STARVED

Gaza is starving.

The UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) has declared a Phase 5 famine – the highest level of food crisis. It’s only triggered when all three of these are true:

• 20% of households have no food and no way to cope,

• 30% of children under five are acutely malnourished,

• At least 2 people per 10,000 die every day.

This is Gaza’s reality.

Famine is rarely about weather or bad luck. This one, like so many before it, is man-made. Starvation as a weapon is banned under the Geneva Conventions and is classified as a war crime. Destroying farms, blocking aid, cutting off food, water, or medicine is illegal and morally indefensible.

Israel is doing these things, but the international community, companies, and many governments has been at best silent, and at worst, complicit in this horror show. Decades of blank cheques of military aid, bullshit “both sides” rhetoric while children’s ribs poke through skin. Western politicians parroting Israeli ministers “Israel has a right to defend itself” while bombs flattened homes, helped get us to this moment.

Israel does not have the right to illegally occupy Palestinian land and impose collective punishment for resistance. Every veto, every diplomatic shield thrown up at the UN helped build this catastrophe.

The Great Hunger Memorial in Dublin

“The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

This horror isn’t new; Ireland bore this before. Starvation wasn’t fate—it was imposed, deliberate, and devastating. To call what happened in Ireland a famine is an insult because it implies a natural disaster. It wasn’t. An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) was policy, calculated, and cruel.

In the 1840s, the potato blight wiped out crops, but the over-reliance on potatoes wasn’t some quaint Irish quirk. People were pushed onto tiny plots of poor land by English and Anglo-Irish landlords, forced into a monocrop diet to survive while the best land grew grain and cattle for export. When the blight hit, they had nothing else to fall back on. At first, the British government made some moves to help – importing American maize and trying to repeal the Corn Laws to lower food prices. But when Lord John Russell took over as prime minister, the mood shifted. He believed in non-intervention, at least when it came to saving Irish lives. Helping was seen as meddling; giving Ireland back to the Irish was still unthinkable.

Parts of the British press and political class openly argued that the famine was a kind of social “correction” for what they saw as Irish “laziness” or “overpopulation.” Charles Trevelyan, the senior official overseeing relief, said that “The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people” and declaed the conditions in Ireland an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population” and even “the judgment of God.” The thinking was ugly: that mass hunger would “civilise” the Irish, make them work harder, or clear land for more profitable use.

Most shocking was the butter: over 820,000 gallons exported to England in nine months, even as bellies in Ireland swelled from hunger.

Captain Robert Bennet Forbes who had arrived in Cork Harbour 1847, with desperately needed food remarked, “I saw enough in five minutes to horrify me. Hovels crowded with the sick and dying, without floors, without furniture, and with patches of dirty straw covered with still dirtier shreds and patches of humanity; some called for water to Father Mathew, and others for a dying blessing.”

By this point in Skibbereen, West Cork, one of the worst it parts of the country, death had settled into the ordinary. Funerals so frequent they blurred together., A Cork Examiner editorial described the desolation, “A terrible apathy, like that which oppresses a plague-driven people, seems to hang over the poor of Skibbereen ... One scanty funeral is fast followed by another and that by another. The dead are enclosed in rude boards, having neither the appearance nor shape of a coffin and are committed to their silent resting place in the night time, when no eye can rest curiously on the rude contrivance, or observe the absence of friends and mourners, and the want of all that ceremony so grateful to the pride and consolatory to the feelings of the Irish peasant.”

The population of Ireand has to this day not recovered to its level in 1841.

Yet at the height of the Great Hunger, vast amounts of food were being taken out of the country. In 1845, 3,251,907 quarters of grain, along with 257,257 sheep. In 1846, almost half a million swine and 186,483 oxen were loaded on ships for other markets. All while millions of Irish starved

Christine Kinealy, a leading historian of the Great Hunger, puts it starkly: in 1847, the worst year of the famine, almost 4,000 ships carried food from starving Ireland to English ports like Bristol, Glasgow, Liverpool, and London. Around 400,000 Irish men, women and children died that year, while under military guard food was shipped out from some of the hungriest regions—Ballina, Bantry, Dingle, Limerick, Sligo, Tralee and more. It wasn’t just grain; peas, onions, rabbits, salmon, oysters, honey, even soap and glue left the country. Most shocking was the butter: over 820,000 gallons exported to England in nine months, even as bellies in Ireland swelled from hunger.

And that’s the echo in Gaza. There is food for the people. Trucks sit loaded, warehouses brim with supplies, ships wait offshore. The problem isn’t scarcity – it’s access. Borders are sealed, checkpoints crawl, and aid is throttled or blocked outright. Grain, medicine, clean water – all there, all within reach – but people are dying because the gates stay shut. Starvation isn’t an accident; it’s enforced.

When a powerful state decides another people are expendable, hunger becomes a weapon. Starvation isn’t an accident; it’s brutal mathematics.

So, what now?

Stop the “deep concerns” commentary. Force Israel to open the gates and drop the blockades, let the food and medicine in. Airlifts, convoys, boots on the ground if that’s what it takes – and then hold every culprit to account: the ones who ordered the strikes, the ones who signed the arms deals, the ones who smiled for photo ops while Gaza starved. And quit polishing Trump’s ego like he’s some genius statesman. He’s a malignant narcissist – treat him like the danger he is, not a man to be flattered.

People are starving because someone chose to let them. History judged An Gorta Mór as one of the darkest chapters in the story of a malevolent empire; Gaza will be judged the same.