For the last 22 months, Israel has laid the groundwork for famine in Gaza — and just today, it was announced by a United Nations body that famine in Gaza is officially underway.
After a short-lived ceasefire ended in March, Israel began limiting and then almost completely blocking the entry of aid into Gaza, increasing hunger and causing the unfathomable conditions the world is witnessing now. Children and babies are dying with sunken eyes and bloated bellies, typical signs of malnutrition. Images of mothers holding their skeletal babies are all over the internet, underscoring the devastation of this latest escalation.
This is not, as 40 Senate Democrats claimed, a “humanitarian crisis”: This is a deliberate campaign of starvation waged by Israel, funded and promoted by the United States government, with bipartisan support.
Meanwhile, in the US, the richest country on the planet, almost 14 million children are food insecure, meaning their families “struggled to provide enough food for everyone living there at some point during the year,” as defined by the USDA. Just last month, Republicans in Congress passed what Trump called the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which guts Medicaid, cuts housing programs, and slashes billions from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). More than 41 million Americans depend on SNAP for food, and many of them are children, disabled people, and seniors.
At home and abroad, the US government is participating in starving people, particularly children, and calling it policy. It’s more than policy, though; it’s been woven into the fabric of this country since its inception. From the forced starvation of Native people through bison genocide, to the Jim Crow era’s deliberate starving of Black farm workers and their families in the Mississippi Delta by local landowners, businessmen, and politicians, America’s elected leaders have time and again chosen to starve not only our own citizens, but human beings the world over.
Since October 7, 2023, when a Hamas attack killed about 1,200 Israelis, Israel has indiscriminately bombed, sieged, and blockaded Gaza, killing at least 60,000 Palestinians in what many human rights groups have called an unfolding genocide. Doctors and nurses have reported seeing children who have been shot in the head by Israeli soldiers. The Israeli government has systematically targeted food infrastructure: bakeries, farms, fishing boats, food warehouses, and aid convoys. They have killed starving people waiting for food multiple times.
Human Rights Watch, experts from the UN, and other experts have called this a starvation campaign and accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war, which is a war crime under international law.
The United States continues to provide arms and funds for Israel, giving several billion dollars annually in military aid, and authorizing billions more since the siege began; as of September 2024, that total neared $23 billion. The US has used its veto power at the UN Security Council to block calls for ceasefires, even as children die waiting for water, food, medical care, and more. US military cargo planes resupply Israel while humanitarian aid operations are attacked with US bombs.
Both the US and Israel support the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a “militarized distribution” organization operating aid sites where the Israeli Defense Force has killed over a thousand people seeking food. This is the use of US taxpayer money to fund the starvation campaign we are currently witnessing. The same government that is funding mass starvation and death in Gaza is also cutting funds to feed hungry Americans right here.
In July, Congress passed the sweeping “Big Beautiful Bill,” thereby slashing safety-net programs under the false claim of reducing the deficit. Among the most brutal cuts: nearly $187 billion from SNAP over the next decade. These cuts tighten age and work requirements, reduce benefits, and make millions ineligible, including disabled people and caregivers who are officially classified as "able-bodied adults without dependents” despite not necessarily fitting within that narrow description.
Food banks, already overstretched and overwhelmed, are sounding the alarm. In North Carolina, the Food Bank of CENC, which serves more than 600,000 people, says they simply cannot meet the need. “What we believe will happen with these cuts to SNAP is that we will not be able to fill the gap with charitable food,” the organization's CEO told Axios.
To be clear: Hunger in the US is not due to scarcity. There is more than enough food to feed everyone. But the government chooses to let children go hungry, especially Black, brown, disabled, and poor children.
This isn’t new. Hunger has always been a tool used by the powerful to control the most marginalized, at home and abroad.
In the late 19th century, the US government carried out a genocide against the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains, and one of its most effective tools was starvation. The Army encouraged the mass slaughter of buffalo to cut off specific tribes from their primary food source. Without buffalo, many Indigenous families faced famine, like those of the Piegan Blackfeet band, of which hundreds died during the “Starvation Winter” of 1883-1884. By the start of the next century, the rate of child deaths were 16 percent higher for Indigenous nations who relied on buffalo for food than for those that did not, according to a recent study.
During the Vietnam War, the US used Agent Orange and other chemicals to destroy crops, leading to famine. Beginning in 2015, American-made bombs dropped by Saudi Arabia destroyed ports, farms, and water infrastructure in Yemen, leading to widespread starvation and leaving millions on the brink of famine, according to UN humanitarian coordinator Lise Grande at the time.
Right now, children in countries across the globe are losing access to food aid after the Trump administration virtually eliminated USAID. According to a study in the medical journal The Lancet, the gutting of US global health and nutrition programs could result in 14 million excess deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under the age of five.
In the next five years, 4.5 million children abroad could die. And with SNAP benefits and healthcare coverage taken away, millions more children within the US will go hungry without regular meals.
The US allegedly has no money to feed its children or the world’s children, but has plenty of money for war.
We are not talking about a failure of policy. This is not even one party over another. It is how this country punishes those who are the loudest in opposition, controls those it has forced into poverty, and reinforces white supremacy at home and abroad. This is one way colonial empires hold on to control, and in the US, officials manufacture consent through sanitized language like “budget neutrality,” “entitlement reform,” and “national security.” It’s the highest and most deadly form of gaslighting.
I am a disabled person who has spent the better part of 15 years organizing in the South. I’ve seen how hunger shows up in our communities. It’s in school cafeterias when kids can’t pay for their meals; when diabetic people skip food to afford their insulin; when new mothers ration baby formula. And I’ve watched, in real time, as the US government funds genocide instead of putting money toward fighting hunger in the US and beyond.
Many of us who came of age amid the backdrop of the invasion of Iraq are watching this all with a deep understanding. Many of us are Jewish and know with complete clarity that what’s happening in Gaza is genocide. Many of us are disabled and know what it feels like to be denied the basic care we need. Many of us are or have been poor and know the feeling of hunger deep in our core.
We also know how to take action. We are protesting, showing up at our electeds’ offices, and demanding that Congress restore and expand SNAP, school meals, and food programs. We are pushing for full funding of USAID. We are demanding an end to US funding of the Israeli military. We are calling for divestment from companies that have funded the genocide in Gaza. And we are building care webs and mutual aid networks to feed one another when the state abandons us. The US government may be committed to starving millions of the world’s children, but we don’t have to be.
Whether it’s in Palestine or Nigeria, Memphis, Tennessee, or Taliaferro County, Georgia, children are starving not because there isn’t enough food, but because our bipartisan legislators choose to let them starve. The cruelty is the point. But it doesn’t have to be this way, despite what our history tells us. We just have to be willing to build something new.
