Starvation 'What they're doing is dismantling a society'

Starvation is not only killing Palestinians in Gaza one by one, but also destroying Palestinian society and inflicting permanent damage on bodies and minds, experts say.

- Emma Graham-Harrison

Starvation is not only killing Palestinians in Gaza one by one, but also destroying Palestinian society and inflicting permanent damage on bodies and minds, experts say. As hopes for a ceasefire rise, the threat from extreme hunger is particularly acute because Israel has continued to deploy food controls as a weapon against civilians during previous pauses in fighting, and could do so again.

Starvation forces the body to consume its own muscle and organs for energy, which can cause permanent injury; it harms children's futures by stunting their physical and mental growth; and it may even damage the health of survivors' children.

It also destroys communities by turning people against each other in their desperation for food and forcing them to do shameful things to survive. Even if they recover physically, the trauma of having to choose between children, turn away relatives, sell their own bodies or a sister or a daughter for food, stays with them for life, famine experts say.

Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, and author of Mass Starvation: the History and Future of Famine, said: "You can approach starvation as a biological phenomenon experienced by individuals, but it is also a collective social experience.

"Very often that societal element - the trauma, the shame, the loss of dignity, the violation of taboos, the breaking of social bonds - is more significant in the memory of the experience of survivors than the individual biological experience.