Commentary/Op-ed
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By Leila Sansour
As Israel’s closest allies begin to recoil, one is left wondering: why did Israel persist so relentlessly with a starvation policy in Gaza, despite the enormous cost to its reputation? This was no blunder. The determination with which the policy was pursued reveals not miscalculation, but intent. It suggests a leadership willing to gamble global outrage for what it sees as a strategic endgame. Israel may have weighed its options and decided that reputations can be rehabilitated, but territorial facts on the ground last forever. By the time the international community acts, Israel may have already redrawn the map of the Middle East in its favour.
As world leaders issue statements of dismay, Palestinians in Gaza are starving before our eyes. The images flood every screen. But my phone carries what screens cannot show: the panic-stricken pleas of my dearest friends, some with starving siblings in Gaza, What now? What can we do? We speak to each other in grief, in fury, in solidarity. But sometimes, there is a need for cold thinking, an attempt to rise from the abyss, to understand why we got here and how to respond. In this piece, I want to share some of the thinking exchanged around starvation as Israel’s latest weapon of war.
What is happening in Gaza is not merely a military war; what we are witnessing is a pivotal shift in Israel’s management of the Palestinian people under occupation.
One of the central tools in this engineered control is food deprivation, which serves not merely as a cruel bargaining tool but as a symbolic and concrete act that undermines the very foundations of community.
Israel has long worked to fragment Palestinians — politically, geographically and legally — separating Gazans, West Bankers, Jerusalemites, and the Palestinian citizens of Israel. But the project unfolding in Gaza marks a further, more brutal stage: the wholesale break-up of a functioning society.
In other words, the aim of starving the population is to commit politicide — a term coined by American political scientist Harold D. Lasswell to describe the erasure of a people’s political identity, reducing them to atomized individuals or fragmented communities that can easily be reshaped according to the will of their occupiers.
In this context, the cases of food chaos, the incidents of looting, and the violence spreading across the Strip can be seen as part of a grand design: a violent social engineering project, implemented in stages, with both precision and intent.
Removing food does not just mean potential extermination, but the disintegration of social norms and social cohesion as survivors are forced into a fight for daily bread rather than collective purpose.
When food self-sufficiency is stripped away, when a population is left without basic necessities, this is usually accompanied by a breakdown of functioning state or collective institutions. The bet is on Gazans no longer seeing their neighbors as fellow citizens but as competitors for basic necessities for survival.
Hunger often leads to the disintegration of the social contract. Finding food becomes the overriding concern. The values of solidarity and dignity that once formed the core of a people’s identity dissolve. The individual’s focus shifts solely to their own survival, a stark departure from the shared sense of communal strength that defines Palestinian society.
Starvation is not only a means of physical subjugation but an internal process of fracture, severing the cohesion of the individual and society. Starvation has been shown in social studies to induce a forced cognitive shift within groups. In Gaza, this shift moves the population’s focus from collective justice to survival at any cost, paving the way for the acceptance of solutions that would have been unimaginable before the crisis.
Israel’s occupying forces are pushing the society to collapse in on itself- the chaos being the testbed for Gaza’s future. How will its people respond in the absence of a functioning authority? Who will rise to fill the vacuum left by the dismantling of the state?
Resistance factions, once protectors of the people, are now increasingly seen as helpless and fragmented. In this new world, power shifts away from political leadership to those who control basic resources like food and water. Successive blows to Gaza’s social and political structures leave its people paralyzed, unable to think or act collectively. Once this shock is complete, the new reality will be presented as a “necessary salvation.”
For Gaza, this means the destruction of political and social structures in preparation for proposals that may appear as humanitarian but are, in fact, political and security-driven. The language of “rescue” will be used to justify a larger political agenda, one that will further entrench external control over Gaza’s people.
In the wake of engineered starvation and societal collapse, Gaza’s people are not merely left hungry—they are stripped of their moral image, reduced in the eyes of the world to what some might call “remnants of humanity.” Out of the chaos, a dangerous narrative begins to take shape: that Palestinians are inherently unfit to govern themselves. This narrative does not emerge by accident—it is the prelude to a new phase of control, one cloaked in the language of salvation. Recolonization returns, not with gunboats, but with briefcases and blue helmets, sold to the world as a humanitarian rescue. The justification is as cynical as it is familiar: Gaza, broken and starved, is no longer seen as capable of self-rule. Only external guardianship, we might be told, can impose the kind of order now deemed necessary.
While the world proceeds at an agonising pace, and Netanyahu’s cabinet deliberates its next move, the horrors in Gaza will continue unfolding without pause. Palestinian society, battered and dismembered, must constantly grapple with the impossible task of rising from the rubble. With political and social institutions largely decimated, one can only hope that new, collective forms of organisation will emerge—models of solidarity and survival built from the ashes. The resilience of Gaza’s people may now be measured not by physical endurance alone, but by their ability to preserve the threads of their social fabric amid hunger and disarray. This quiet, stubborn resistance will be an essential force to carry Gaza forward.
What is unfolding in Gaza is a defining moment in Palestinian history and maybe the history of the whole region. It is the largest experiment in “violent social engineering” carried out against an entire people, and it’s happening right under the world’s eyes.
The strategy to confront it should therefore focus on unwavering commitment to rebuilding kinship, a sense of shared purpose, restoration of community, and civic dignity. The outcome for Gaza—and for all Palestinians—will not be decided on the battlefield. Bullies measure their success in the conquest of the moment. But for the oppressed, victory is generational; it lies in the quiet miracle of endurance as a society—with bonds, identity, dignity, and purpose.
To those watching from afar, the question is no longer what you know, but what you are willing to bear. Western nations cannot afford to remain spectators to the collapse of international law and the most harrowing atrocity of our time. This will not remain confined to Gaza; the erosion of moral order, once unleashed, does not respect borders. The sooner this ends, the more chance we have to salvage what generations before us built—our shared moral architecture, paid for in blood and principle. Demand that your governments abandon the cold arithmetic of managed alliances and reassert the primacy of human dignity. Gaza is not only a test of Israel’s impunity—it is a mirror held up to the rest of us, showing what remains of our own reflection.
Leila Sansour is a Palestinian-British filmmaker, renowned for her documentaries Jeremy Hardy v. The Israeli Army and Open Bethlehem. Leila’s career also includes freelance work with ITN news, most recently covering the war on Gaza, and she served as senior producer on Al Jazeera’s documentary series Encounter in Exile. She is also the creative director of Planet Bethlehem, an innovative art project currently developing a unique online museum space.
Note: A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to Harold Lasswell as an Israeli sociologist. We apologize for the mistake.
