Starving Gaza ‘politically calculated’ part of Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians: Scholar

By Press TV Website Staff

The Israeli regime is deliberately using starvation in the besieged and war-ravaged Gaza Strip to advance its political and colonial objectives, says a Malaysian scholar and activist.

In an interview with the Press TV website, Mohd Azmi Abdul Hamid, President of Malaysia Consultative Council of Islamic Organizations (MAPIM), said the Tel Aviv regime is using “hunger as a weapon.”

He said what the world is witnessing today is the “collapse of all ethical boundaries, noting that the weaponization of aid is not accidental but “a strategic, deliberate, and politically calculated move.”

Israel launched its genocidal war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, but despite wreaking havoc in the coastal Palestinian territory for more than 600 days and killing more than 60,000 Palestinians, most of them children and women, the regime has failed to meet its stated military objectives.

Since May alone, Israeli regime forces have killed more than 1,500 Palestinians seeking humanitarian aid, with over 8,800 others injured — most of them at Gaza’s food distribution centers operated by the US-Israeli-run GHF, which has come to be known as “death trap.”

Human rights organizations worldwide have denounced the illegal and crippling blockade on essential supplies as a crime against humanity and a blatant breach of international law.

According to UN agencies, over 6,000 Palestinian children are currently suffering from malnutrition as a result of Israel’s complete siege on the territory. The blockade has also led to the deaths of at least 175 people—including 93 children—who have starved in Gaza since the beginning of the war.

Excerpts from the interview with the Malaysian scholar and activist, Dr. Hamid:

Q. How do Israeli policies restricting food, water, and medicine into Gaza align with international humanitarian law, particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention's prohibitions against collective punishment and the use of starvation as a method of warfare?

A. Israel’s deliberate restriction of essential supplies—food, water, fuel, and medicine—into Gaza constitutes a blatant violation of international humanitarian law. The Fourth Geneva Convention, particularly Article 33, explicitly prohibits collective punishment.

Starving a civilian population to force submission is an inhumane war tactic and is recognized under Article 54 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions as a war crime.

Israel’s actions amount to systematic starvation—a crime of inhumane and disproportionate violence against an entire civilian population.

It is a form of extermination that reflects genocidal intent. No state can claim moral high ground or democratic legitimacy while imposing such policies.

Q. Observers believe Israel is deliberately using hunger as a pressure tactic to achieve military and political objectives in Gaza. What does this reveal about the ethical boundaries the occupation regime is willing to cross in its ongoing campaign?

A. What we are witnessing is the collapse of all ethical boundaries. Israel’s use of starvation is not accidental—it is strategic, deliberate, and politically calculated.

By using hunger as a weapon, Israel is reducing humanitarian needs to bargaining chips. This reveals that the regime is willing to violate every norm of morality, religion, and civilization to achieve its military and settler-colonial goals.

It exposes a terrifying truth: that the occupation is not just a military project, but a dehumanization campaign against the Palestinian people.

There are no red lines for this regime—only expanding zones of impunity.

Q. What responsibility do Western governments and UN agencies bear in failing to stop the weaponization of aid—especially when many of them fund or politically shield the Israeli regime?

A. Western governments, especially those that provide military aid and political cover to Israel, are directly complicit. They cannot hide behind the façade of neutrality while funding and shielding a regime that commits mass starvation and ethnic cleansing.

Their double standards and silence have not only undermined the credibility of international institutions like the UN but have emboldened Israel to act with impunity. These governments are not just bystanders; they are accomplices to war crimes. Their failure to act is a moral failure of the global order.

Q. The UN says more than 1,500 Palestinians have been killed in the so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Fund” centers while seeking aid, as the centers have been slammed as “death traps” by rights groups. This is happening before the world’s eyes, but Western countries that claim to champion human rights are doing nothing practically to change course and let international bodies, such as the UN, deliver the aid. What is your take on these centers?

A. The so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Fund” is a cynical propaganda tool—not a genuine humanitarian effort. To brand a project as “humanitarian” while bombing the very aid centers and starving the population is the ultimate hypocrisy.

These centers, designed under the banner of aid, have become death zones, where desperate civilians—children, women, elderly—are killed while seeking food and medicine.

This is not a humanitarian operation; it is humanitarian baiting, weaponizing aid to control, humiliate, and eliminate. The world should not be fooled by this duplicity. Western powers supporting such schemes have forfeited any claim to moral authority.

Q. Israel continues to use the impunity given by its closest ally, the US, to carry on with its atrocities in the occupied Palestinian territories and beyond. How does this impunity affect international law?

A. The US has turned Israel into a rogue entity with diplomatic insurance. The impunity it enjoys—fueled by vetoes at the UN Security Council, financial aid, and arms supplies—has rendered international law almost meaningless for Palestinians. This dangerous precedent destroys the credibility of international legal mechanisms.

If one entity can commit genocide, impose starvation, bomb hospitals and schools, and still be protected, then we no longer live under the rule of law but under the rule of power. The result is a global justice system in paralysis, eroded by selective enforcement and colonial arrogance.

History will remember this era as one of moral collapse. If the world continues to allow starvation, mass killings, and blockade against an entire population without consequences, then every international law and humanitarian principle we claim to uphold is a lie.

It is time for the people of conscience—religious leaders, scholars, civil society, and citizens of the world—to rise. We must break the siege. We must not be silent accomplices.

Because when the day of reckoning comes, the Creator will ask each of us: What did you do when Gaza was being strangled before your eyes.

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