A snapshot of conflict-driven starvation: Gaza, Ukraine, Africa and beyond

Gaza ~ In July, a heart-wrenching image of Hidayat Al-Motawaq holding her malnourished 18-month-old son, Mohammad Al-Motawaq, went viral, becoming emblematic of a crisis that has introduced starvation as a weapon of war to new generations of witnesses.

Though the internet, with its patchy reality, feels like an inept net for capturing barbarism, it is a primary reason why famine in Gaza has been so widely acknowledged as a man-made atrocity.

Gaza’s history of isolation and blockade, the restricted movements of its people and Israel’s command of its infrastructure, sea and airspace make for a clear and dark visual mapping of contained terror that all can grasp. The escalation in numbers also speaks louder than words. The UN reported 5000 cases of children suffering from malnutrition in May, rising to 6000 in June, with UNICEF reporting an escalation to 12,800 in August.

Deepening public outrage is the recognition of Israel’s ‘intent to genocide’ and the element of calculation that has been unpacked by journalists and officials alongside Israel’s original announcement of starvation as a war tactic. Writing for The Guardian in July, Emma Graham-Harrison said:

‘Data compiled and published by Israel’s own government makes clear that it has been starving Gaza. Between March and June, Israel allowed just 56,000 tonnes of food to enter the territory, COGAT records show, less than a quarter of Gaza’s minimum needs for that period.’

The foundation of food poverty in Gaza was laid long before the 7^th October attack by Hamas. At the outset of the blockade in 2007, nearly 30% of the country’s farmland was reappropriated as a ‘buffer’ zone by the IDF. Simone Lipkind, writing in Think Global Health says: ‘Both Israel and Egypt also enforced a blockade of the strip, and Israel strictly regulated whether items it considered dual use, anything that could have both a civilian and military purpose, could enter the territory.

Those import restrictions kept food items including dates, certain agricultural  fertilizers, and materials critical to developing and maintaining infrastructure, such as concrete, out of Gaza…including some 70% of water sanitation and hygiene related materials.’

While French President Macron and the UK’s Starmer concur that right must prevail over might and formally recognise a Palestinian state, the US-Israeli GHF controls four aid points in areas that residents are prohibited from entering. Following a recent report, Doctors Without Borders declared: ‘These are sites of orchestrated killing and dehumanization,’ citing the shootings of a 12-year-old boy and an eight-year-old girl as examples of how deadly these military ‘aid’ hubs can be.

The UN’s ‘Right to Food Report’ of 2024 states: ‘Never in post-war history had a population been made to go hungry so quickly and so completely as was the case for the 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza.’ Questions were raised two years ago as to how long Israel’s policy of weaponizing hunger could be kept just below the line of famine. Now the question is: how long genocide by starvation can be tolerated.

Yet, while famine in Gaza and its online documentation is unprecedented, the world has, in a sense, been here before.

The Nazi Hunger Plan was drawn up by German officials in 1941 and intended genocide by starvation of between 31-45 million people living in Nazi occupied territories. This genocidal initiative was only partially executed, but saw an estimated 4.2 million Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians losing their lives to the scheme between 1941 and 1944. Food stocks were captured in occupied territories and redirected to German troops and civilians in a bid to boost morale in the motherland and create a man-made famine in Eastern Europe.

Decades before WW2, Hitler and other officials were keenly aware of Germany’s reliance on imports and the ruptures in food supply caused by the Allied forces’ blockade of Germany in WW1. Ukraine, as the fertile grain-store of the world, was a focal part of the Hunger Plan, which itemised: Kyiv as a target for annihilation of a ‘surplus population’, the reduction of food supply to Ukraine’s second cities, starvation of the country’s farming population, and the redirection of grain stocks from the north – an area of dense, urban habitation.

Ukraine

In 2025, geopolitics have ensured that the western world’s gaze stays not only on Gaza, but on Ukraine. King Charles notably dwelt on the common interests of the US and UK in Ukraine during his recent state dinner with Trump – a nuance of diplomacy that was not afforded to the more contentious situation in Gaza. It is impossible to sensibly compare the suffering of two such differently positioned territories. Yet, the ripple-effects on global food supply are markedly different.

