Just a few weeks of extra aid shipments during the ceasefire in January and February this year provided enough calories to bring Gaza back from the brink of famine, UN data shows.
However, in May only a trickle of food returned, in quantities that served only to slow Gaza’s descent into starvation, not stop it. Two months on, the scale of suffering has now spurred another round of international outrage, including demands from Donald Trump to get “every ounce of food” to starving children.
In response Netanyahu has promised only “minimal” extra aid. The number of food trucks entering the territory has risen, but is still well below the minimum needed to feed Palestinians there, much less reverse a famine.
Airdrops, used intermittently throughout the war, have also restarted, with France, Germany, the UK, Egypt, Jordan and the UAE among the countries announcing flights even though parachuting in food is expensive, inefficient and occasionally deadly.
Last year at least 12 people drowned trying to recover food that landed in the sea, and at least five were killed when pallets fell on them.
In the first 21 months of war, 104 days of airdrops supplied the equivalent of just four days of food for Gaza, Israeli data shows, for a cost running to tens of millions of dollars. Spent on trucks, the same budget would deliver much more food, but the price of these flights is not only a monetary one.
They allow Israel and its allies to frame starvation as a catastrophe caused by logistics, not a crisis created by state policy.
Airdrops would usually be ordered as a last resort to feed people in emergency situations where hostile armed forces or geography make road deliveries impossible. In Gaza the only obstacles to driving aid across the border are restrictions imposed by Israel, an ally of many western nations including Britain, and armed with British and US weapons.
Two Israeli-based rights groups this week declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, with reports citing evidence including the weaponisation of hunger. B’tselem described an “official and openly declared policy” of mass starvation.
Israel’s government knows how much food Gaza’s people need to survive, and how much food goes into the territory, and in the past used that data to calculate how much food was needed to avoid starvation.
The vast gap between the calories Gaza needs, and the food that has entered since March makes clear that Israeli officials are doing different maths today. They cannot pass responsibility for this human-made famine to anyone else, and nor can their allies.
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