We need to talk about starvation as a weapon

TetleysTLDR:  The summary 

Starvation is being used deliberately as a weapon of war in places like Sudan and Gaza, not because of natural scarcity, but as a tactic by those in power. Despite global food abundance, hunger is imposed by human action through sieges, blockades, and destruction of aid.  Western governments, including the UK and US, are complicit, supplying arms, blocking accountability, and criminalising dissent.  International law is clear:  using starvation in war is a crime.  Yet those responsible face no consequences, while protestors are silenced.  The West's moral authority is gone.  Starvation is not accidental, it's a deliberate, silent genocide, and we must stop pretending otherwise. 

TetleysTLDR: The article 

Starvation is the quietest form of mass murder.  It doesn’t scream.  It doesn’t explode.  It doesn’t leave the kind of body count that gets splashed across the front pages. Instead, it creeps. Slowly. Silently. One wasted child at a time. 

And yet it is one of the most devastating weapons ever used against human beings. In a world that produces more than enough food to feed everyone on Earth twice over, starvation should no longer exist.  But it does.  Not because of scarcity, but because of power.  Because hunger has become a tool.  A weapon of war.  

And the so-called civilised world:  Britain, the United States, the EU, is not just standing by, it is actively complicit. 

It’s just over 40 years since Live Aid.  A moment in history when the world seemed to pull together, if only briefly, in the face of unimaginable suffering.  In 1985, the brutal famine in Ethiopia forced the Western conscience to look itself in the mirror.  Night after night, we watched the television flicker with images of skeletal children, limp, wide-eyed, clinging to life by threads of bone and breath. Their bodies, ravaged by starvation, became a haunting symbol not only of hunger but of global neglect.  And somehow, amid the excess and apathy of the 1980s, those images pierced the noise.  The world responded. People gave. Stars sang.  Governments, reluctantly, followed. 

Because even the most hardened viewers couldn’t ignore what starvation actually is: not just death, but death as a drawn-out agony.  The body begins by feeding on itself.  Fat disappears.  Muscles wither.  Skin cracks and sags. Immune systems collapse.  Organs fail one by one.  Children stop crying because they no longer have the strength.  Their bellies swell grotesquely, not with food, but with gas and fluid from protein starvation.  It is a death by erasure. Not just of the body, but of dignity, of identity.  

And yet, famine remains one of the few forms of mass death we still talk about in passive terms.  As though it just happens.  As though no one is to blame. When famine is caused by drought, by ecological collapse, by genuine natural disaster, that is a tragedy.  

When hunger is imposed, when food is withheld, convoys blocked, crops destroyed, water denied: that is a war crime. 

And it’s happening right now.  In Sudan.  In Gaza.  And our governments are not only silent, they are supporting the perpetrators.  Sudan is experiencing one of the worst humanitarian crises on Earth.  The country has been plunged into civil war, and millions are starving.   But they are not starving because of drought.  They are starving because both sides in the conflict:  the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces are deliberately using hunger as a weapon.   They are besieging cities, looting markets, burning food stores, and cutting off aid.   They are starving civilians into submission.  This is not an unintended consequence.  It is a strategy.  One the international community is barely acknowledging, let alone stopping.

^{Famine in Sudan.  Engineered. Civilians suffer.  Children suffer.}

Sudan is deeply relevant to what’s happening in Gaza, and not just because both are war zones ignored by the Western press until it’s too late. The parallels run deeper, and darker. In both Sudan and Gaza, the violence is being committed with near-total impunity because the perpetrators believe no one will stop them. That belief isn't unfounded. Whether it’s the Sudanese Armed Forces, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), or the Israeli military, each is carrying out military campaigns that amount to war crimes in broad daylight, often against civilian populations, and often in isolation from the world’s scrutiny or meaningful intervention. 

The silence around Sudan,  just like the muted outrage around Israel's actions in Gaza sends a dangerous message: that mass atrocities can happen in plain sight if you’re in the right club of impunity.  That if the victims don’t matter to the West, neither do their deaths.  Both conflicts show us what happens when law is replaced by raw power, and when media narratives are shaped more by geopolitical alliances than by morality. Sudan and Gaza are twin symptoms of a world order where international law has collapsed, and where crimes against humanity are becoming normalised, if the murderers wear the right uniforms.

In October 2023, Israel imposed what it called a ‘complete siege’ on the Gaza Strip.  No food.  No water.  No fuel.  No medicine.  The intention could not have been clearer: to collectively punish more than two million people, half of them children, for the actions of a few.  Israeli officials have been open about this policy for years.  Dov Weisglass, a senior advisor to Ehud Ohmert said in 2006 they would ‘put Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die of hunger’.  Except of course now they are.  

The blockade has become a famine.  Children are dying.  Not metaphorically, not symbolically, but literally.  From hunger.  From thirst.  From a manufactured famine, imposed by one of the most powerful militaries in the world, with full knowledge and consent of its Western allies.  And what do our governments do?  They issue statements. They express ‘concern’ and then they carry on supplying the bombs.  They carry on blocking international accountability.  They carry on treating international law like it’s optional, something only poor countries are subject to. 

