Starvation as a Method of War and What International Law Forbids

On May 24, 2018, the fifteen members of the United Nations Security Council did something they rarely manage on anything to do with war: they agreed. Resolution 2417 passed unanimously. It was not about a single conflict. It condemned the starving of civilians as a method of warfare, condemned the unlawful denial of humanitarian access, and asked the Secretary-General to tell the Council quickly whenever the risk of conflict-driven famine appeared anywhere. It read, at the time, like a document written for Yemen, South Sudan and northeast Nigeria. Seven years later, in August 2025, a panel of food-security experts confirmed famine in Gaza City, and the resolution's promise of an early warning met the question it was never designed to answer: what happens when the warning arrives and the hunger continues anyway?

In short: International law forbids starving civilians as a method of war, protects the food, water and farms people need to survive, and requires parties to let impartial relief through. Those rules are old, widely accepted and now prosecutable as war crimes, but they depend on evidence, on intent and on political will, which is why famine can be declared and still not be stopped.

Hunger used to be a weapon like any other

For most of history, starving the enemy was not a scandal. It was a strategy. Sieges were designed to empty the granaries of a walled town until it surrendered. Naval blockades in both world wars aimed at the food supply of whole countries. In the siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944, hundreds of thousands of civilians died of hunger and cold. After the Second World War, a United States military tribunal at Nuremberg, in what is known as the High Command case, treated starving the civilian population of a besieged city as lawful under the rules as they then stood.

That is the starting point worth remembering. The ban on starvation is not ancient. It was written in living memory by people who had seen what modern blockade and siege could do, and it was written deliberately to close a door that the law had left open.

Where the rule is written

The prohibition sits in several places, layered on each other.

The first is the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which protects civilians in enemy hands and under occupation. It does not use the word starvation as a ban, but it does two important things. Article 23 requires states to allow the free passage of medical supplies and of essential foodstuffs and clothing intended for children under fifteen, expectant mothers and maternity cases, with conditions. And Article 55 puts a positive duty on an occupying power: to the fullest extent of the means available to it, it must ensure the food and medical supplies of the population, bringing them in if the occupied territory's own resources are inadequate. Article 59 adds that if the population is inadequately supplied, the occupier must agree to relief schemes and facilitate them.

The second, and the plainest, is Additional Protocol I of 1977. Article 54 says starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited. It then forbids attacking, destroying, removing or rendering useless objects indispensable to civilian survival, listing foodstuffs, farm areas, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and irrigation works. Additional Protocol II carries a similar rule into civil wars.

The third is customary law. Not every state has ratified the Additional Protocols; the United States and Israel are among those that have not. But the International Committee of the Red Cross, in its long study of customary humanitarian law published in 2005, concluded that the ban on starving civilians as a method of warfare binds all parties in both international and internal conflicts, whether or not they joined the treaty. Most governments, including those outside the Protocol, accept the basic rule even when they argue over its edges.

The fourth is criminal law. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court lists "intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare," including wilfully impeding relief supplies, as a war crime in international conflicts. In 2019 the court's member states amended the statute to cover civil wars too.

Siege, blockade and the question of intent

If the rule is that clear, why is it so hard to apply? Because war is full of things that cause hunger without being designed to.

The law does not ban sieges as such, and it does not ban blockades. It bans using starvation of civilians as a method, and it bans destroying the things civilians need to live for the purpose of denying them sustenance. The heart of the matter is purpose. A commander who blows up a bridge used to move troops may cut a food route too; that is analysed under the ordinary rules of proportionality and precaution. A commander who closes every crossing so that a population will go hungry until its leaders give in is doing something the law forbids outright.

The relief rules carry the most weight in practice. Parties to a conflict must allow and facilitate the rapid and unimpeded passage of impartial humanitarian relief for civilians in need, subject to their right to inspect it and to arrange its delivery. They may not refuse consent arbitrarily. They can search trucks. They can set routes. What they cannot do is use inspection as a slow-motion veto, or treat a whole population's food supply as leverage.

That gap between a legal standard and real-world evidence is why the debate over starvation in any given war turns on details: how many trucks entered and when, what was blocked and why, whether markets functioned, whether warehouses were looted and by whom, whether the people giving orders said what they intended.

Food is not only food

A point that gets lost in arguments about truck counts: people do not starve only because flour is missing. They starve because the whole system that turns food into survival breaks down. Bread needs fuel for ovens and mills. Infant formula needs clean water. Malnourished children die of diarrhoea and pneumonia, which spread when sewage plants stop running and clinics close. A hospital without generator fuel cannot treat the severely malnourished, who need careful, monitored feeding to recover.

The law reflects this. Article 54 of Additional Protocol I protects drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works, not just crops. The relief rules cover medical supplies and objects essential to survival, which in modern conditions include fuel to pump water and power hospitals. That is why humanitarian agencies argue about fuel and water pipes with the same urgency as about grain. A siege that lets in some food while cutting off the power, the water and the medicine can produce famine just as surely as one that stops the food.

This is also why the timing of relief matters so much. Recovering from severe acute malnutrition takes weeks of treatment, and some damage to young children's growth is never undone. Aid that arrives late does not simply restore what was lost. It is one reason the authors of Resolution 2417 put so much weight on early warning.

