Since October 2023, more than 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s war on Gaza. At least 18,000 of them were children. But death now comes in quieter forms, not by bombs or missiles, but by hunger.

According to UNICEF, 154 people, including 89 children, have already died of starvation, according to the latest figures. UNICEF warns that one in three Palestinians in Gaza are going days without food, with over 320,000 children at risk of acute malnutrition. These are not just statistics, these are lives disfigured by geopolitical cruelty.

In March, Israel blocked food aid, a blockade that was eased only under overwhelming international pressure, and a U.S.- and Israel-backed group, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), assumed control. But reports from whistleblowers, aid workers, and local journalists suggest this “aid” is anything but humane. At least 1,300 Palestinians have been killed trying to access food from GHF distribution sites, some purposefully shot by Israeli forces or U.S. contractors.

Seventeen-year-old Atef Abu Khater died from malnutrition last week in a Gaza hospital. Just months ago, he was a healthy teenager. Now, his name joins a growing list of victims of a siege so total, so devastating, that children are not dying of wounds, they are dying because food, water, and shelter are used as weapons.

This is not “collateral damage” , or the fog of war. This is systemic starvation.

Israeli officials continue to frame this as a matter of “security”, but what security demands you shoot at children for reaching for rice? What security doctrine starves an entire population under the eyes of the international community?

In a grotesque inversion of reality, it is the occupied and starving who are blamed for their desperation, and the occupiers hailed for “allowing aid in.” It’s not enough. As UNICEF’s Ted Chaiban rightly said this week, “airdrops cannot replace the scale of land convoys… and what children in Gaza need is a sustained ceasefire.”

The so-called “tactical pause” and the diplomatic photo ops, featuring well-fed foreign dignitaries in protective vests, cannot distract from the obvious: a deliberate humanitarian crisis is unfolding, engineered and maintained by political choices. Choices that can still be reversed.

The international community has a moral obligation, not just to feed Gaza, but to end the conditions that manufactured this famine. That includes demanding a ceasefire, full restoration of humanitarian aid access by land, and an end to the militarization of starvation.

Until then, we must look at the image of that child with his flour, and ask ourselves: how many more must die before we stop pretending this is normal?

By I. Constantin