Old wounds of wartime starvation have reopened among civilians in Ukraine, with approx’ a third of people across six frontline regions grappling with food poverty and making hard choices about how often and what they can eat. Nutritious food now comes at a premium in a country where the decimation of infrastructure has rendered over two million unemployed.

Exacerbating this is the end of Russia’s cooperation with the Black Sea Grain initiative, which allowed the US and Türkiye to provide a humanitarian corridor for exports from Ukraine during a year-long window, in 2022-23. A scaled-down number of ‘solidarity lanes’ have since been created through land and inland waterways by the EU.

The repercussions of Ukraine’s stunted food production and exporting powers are seismic. The ‘bread basket of central Europe’ now provides 50% less grains and oil to food impoverished countries such as: Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia, than it did before the Russian invasion.

More globally, Russia’s actions have driven up food inflation and the cost of food for all of us. It is the costly prospect of long-term destabilisation in central Europe that steers US foreign policy towards bolstering Ukraine, paired with a newfound agreement that ‘Ukraine can win back land with the support of NATO.’

North Africa

Meanwhile, the famines of the African continent rage on outside of the spotlight, as nations struggle with self-sufficiency and reduced foreign exports. The International Rescue Committee has described the situation in North Africa as a ‘forgotten crisis,’ the ‘least discussed and most underfunded in the world.’

In the forty years since Live Aid broadcast Ethiopia’s hunger crisis and famine of 1983-85 to millions, conflict has been the main driver of hunger for the 160+ million Africans living with food poverty – 840,00 of whom are estimated to currently be living with famine. Those suffering in the areas of Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia declared to be in famine, are not victims of military planning so much as callous ambivalence from warring factions and questionable domestic policies.

In Sudan, cradle to the world’s largest case of displaced people, civil war has pushed roughly half the population close to starvation. Destruction of infrastructure has forced the farming community – two thirds of the population – into food insecurity, as families behind the wall of the capital, El Fasher, suffer famine without the intervention of aid. A decline in global funding for African aid, especially from the US, bureaucratic barriers and limited access due to combat, has seen hundreds of thousands in El Fasher and Kadugli on the brink of starvation.

If calculation and callous ambivalence have meant millions of Palestinians and Africans have lost family members, friends and colleagues to starvation, there is a mitigating third front that is entirely indiscriminate – climate.

Climate.

Somalia is at the epicentre of the crisis where climate, conflict and food poverty intersect. As a country that has suffered multiple iterations of civil war and government since the early 1990s, it has also been impacted by the destabilization of consecutive ‘climate shocks.’ Ettienne Petershcmitt of the UN Food and Agricultural Organization in Somalia says:

“Worsening drought, erratic rainfall and ongoing conflict are eroding livelihoods, pushing families deeper into crisis.”

It is believed that 3.4 million Somalians are experiencing acute hunger – especially displaced agricultural families, who have exhausted their own supplies. Low rainfall in 2024 reduced crop yields and depleted water supplies which, in turn, led to deaths of livestock. Equally, flooding on critical farmland has devastated crops and reduced soil quality for the long term. The UN’s global tracker anticipates that 1.7 million Somalian children under five will suffer from acute malnutrition in 2025. The comorbid issues associated with these conditions include diseases such as Cholera and disabilities such as developmental delay.

The fight against climate change as a source of food poverty is currently felt most severely in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Central and South America. But there is no denying the power of conflict to expedite and exacerbate its devastating effects. Haiti and Mali are two nations where extreme weather events such as Hurricanes and the El Nina phenomenon intersect with tensions of factional warfare to compound extreme food insecurity. In Yemen, where civil war has caused displacement over decades, the contrast of flash floods and the ‘desertification’ of droughts make growing food unsustainable.

 

In a world where over 135 million children and adults are estimated to be acutely food insecure, or, in layman’s terms – facing starvation – conflict is recognised as the main driver of at least half these cases.

The theme of international responsibility looms over these crises, and the question of how far, beyond the interests of national security, richer countries will go to deliver aid and peace. Though ethical responsibility is a changing, man-made construct, challenged by these man-made atrocities, what persists is a shared sense of humanity.

How much this, in the form of public pressure, will shift the dial of intervention in Gaza, Africa and beyond, is yet to be seen. But the lens of the media will surely play a role in decision-making.

 

Want to commission me to write on a humanitarian, environmental or cultural subject? Please send a line to @ tamsin.flower@gmail.com