How famine gets measured

The finding in Gaza City came from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the IPC, a system built by UN agencies, governments and aid groups to describe hunger with the same yardstick everywhere. It runs from Phase 1 to Phase 5. Phase 5, famine, requires three things in a given area at once: at least one in five households facing an extreme lack of food, at least three in ten children acutely malnourished, and deaths from starvation or from the combination of malnutrition and disease reaching at least two people per ten thousand per day.

Those thresholds are deliberately demanding. Famine is not a synonym for "very bad." By the time an area meets all three, people are already dying who would have lived. Before the IPC declares famine, an independent group called the Famine Review Committee checks the evidence.

On August 22, 2025, that committee confirmed famine in the Gaza Governorate, which includes Gaza City, and projected it would spread to other areas without a change of course. It was the first famine confirmed in the Middle East under the system. The Israeli government rejected the finding, disputing its data and methods and saying that aid was being diverted by Hamas. UN agencies and many aid groups said the main obstacle was the restriction of aid itself, and that Hamas diversion claims, where true, did not justify cutting off a population of two million people.

You do not need to settle every number to see the shape of the legal question. A famine classification is not a verdict on who is responsible. It is a measurement. The law then asks what the people with power over the food supply knew, what they did and what they meant.

Who has been held to account

For decades, starvation was a war crime on paper and almost nowhere else. That has begun to change.

The clearest example from the Gaza war is the International Criminal Court. On November 21, 2024, its judges issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The charges include the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, alongside crimes against humanity. The judges also issued a warrant for Mohammed Deif, a commander of Hamas's armed wing, on charges that include murder and hostage-taking connected to the October 7, 2023 attacks. Israel rejects the court's jurisdiction and the charges; the United States is not a member of the court and has opposed the warrants. Warrants are not convictions. They mean judges found reasonable grounds to believe the crimes were committed, and they can only be tried if the accused are brought to The Hague.

Elsewhere, investigators and UN bodies have raised starvation concerns in Sudan, where the IPC confirmed famine in the Zamzam displacement camp in 2024 amid the war between the army and the Rapid Support Forces; in Ethiopia's Tigray region during the war from 2020 to 2022; and in Syria, where besieged towns were sealed off for years. The law, in other words, is not written for one country, and anyone arguing about Gaza should be ready to apply the same standard to Sudan and to anyone else.

The strongest case on the other side

Israel's government and its defenders make several arguments, and they deserve to be stated clearly.

The first is that Hamas, not Israel, is responsible for Gaza's suffering: it started the war with the attacks of October 7, held hostages, built military infrastructure in and under civilian areas, and diverted aid for its fighters and for profit. The second is that inspection and control of aid are lawful, because a party is entitled to stop weapons and materiel reaching its enemy. The third is that the numbers are contested, that Israel let large volumes of aid in at many points, and that UN agencies, in their view, are not neutral reporters.

Here is the answer, offered as this site's argument. Hamas's crimes are real, and the law condemns them, including the taking of hostages, a separate war crime this blog covers in its own post. But the duty to let relief reach civilians does not depend on the enemy's good behaviour. It is owed to the civilians. Inspection is lawful; arbitrary denial is not; and where a population tips into famine while one party controls nearly every route in, the burden of showing that its restrictions were necessary rests heavily on that party. Diversion is a reason to change how aid is delivered, with monitoring and more crossings and more trucks, not a reason to deliver less food to children.

The same logic would apply if the roles were reversed. That is the point of the rule.

Progressives and the habit of selective outrage

There is a self-criticism worth making here. People on every side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been quick to invoke humanitarian law against the other and slow to apply it to their own. Some on the left were reluctant to name the hostage-taking of October 7 for what it was; some on the right treated any discussion of Gazan hunger as enemy propaganda. Neither habit helps a starving child or a captive in a tunnel.

A durable progressive position is the boring one: the rules apply to everyone, they are enforced by evidence, and the people whose lives they protect are not props in anyone's argument. That consistency is also what persuades the undecided. Readers can follow the reporting from many outlets on our Gaza and Palestine page and on the broader human rights and foreign aid page, which covers Sudan, Ukraine and other wars with the same lens.

What the October 2025 ceasefire did and did not change

The ceasefire that took effect on October 10, 2025 brought the release of the last living hostages within days and opened the way for more aid trucks. It did not repeal the law, and it did not answer the questions about what happened before. The investigations, the court cases and the debate over how hunger was used will continue for years, as they did after the Balkans and Rwanda. A famine finding is a record. Records matter later.

What you can do

1. Put the question to your senators directly. Congress writes the laws that govern American arms sales and aid. Our representatives page finds your representative, your senators and your state legislators from your address, with their phone numbers, contact forms and latest votes. Ask whether they support requiring that recipients of US security assistance allow unimpeded humanitarian access, and ask them to answer in writing.
2. Watch what Congress actually votes on. The Congress votes and bills page tracks the bills and recorded votes in both chambers, so you can see when aid, arms and humanitarian access come to the floor and how each member voted.
3. Give to impartial relief and to groups near you. Our directory of organizations lists nonprofits by cause in every state, including food banks, immigrant services and legal aid groups that work with families who have fled wars.
4. Learn the yardstick. Read how the IPC classifies hunger on its own website before the next crisis, so that "famine" in a headline means something precise to you.
5. Apply the rule evenly. When you talk about Gaza, talk about Sudan. When you talk about civilians in Gaza, talk about the hostages and their families. Credibility is the most persuasive thing you have.