Britain is still exporting arms to Israel.  The United States is still shipping billions of dollars in military aid.  Western nations are criminalising protest and solidarity.  France is cracking down on pro-Palestine marches.  Germany and the UK are arresting protesters on the most flimsy of excuses.  And all of them are watching, in real time, the deliberate starvation of a trapped population:  and doing nothing to stop it.  Under international law, under the Geneva Conventions, under the Rome Statute, using starvation as a method of warfare is a war crime.  It is not complex.  It is not conditional.  It is a crime.  If you bomb food depots, it’s a crime.  If you block humanitarian aid, it’s a crime.  If you deny water and electricity and medicine, it’s a crime.  

So ask yourself: why are the perpetrators not in the dock? Why are they not facing sanctions, investigations, consequences?  Because the West has abandoned any moral authority it once claimed to have.  It has become the bodyguard of impunity.  The enabler of war crimes.  The mouthpiece of occupation.  And it doesn’t even try to hide it anymore. 

Just look at the state of our politics.  While children starve in Gaza, Keir Starmer’s Labour Party punishes MPs for calling for a ceasefire.  He dismisses credible reports of famine.  And the Labour Friends of Israel, who wield enormous influence over party policy, remain silent on mass hunger.  Silent as babies die. 

And then there is the evil being carried out that layers on top of this.  I remind you of the Schindler’s List:  iconic film about the Shoah from Steven Spielberg.  We follow a little girl in the red coat, the only colour in a black and white dystopia.  Tthis shocked and moved the world precisely because it took an overwhelming atrocity and focused it through the lens of one innocent life.  It shattered abstraction.  It forced us to see the Holocaust not as history, not as statistics, but as the systematic murder of a child with hopes and fears, a child who might've just been hiding or searching for her parents.  Spielberg gave her just enough screen time for us to care, and then showed us the brutal finality of her fate. 

Now, compare that to a child in Gaza, Rafah or Jenin today, walking through rubble, lining up at a food distribution point because she's starving, because Israel has imposed a siege that amounts to engineered famine.  Imagine that child hoping for a bag of flour, flour possibly laced with opioids or crushed glass, as UN doctors have claimed.  And later, that same child is found among the dead, executed by a sniper or bombed in her home, her name never spoken on Western news. 

And don't you dare clutch your pearls and scream antisemite!  How fucking dare you. How is shooting starving children in a food queue not the moral equivalent of gassing them in Auschwitz?  The method is different.  The intent: to dehumanise, to destroy, to erase is exactly the same.  Israel cannot keep hiding behind some well polished faux conflation of antisemitism while committing atrocities that so closely mirror the horrors inflicted on Jews 80 years ago.  There is no moral high ground in using snipers against children queuing for flour. There is no exemption from international law for those whose own history should have taught them better.  And the conflation of Judaism with the murderous actions of the Israeli state no longer holds water, not when thousands of Jews across the world are speaking out, resisting and saying ‘not in our name’.  No amount of mental gymnastics from Eylon Levy, Mark Regev or Tzipi fucking Hotovely equating criticism of war crimes with hatred of Jews can be justified.  It’s not just dishonest, it is a betrayal of memory, of justice, and of the very lessons the Holocaust was meant to teach us. 

^{Children cry as their friend is shot and killed by Israeli snipers in a food queue.}

And the Israelis are squeezing 2 million people into prisons of smaller and smaller proportions.  Oh I don't know - if only we had a name for camps where you concentrate people you have dehumanised. 

And then, in one of the most grotesque political inversions imaginable, Conservative MP Kit Malthouse says David Lammy, the shadow foreign secretary, could end up in The Hague.  Whilst he almost certainly should, as well as Starmer and many others in our Governments, and if there was any justice, Labour Friends of Israel would be proscribed as a terrorist group, when Kit Malthouse is the voice of moral authority we are through the looking glass. 

That is how warped our political discourse has become. That is how far we’ve fallen. We have reached a point where Western governments, including our own, are no longer just bystanders to atrocity.  They are participants.  Accessories.  Enablers. 

So stop pretending this is complicated.  It isn’t.  You do not get to mourn the famine in Ethiopia in 1985 and ignore Gaza in 2025.  No Bob Geldof this time taking all the credit and shouting give us your fucking money.  You do not get to light candles for past atrocities while funding current ones.  You do not get to weep for dead children while your taxes help kill more of them.  

Starvation is not just a consequence of war. It is a weapon of war. And those who use it, and those who support them, should be held to account. 

And within all the death, a victim is humanity itself as we normalise, sanitise and defend the indefensible. 

Shame on our Government for allowing this and more shame on them for trying to silence dissent.  

When our Government tries to quieten us about crimes against humanity it is our duty as humans to shout louder.

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