By Mohamed Harees –

Lukman Harees

Famine is taking place in Gaza – just a short drive away from hundreds of trucks of aid sitting idly outside its borders. “One in three people hasn’t eaten for days”, insisted Tom Fletcher, UN Emergency Relief Chief and head of OCHA. “People are being shot just trying to get food to feed their families. Children are wasting away. This is what we face on the ground right now.” People in Gaza have exhausted every possible means of survival. Hunger and malnutrition are claiming lives every day, and the destruction of cropland, livestock, greenhouses, fisheries and food production systems has made the situation even more dire. A joint statement from several UN organisations, including UNICEF, the WFP, and the WHO, expressed alarm, saying “it would have further devastating consequences for civilians where famine conditions already exist. “Many people – especially sick and malnourished children, older people and people with disabilities – may be unable to evacuate.”

After weeks of rising concern about Israel’s brutal use of hunger as a weapon of war in Gaza, a UN-backed panel –The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)-, has declared that famine is underway in northern Gaza, warning that by the end of September, more than 640 000 people will face Catastrophic levels of food insecurity – classified as IPC Phase 5 – across the Gaza Strip. An additional 1.14 million people in the territory will be in Emergency (IPC Phase 4) and a further 396,000 people in Crisis (IPC Phase 3) conditions. Conditions in North Gaza are estimated to be as severe – or worse – than in Gaza City. Classifying famine means that the most extreme category is triggered when three critical thresholds – extreme food deprivation, acute malnutrition and starvation-related deaths – have been breached. The latest analysis now affirms, on the basis of reasonable evidence, that these criteria have been met.

As the international community has been caught napping, the hypocritical West, especially the US, is directly and indirectly funding a livestreamed genocide and the pathetic Muslim world acting like a deer in the headlights, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has escalated into one of the most severe emergencies in recent history. Israel has been using starvation of civilians as a deliberate tactic of warfare in the occupied Gaza Strip, with the continuing blockade of Gaza amounting to collective punishment of the civilian population, war crimes indeed! After months of the world seeing images of starving children, with distended stomachs and protruding bones, sure tell-tale signs that a famine was imminent, were long overdue.

Finding food has become a deadly endeavour for Palestinians, and they have to choose between starvation and death, referring to the near-daily shootings of people trying to get aid at GHF distribution sites. The UN has recorded the killing of at least 994 Palestinians in the vicinity of GHF sites, since late May, some of the 1,760 killed trying to access aid. The UN says the majority killed were shot by Israeli troops, something corroborated by many eye-witnesses and medics in Gaza.

Deliberate starvation of civilians is a gross violation of international law and causes unbearable suffering, and threatens to normalise such crimes in future conflicts. Using starvation as a method of warfare is explicitly prohibited under Article 54 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions and is defined as a war crime under Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. These frameworks recognise actions, such as destroying agricultural infrastructure, blocking humanitarian aid, and depriving civilians of essential resources (eg, food, water, and medicine) as illegal and morally indefensible.

Since the Israeli military’s ground incursion into Rafah (March 18, 2025), which is the main humanitarian crossing, aid flows have nearly stopped. This closure has led to the longest and most severe blockade of humanitarian assistance since the war began. Aid agencies report depleted stockpiles, empty markets, and skyrocketing prices—up to 1400% for basic food items—leaving families unable to feed their children. Malnutrition among children in Gaza is accelerating at a catastrophic pace. In July alone, more than 12,000 children were identified as acutely malnourished – the highest monthly figure ever recorded and a six-fold increase since the start of the year. Nearly one in four of these children was suffering from severe acute malnutrition (SAM), the deadliest form with both short and long-term impacts. Gaza’s health system has severely deteriorated, access to safe drinking water and sanitation services has been drastically reduced, while multi-drug-resistant infections are surging and levels of morbidity – including diarrhoea, fever, acute respiratory and skin infections – are alarmingly high among children.

The world has waited too long, watching tragic and unnecessary deaths mount from this livestreamed Genocide and a deliberately engineered man-made famine involving widespread malnutrition. This means that even common and usually mild diseases like diarrhoea are becoming fatal, especially for children, which the broken health system, run by hungry and exhausted health workers, cannot cope. Gaza must be urgently supplied with food and medicines to save lives and begin the process of reversing malnutrition. Hospitals must be protected so that they can continue treating patients. Aid blockages must end, and peace must be restored, so that healing can begin. However, genocidal Israel, with US complicity, is being allowed to run amok with impunity, making a mockery of international law and the legal order.   Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has already killed more than 60,000 Palestinians and wounded over 125,000, according to reliable figures.

