IN GAZA, the ongoing weaponized starvation, first planned by Israel almost two decades ago, plays a key role in the ethnic cleansing and the genocidal atrocities.
In brutality, these manufactured famines are at par with Imperial Britain’s hunger experiments in India and the Nazi concentration camps, as evidenced by empirical, historical evidence. Here’s an excerpt from my new book, The Obliteration Doctrine.
Hunger experiments from Imperial India to Gaza
In 2006, when Hamas won the Palestinian election, Israel and the US-led West launched economic sanctions against the Palestinians. The blockade was the result of a deliberate attempt to push the Gazan economy “to the brink of collapse,” according to a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.
The average daily calorie intake critical to survival is estimated at 2,100 kilocalories (kcal) per day. The Israeli “Red Line” document used a higher calculation of 2,279 calories per person, taking into account the presumed domestic food production in Gaza.
Such calculations have a dark history in colonial settler societies. During the 1876 Southern Indian Famine, the British Famine Commissioner Sir Richard Temple implemented human experiments to maximize British revenues. Seeking to determine the minimum amount of food for survival, he projected the figure at around 1,627 kcal. These experiments caused millions of Indians to perish.
Similarly, in Gaza, the Netanyahu cabinet sought to put the Palestinians “on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” During the 2008–2009 Gaza War, the Strip was subjected to a “Shoah” (Hebrew for Holocaust), as Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai admitted.
From US mass starvation to the SS and Israeli Generals’ Plan
The 2018 UN Security Council adopted unanimously resolution 2417 condemning the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and the unlawful denial of humanitarian access to civilian populations. In Gaza, most of its tenets have been violated by Israel and the West’s complicity in these crimes.
In historical review, the Israeli total siege of the densely inhabited Gaza and its 2.3 million Palestinian refugees has affinities with the siege of Leningrad and its 3.1 million people. Part of the Nazi Hungerplan by SS ideologue Herbert Backe, the original grand objective was to forcibly starve 31-45 million Soviets and Eastern Europeans by redirecting food stocks to German forces.
Along with American eugenics and white racism, it was the US treatment of Native Americans that inspired the hunger policies in Hitler’s Germany.
In Gaza, the original Israeli “Generals’ Plan,” premised on the blocking of food supplies and epidemics, could not be carried out in full due to international opposition. But its partial execution drove the Strip to risk of famine already in fall 2024, with top UN officials describing the situation in northern Gaza as “apocalyptic” because everyone there was “at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine, and violence.”
Prelude to ethnic cleansing and genocide
Set in comparative historical context, the weaponization of mass starvation has long been associated with imperial and colonial activities, setting the stage for genocidal atrocities.
In this view, the Nazi concentration camps can be traced to genocidal atrocities in colonial concentration camps, such as the British camps during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), followed by the Herero and Namaqua genocide (1904–1908) under the German Empire.
From the British Empire in India to German South West Africa (now Namibia), famine and starvation have served as a prelude to the final genocide, as stressed by Raphael Lemkin, the pioneer scholar of mass atrocities and the father of the Genocide Convention, in his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944).
Historically, mass starvation and genocides entered a new stage in the Nazi era, thanks to industrial atrocities, greater efficiencies in assembly-line mass murder, and scientific innovation. In a surreal manner, concentration camps and mass starvation went hand in hand with modernity in the West.
One (very rough) way of comparing such efforts across time and place is the calorie count.
Calorie intake: from concentration camps to Gaza
The Nazi siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) from fall 1941 to January 1944 was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history. When German armies prevented food supplies from reaching the city, half of the city’s population of 2.4 million died, mainly as a result of starvation. In the fatal “Hunger Winter” period, the average daily ration was barely 300 calories.
Daily Calorie Intake in Extreme Situations: Selected Examples. Source: FAO (UN, 2023), Oxfam
An even lower official calorie count was documented in the Warsaw Ghetto hunger study in 1942. Determined to starve the ghetto in just months, the Nazis only permitted a daily intake of 180 calories per prisoner. Hence, the thriving black market. Whatever the ultimate daily intake, it paved the way from starvation to death.
What about Gaza?
Why the silence?
Measured in terms of total food deliveries into the Strip since October 2023, the calorie intake was about 860 kcal, a third less than in the Nazi camps over eight decades ago.
As the German invasion of the Soviet Union failed and the tide of World War II shifted, the Nazi camps deteriorated, with the daily intake shrinking to 700 kcal in 1944. That’s almost three times the intake of 245 kcal in northern Gaza in the first half of the year 2024, when the New York Post famously headlined
that there was “no famine in Gaza.”
The mass starvation of Gaza was first tested by Israel almost two decades ago. It has been applied since early spring 2024.
Throughout this period, Israel has claimed that there is no genocide in Gaza. The US has supported its client state in the name of “rules-based order.” Europe has followed in the footsteps.
Except for Al Jazeera, TRT World, and a few others, international media have largely ignored mass starvation until recently.
Weaponized starvation marks the moral collapse of the US-led West in the early 21st century. It is a blueprint for far worse in the future, elsewhere.
The author of The Obliteration Doctrine and The Fall of Israel, Dr Steinbock is an internationally recognized visionary of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net
P.S. This is a highly abbreviated version of the original book excerpt published by TRT World on July 21, 2025. For The Obliteration Doctrine (Clarity Press), see https://www.amazon.com/Obliteration-Doctrine-Genocide-Prevention Israel/dp/1963892224
