Country: occupied Palestinian territory Source: International Crisis Group Please refer to the attached file. As ceasefire talks drag on, Gaza is tipping from mass starvation toward mass death. Israel must allow assistance in immediately. But that step alone will not save the strip’s depleted population. Gaza needs both an end to Israel’s siege and a ceasefire, urgently.Israel is starving Gaza. Since walking away from a ceasefire in March, it has throttled the tiny strip and its 2.1 million inhabitants with draconian restrictions on humanitarian aid and commercial deliveries. Israel’s stated objective is to prevent Hamas from diverting supplies and thereby gaining a leg up in the nearly 700-day war that began with its attacks of 7 October 2023. But as Palestinians in the enclave collapse in the street from malnourishment, it is not Hamas that is bearing the brunt of this policy.This catastrophe was not only predictable; it was predicted. Crisis Group, the UN and others warned of the very events that are now unfolding in the strip. Israel’s strategy of restricting access to life’s basic necessities while providing just enough subsistence to keep Gazans from sliding into famine underestimated the toll that extended deprivation would take on an already weakened population. With more people succumbing every day, Israel must end its siege immediately. Every truck matters. Every calorie counts. But opening the gates is only the beginning: only a ceasefire can alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe engulfing Gaza.The Food FrontIsrael’s shift to militarised aid distribution created a system designed for failure. After imposing a total blockade on food delivery in March, Israel pivoted in May to a new system of food distribution under its full control. At the same time, it continued to tightly restrict supply via the deeply implanted, well-stocked and time-tested networks of the UN and its partner agencies. The biggest of these providers, the World Food Programme (WFP), says its stores hold enough to feed all of Gaza for two months. Yet Israel is allowing just 10 per cent of the needed volume into the territory. It has claimed – without providing evidence – that Hamas was diverting or profiting from aid distributed in the old way.Whether or not that is true, the new Gaza Humanitarian Foundation system (GHF) delivers rations through a mechanism that ensures the weakest cannot get them. Administered by security contractors, the U.S.-backed GHF claims to have provided some 87 million meals in two months. But it has not defined what constitutes a “meal” or explained how it can effectively distribute provisions by dumping boxes on the ground for crowds to scuffle over. Furthermore, even if its claims about food quantities are correct, simple arithmetic shows that these would amount to far less than one “meal” per day per person. Without transparent data or independent verification, it is impossible to know what the GHF is actually handing out. What is clear is that Israel, which has managed Gaza’s humanitarian access for decades and faced court challenges on adequate nutrition, knows exactly what survival requires. Yet the system it has created delivers too little food at too few sites to too few people.The predictable result has been deadly chaos that makes a mockery of “humanitarian” distribution. In desperation, Palestinians have mobbed the four remote, heavily guarded GHF sites by the tens of thousands. Israeli troops have repeatedly opened fire on the aid seekers, killing more than 1,000 of them since May. The jostling to grab GHF handouts has created a daily survival-of-the fittest contest, exploited by organised gangs – perhaps including Hamas itself – that now dominate distribution. Unlike the old system, the new ostensibly “Hamas-free” GHF model leaves Gaza’s weakest and poorest to starve.War is No Licence to StarveGaza is now exhibiting the warning signs of imminent mass death. Technically speaking, the situation is not yet a full-fledged famine, which by the standards of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (or IPC) would mean that at least two of every 10,000 inhabitants are dying every day from causes other than violence. But urgent testimonials from doctors, journalists and aid workers in Gaza (as well as from Crisis Group’s own contacts) suggests that hunger has reached a tipping point. The WFP reports that one in three Palestinians in Gaza now go for days on end without food. Médecins Sans Frontières says it treated three times more patients for severe malnutrition in the first two weeks of July than in all of May. Agence France Presse, the BBC, Reuters and the Associated Press have issued a joint protest, declaring that their own reporters and families in Gaza are starving. By 23 July, Gaza hospitals were reporting ten to fifteen deaths from starvation every 24 hours – far more than the monthly average over 21 months of war.Once this tipping point is passed, famines tend to follow a catastrophically self-reinforcing pattern, which is already visible in Gaza. A slow creep of death yields to swift mass mortality as organs fail, immune systems collapse and victims lose the will to go on. Once famine begins, deaths tend to rise exponentially, meaning that waiting for confirmation that the technical line has been crossed to take remedial action could condemn thousands of people – especially young children – to death. For children, surviving such a scenario may entail permanent disability, including cognitive impairment. Some may already be facing exactly this prospect. Alarmingly, UN nutrition screenings of 15,000 children in Gaza City in July have assessed over 16 per cent as being acutely malnourished, above the 15 per cent threshold the UN uses for famine declarations and way above the 4 per cent recorded in February.The lack of a ceasefire provides no excuse for this starvation policy.The lack of a ceasefire provides no excuse for this starvation policy, nor for outside actors to give Israel diplomatic space pending the outcome of negotiations, which in any case seem to be stalled. Despite flickers of hope, the latest round of talks between Israel and Hamas (hosted by Qatar in Doha) appears to be hung up on the same point that halted previous rounds. Hamas insists that the ceasefire be a prelude to a long-term truce, while Israel insists that it be merely a pause in fighting. The spectacle has unfortunate echoes of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process of the past three decades, in which the process itself was presented as progress, even as the possibility of actual peace receded on the ground.These diplomatic failures cannot justify withholding food from 2.1 million people. The imperative to avert mass mortality is clear: Israel must open the gates immediately and let in life-saving assistance. But unblocking aid alone will not save a population that has been systematically weakened to the point that it can no longer survive conditions it has endured in nearly two years of a war that has killed or maimed one in every ten of Gaza’s people. People whose frames have been stripped of muscle mass cannot flee bombardment that they once escaped; immune systems destroyed by malnutrition cannot fight infections that healthy bodies would resist; children too weak to walk cannot reach even nearby aid points. The same Palestinians who made it through the war’s early months when they had strength and reserves now face death from injuries and illnesses that would not have killed them before.In short, Gaza needs both open gates and a ceasefire. Outside actors who have expressed outrage but failed to use their leverage must now demand both measures. The machinery of death must be stopped, not merely slowed.