Millions worldwide are appalled by what they see as the total failure of the international legal order to prevent Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Despite many judgments by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), there is a growing sense of frustration that the law has not done its job. True, in its first ruling, the court agreed that Israeli actions in Gaza “plausibly” constitute genocide and that the situation was so horrific that it justified provisional measures. However, despite these incontrovertible facts, the court did not order the one measure that could stop the genocide: an immediate and permanent ceasefire. The court only ordered Israel to “implement all measures in its power to avoid the commission of acts of genocide, to allow humanitarian aid in, and to report on all measures taken within 30 days.” That decision left the international community trapped in the absurd position of having to sit with the perpetrators of genocide and discuss for months whether they are doing everything in their power to avoid what they have publicly declared they intended to do, and are actually doing.

As the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan recounted, after seeking arrest warrants against war criminals in Israel, many Western governments clearly believe that international courts were created only for “Africans and thugs like Putin.”. Today, Judges and officials of the ICC are facing US sanctions for having acted against Israel and the US. Thus, critics further argue that the international legal order was built to administer colonial violence, not to end wars, and that poses serious questions for the Palestinian struggle.

As Israel continues to escalate its military operations in Gaza, while senior Israeli Ministers have expressed their intention to “take control of all the territory of the [Gaza] Strip” and “conquer, cleanse and stay – until Hamas is destroyed”, further stating “what remains of the Strip is also being wiped out,” some Western leaders such as in UK, Australia, France, and Canada are starting to recognise that the level of human suffering in Gaza is “intolerable” and warns of possible “further concrete actions” against Israel. However, they continue to play a supportive role in Israel’s genocidal war by supplying arms and also trying to stifle local democratic opposition to the ongoing genocide. A recent example is the UK ban on Palestine Action, -‘a disturbing’ misuse of UK counter-terrorism law’, as the UN warns.

Meanwhile, the Islamic world, through the umbrella organisation OIC, has been good at putting out statements. However, this approach hasn’t varied much from that of the wider global community. It is largely verbal and void of any practical measures.  Surely, Muslim states can and should be doing more. For example, the OIC has failed to persuade Israel’s neighbouring states – Egypt and Jordan, in particular – to open their border crossings to allow humanitarian aid to flow into Gaza, the West Bank or Israel, in defiance of Israeli leaders. Nor has it been able to compel Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco to suspend their relations with the Jewish state until it agrees to a two-state solution. Further, the OIC has not adopted a call by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, for Israel to be suspended from the UN. Nor has it urged its oil-rich Arab members, in particular Saudi Arabia and the UAE, to harness their resources to prompt President Trump to halt the supply of arms to Israel and pressure Netanyahu to end the war.

There are many reasons for the OIC’s ineffectiveness. For one, the group is composed of a politically, socially, culturally and economically diverse assortment of members. But more importantly, it has not functioned as a “bridge builder” by developing a common strategy of purpose and action that can overcome the geopolitical and sectarian differences of its members. In the current polarised international environment, the rivalry among its member states – and with major global powers such as the United States and China – has rendered the organisation a mere talking shop. It is time to look at the OIC’s functionality and determine how it can more effectively develop an effective common strategy that could help the cause of peace and stability in the Muslim domain and its relations with the outside world.

The “tragicomedy of international law”, in essence, stems from the enduring gap between the grand promises of international law and its flawed, often cynical, implementation and outcomes. The rules-based international order is dying. This isn’t alarmism; it’s a cold, hard fact staring us in the face. This breakdown isn’t happening in a vacuum. And the rules-based international order is not exclusively being “undone” by the ‘bad actors’ like Russia and China. It’s the result of decades of hypocrisy, failed policies, and a refusal to adapt to changing global realities. The West has consistently applied international law selectively, undermining its own credibility as a defender of the rules-based order. Exceptionalist support of countries like Israel, flagrantly disregarding international law while sanctioning others for doing so, speaks loudly to those who also might wish to breach international law.

A ceasefire now is also a ceasefire years too late; a ceasefire 60,000 dead Palestinians too late. A ceasefire now is a ceasefire that did not happen after all the hospitals were bombed, after babies decomposed in the hospital ICUs, or after doctor after doctor spoke of children having their limbs amputated without pain relief. It would be a ceasefire that did not happen after Hind Rajab was trapped in the car with her murdered relatives, calling for help, her whereabouts unknown for days, or after it became clear that Israel had targeted the ambulance that was going to save her. It would be a ceasefire that did not happen despite hundreds of videos of parents grieving their dead children; of children covered in dust and blood and paralyzed by shock sitting alone, as sole survivors of whole family trees. A ceasefire now is one severe famine too late. It answers the question that many of us asked at the start: how many Palestinian deaths until Israel’s right to self-defence is no longer limitless. The point here is not just that a ceasefire now is too little too late; it is that the damage caused, the trauma suffered and the destruction of life as it was known in Gaza is so profound that a ceasefire, while necessary, seems a little bit like putting a single band aid on 100,000 bullet wounds. And it is difficult to imagine what an adequate redress would be for the harm caused. But, still, this genocidal war should end a least now, and those responsible should be brought to account, at least to salvage the credibility of international law.