions by both sides of Sudan’s terrible civil war. The ICC prosecutor has opened a war crimes inquiry into Sudan’s Darfur region - a region over which the court has clear jurisdiction following a 2005 referral by the UN Security Council - where the RSF is now besieging El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur. Yet despite growing reports linking the humanitarian crisis across the country to deliberate starvation tactics, the tribunal has not yet publicly brought charges citing starvation as a war crime in the Sudanese context. (In April, however, the ICJ took up the issue in a genocide case filed by Sudan’s military government against the United Arab Emirates that alleges Emirati support for starvation tactics by the RSF.)

In making the war in Gaza the ICC’s first prosecution of starvation crimes, then, the ICC prosecutor appears to have determined that the blunt public statements by Israeli leaders provide unusually concrete evidence of intent, regardless of various jurisdictional obstacles. On October 9, 2023, for example, two days after the Hamas attacks, Gallant declared a “complete siege” of Gaza, ordering the cutoff of all electricity, food, and fuel, and referring to Gazans as “human animals.” Similarly, in the opening weeks of the war and again more recently, Netanyahu publicly refused to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza. During the first year of the war, Israel did begin to let small amounts of aid into Gaza, largely in response to international condemnations and pressure from the Biden administration. Yet more recently, rather than moderating such overt statements of intent, the Israeli leadership has doubled down on its rhetoric even as it has reimposed a total blockade and resumed its bombing campaign. In March, for example, Gallant’s successor as defense minister, Yisrael Katz, joined other ministers in talk of unleashing the “gates of hell” on Gazans. Such public declarations by Israel’s political leadership have turned starvation from a war crime that was never prosecuted into what some scholars of international law have called “low-hanging fruit” - and helping make starvation charge the centerpiece of the ICC arrest warrants.

Yet the ICC prosecutor’s focus on the rhetoric of Israeli officials raises deeper questions about the viability of seeking justice for starvation crimes. Would the ICC have been able to issue arrest warrants if Netanyahu and Gallant had been more discreet in their public statements? The press release announcing the ICC’s decision suggests that if Israel’s leadership had avoided explicitly declaring a starvation siege - regardless of the outcome of the tactic - the charges might have been confined instead to “command responsibility” for direct attacks on civilians and crimes against humanity. These in themselves are serious offenses but perhaps less damaging than the crime of starvation, with its implication of intent to destroy a civilian group in whole or in part.

 

A Turning Point?

Given the enormous political headwinds now facing the ICC, the case against Israel may go nowhere. Yet the court’s focus on the crime of starvation could have legal ramifications for other recent and unfolding conflicts. Around the Red Sea and in central Africa, warring parties continue to use siege tactics and starvation campaigns largely unimpeded. Following the precedents set in Geneva in 1949, the states employing these tactics continue to claim that the resulting famines are either nonexistent, or unintended consequences of lawful actions against enemy combatants. Although it is unlikely to help the Palestinians’ plight, the arrest warrants against Israeli leaders marks a small but important legal watershed, potentially clarifying and even lowering the threshold needed to prove intent in future prosecutions, whether in domestic or international courts. The recent arrest of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in The Hague suggests that such efforts are not necessarily in vain.

The timing of the ICC’s decision is important, as it coincided not only with growing alarm over the threat of mass famine in northern Gaza but also with a critical long-term shift in global attitudes toward the use of starvation as a weapon. Certainly, the tactic remains entangled with the strategic priorities of the world’s most powerful states, with China preparing for a potential strangulation blockade of Taiwan and the U.S. Department of Defense continuing to accept starvation sieges as potentially legal methods of warfare against enemy combatants. Since the late 1990s, however, progressive lawyers, nongovernmental organizations, and other activist forces have pressed both states and courts to stigmatize starvation campaigns, and recent conflicts have highlighted their unacceptable civilian costs.

Now, the ICC case against Israel - and the implication that even powerful allies of the West can be held to account - puts these changing global norms to the test. As major European powers seek to rapidly augment their defense capabilities in a world where the U.S. defense umbrella is no longer assured, their governments face a choice: they can either uphold the international principles they often champion or abandon their claim to moral leadership. Just as crucially, major states in the global South that have long and rightly criticized international courts for targeting only non-Western actors and outright adversaries of the West must now step up.As major European powers seek to rapidly augment their defense capabilities in a world where the U.S. defense umbrella is no longer assured, their governments face a choice: they can either uphold the international principles they often champion or abandon their claim to moral leadership. Just as crucially, major states in the global South that have long and rightly criticized international courts for targeting only non-Western actors and outright adversaries of the West must now step up. If these states wish to reclaim the mantle of defending international law, they must back the efforts of the ICC and the ICJ not just in word but in deed. Otherwise, the two courts and the international rules they seek to enforce may be consigned to irrelevance.

 

 

For updates click hompage here