When Starvation Is a Weapon, the Harvest Is Shame

As Palestinians die of starvation under occupation, it brings grim echoes of another famine nearly two centuries ago in Ireland.

In a work entitled “Irish Famine 4,” Palestinian-American journalist and artist Sam Husseini combined grass and paint to commemorate a bitter time in Irish history when starving people died with their mouths stained green because, according to historian Christine Kinealy, their last meal was grass. Shamefully, British occupiers profited from exporting out of Ireland the food crops so desperately needed. During a seven-year period beginning in 1845, one million Irish people died from starvation and related diseases. It was a deliberate mass killing, employing one of the most horrific means of execution imaginable—an excruciating descent of weeks’ duration into despair, delirium, and bodily immobility while one’s attention, one’s character, is gradually reduced to little more than appetite and pain.

Now, in the occupied Gaza Strip, as weapons dealers benefit from increasing military shipments to Israel, Palestinians have resorted to eating mixtures of grass and animal feed. The past five months of Israeli siege, bombing, and displacement have killed more than 31,000—mostly women and children—but a process of famine long underway is clearly about to expand that number exponentially, particularly among children.

Human Rights Watch says the Israeli government is starving civilians as a method of warfare in Gaza. Aiding and abetting this war crime, the United States has approved 100 military sales to Israel over the past five months. U.S. bullets, bombs, and guns have helped keep crucially needed aid from reaching millions of Palestinians. The bombs have buried or destroyed much of the food supplies which could have mitigated this horror, and they have forced vast populations to flee attacks and huddle in the city that is Israel’s latest target: Rafah. The United States continues providing the muscle behind a starvation genocide.