Israel’s Gaza Starvation Op: Depravity in Broad Daylight

August 4, 2025

By Jean-Pierre Filiu, Professor at Sciences Po (Paris Institute of Political Studies)

Source: French Newspaper Le Monde, August 3, 2025

Translation Alain Marshall

Airdrops in conflict zones are “the least effective means of distributing” humanitarian aid. That was the categorical conclusion drawn by the U.S. military following its large-scale airdrop campaign in northern Iraq in the spring of 1991. At the time, hundreds of thousands of Kurds had fled to the mountains near the Turkish border to escape repression by Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The United States, the United Kingdom, and France had imposed a no-fly zone on Iraqi aircraft in the far north of the country. But the airdrops caused numerous casualties among the refugees — people were crushed by aid pallets, violent fights broke out over supplies, and some parachuted goods landed in minefields.

Military personnel involved in the operation protested that it was more of a media spectacle than an effective relief effort, eventually securing authorization to deliver aid by helicopter rather than by parachute. Even that was just a stopgap, until truck convoys were able to deliver humanitarian assistance worthy of the name.

The failure of aid airdrops in northern Iraq was so severe that such operations were avoided for over three decades. It took Israel’s determination to weaponize aid as a tool of pressure against Gaza’s population — violating the core principles of humanitarian law — for this makeshift tactic to resurface.

By February 2024, four months of unprecedented Israeli bombardment, followed by an equally brutal ground assault, had triggered catastrophic famine in Gaza City and the north of the enclave, which were cut off from the rest of the Strip. A 25-kilogram bag of flour was selling for $1,000, leading to the tragedy known as the “flour massacre” on February 29, 2024: 118 people were killed — shot by the Israeli army, crushed by tanks, or trampled to death in the panic of an aid distribution turned nightmare.

Then-U.S. President Joe Biden pledged a “massive increase in humanitarian aid delivered daily to Gaza.” Yet he was unable to convince (sic) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reopen land access to the enclave, despite urgent appeals from all major humanitarian organizations. The U.S. military launched an airdrop campaign, delivering 1,000 tons of aid within a few weeks.

Still, that total amounted to just 40 truckloads of aid per month — while the United Nations had been calling for the restoration of the pre-conflict flow of at least 500 trucks per day, as was the case until October 2023. Nevertheless, the UK, France, Jordan, and Spain joined the airdrop campaign, whose media visibility far outweighed its operational impact. And never mind that, on March 8, 2024, a plane from the United Arab Emirates dropped a crate with a faulty parachute that crashed, killing five Palestinians.

The failure of aerial aid was so glaring that the U.S. turned to another stopgap: shipping food by sea, using a temporary pier built in cooperation with the Israeli army. That effort was no more effective. After a month, only the equivalent of a single day’s minimum food supply had been delivered for Gaza’s population.

On June 12, 2024, the United Nations announced that at least 32 people, including 28 children under the age of 5, had already died of starvation in the Gaza Strip. In reality, the Israeli offensive on Rafah had closed the last border crossing with Egypt, leaving an entire exhausted population at the mercy of the occupying forces. The few dozen trucks allowed in daily, on average, during the summer and fall of 2024, were also regularly looted by gangs operating on behalf of Israel. It was only during the truce from January 19 to March 2, 2025, that a normal flow of humanitarian aid trucks was restored.

Donald Trump, who succeeded Joe Biden in the White House, supported the resumption of the Israeli offensive on March 19. The United Nations and humanitarian organizations are now excluded from aid distribution, which has been taken over by a U.S.-funded “foundation”, protected by the Israeli army. These distributions regularly descend into carnage, hence the nickname “Hunger Games” used in the Palestinian enclave.

However, the recent broadcast of shocking images and damning testimonies about the famine in Gaza has finally forced Israel to slightly loosen its grip. Nonetheless, the number of trucks allowed in remains well below the bare minimum required by a population literally on the brink of starvation. And as in March 2024, the airdrops carried out by Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany serve more as a media alibi than an effective humanitarian operation. For instance, all of the aid recently dropped by Spain amounts to only half the load of a single humanitarian truck.

Finally, it is worth recalling that since November 2024, Netanyahu has been under an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court, for, among other charges, “starving civilians, which constitutes a war crime.”