Hunger as a Weapon of Genocide: Gaza, El-Fasher, and the Test of Human Conscience

By Amjad Farid Al-Tayeb

Famine is not simply the result of drought or a lack of resources; it is the outcome of political choices. This was the core argument made by Nobel Prize–winning Indian economist Amartya Sen in his groundbreaking work on poverty and famines in the 1970s. Sen demonstrated that famines are not caused by the absence of food itself, but by the absence of access to it. That truth is manifest today in its ugliest form in Gaza and El-Fasher, where hunger is being deliberately deployed as a weapon of war.

We are faced with two parallel realities. In Gaza, more than two million people are being systematically starved under Israel’s tightening siege. In El-Fasher, North Darfur, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia has imposed a blockade on one million civilians since May 2024, reviving the darkest memories of genocide in the region. These twin tragedies reveal the profound moral bankruptcy of the international system: silence, complicity, and a false neutrality that equates perpetrators with victims. What is happening in Gaza and El-Fasher demands a response that is principled and moral, not one that hides behind the false comfort of performative neutrality. To look away from the weaponization of hunger is to become complicit in its continuation.

The Bloody History of Starvation

Starvation has long been fascism’s weapon of choice in genocidal wars. History is replete with episodes showing that famine is not a natural disaster or a byproduct of war, but a deliberate strategy to break societies, humiliate communities, and destroy lives through slow death.

From Ukraine to Ethiopia, from Gaza to Darfur, the pattern is consistent: food—life’s most basic necessity—is weaponized for political and military ends.

In the 1930s, Ukraine endured one of history’s most infamous famines, the Holodomor, when Stalin’s policies of crop requisitioning led to millions of deaths. This was not a drought, but a calculated act of mass starvation. In the Nazi siege of Leningrad (1941–44), over one million people perished from hunger and cold during 872 days of encirclement. The goal was not purely military; it was to subjugate through collective suffering. In Ethiopia in the 1970s and 1980s, famine was engineered in Tigray through forced displacement and obstruction of aid. The harrowing images that shook the world were not acts of nature but consequences of policy. In Syria in the last decade, the sieges of Ghouta and Homs forced civilians to eat grass for survival—a deliberate tactic of repression.

Today, in Gaza and El-Fasher, these patterns repeat, part of a dark continuum: the systematic use of hunger as a political weapon.

Gaza and the Prolonged Palestinian Tragedy

Gaza lies at the heart of the protracted Middle East conflict, where generations of Palestinians have been trapped in a cycle of dispossession and suffering. Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks and Israel’s subsequent military response, over 2.3 million people in Gaza have lived under a suffocating siege cutting off the lifelines of survival.

By August 2025, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) formally declared Gaza at Phase 5—full-blown famine, the highest level of food insecurity.

This is no accident of circumstance. Reports from Amnesty International and UN experts show how Israel’s restrictions on aid entry, combined with the destruction of farmland and water systems, systematically collapsed Gaza’s ability to sustain itself. International famine scholar Alex de Waal has accused Israel of committing “genocidal starvation,” warning that the scars will last for generations.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called Gaza a “man-made catastrophe,” but his statements skirt naming those responsible. Such omissions reduce famine to a political talking point, deflecting from accountability. This rhetorical neutrality normalizes starvation as a legitimate weapon of war, allowing perpetrators to hide behind politics while children starve daily, unable to wait for ceasefire talks or prisoner swaps.

Israel’s blockade on food and medicine, whatever its stated security rationale, cannot be justified. It violates international humanitarian law, entrenches impunity, and erodes the moral foundations of global conscience.

El-Fasher and the Shadow of Genocide

In Sudan, El-Fasher—the capital of North Darfur—has become the epicenter of another famine. Since April 2023, Sudan’s army and the RSF have fought a devastating war displacing millions. But since May 2024, the RSF has laid siege to El-Fasher, cutting off roads, looting convoys, and blocking humanitarian aid. The IPC warns famine could engulf more than 1.5 million people in the city and surrounding displacement camps.

Families have been reduced to eating animal fodder while children die of acute malnutrition under relentless shelling. The RSF—descendants of the Janjaweed militia—are deliberately using starvation as a weapon, echoing the genocidal campaigns of 2003–08. The U.S. has designated RSF atrocities as genocide.

According to ACLED data, by the end of 2024 the RSF was responsible for 77% of all civilian-targeted violence in Sudan, with trends continuing into 2025. A July 2025 report from the independent group Insights documented 765 civilian deaths that month, 88% attributed to the RSF.

Despite this, international responses have been paralyzed. In June 2025, Guterres proposed a seven-day humanitarian truce to allow aid into El-Fasher. Sudan’s government accepted at the highest levels, but the RSF rejected the plan and escalated attacks, killing 89 civilians in just ten days that August.

On August 18, Sudan’s Prime Minister appealed directly to the UN Security Council, insisting that El-Fasher represented “not just a humanitarian crisis, but a moral test for the United Nations.” His words stripped away excuses for inaction, challenging the world to confront starvation as genocide.

Geopolitical entanglements have shielded the RSF from accountability. UN expert reports and U.S. briefings to Congress confirm foreign weapons supplies enabling RSF atrocities. Sudan has presented evidence at the International Court of Justice that the militia’s backers not only armed them but also provided political cover to block accountability. Even Western governments, including the UK, have been accused of soft-pedaling criticism, providing a further shield of impunity.

Complicity, Neutrality, and the Global Moral Test

Gaza and El-Fasher are not isolated crises. They are symptoms of a crumbling post–World War II order where starvation is openly used as coercion, and political calculations excuse atrocity.

Addressing these crises requires more than statements of concern:

1. Redefine “Responsibility to Protect.” It must be reclaimed as a moral commitment to shield civilians from extermination, not reduced to a synonym for military intervention.

2. Guarantee aid delivery. Food and medicine cannot wait. Airdrops are no longer a last resort in Gaza and El-Fasher—they are the only option, as proven in Berlin, the Nuba Mountains, and South Sudan.

3. Name and shame perpetrators. It is not enough to condemn obstruction of aid. The guilty—whether local militias or foreign sponsors—must be identified and prosecuted.

4. Ensure accountability. Starvation is a crime of genocide. Responsibility must be directly assigned: to Israel for Gaza, and to the RSF and its backers for Sudan.

5. Reject false neutrality. Equating perpetrators with their victims is not impartiality but complicity.

As Amartya Sen warned, famine is not inevitable—it is political. What politics create, politics can undo. But only if the world acknowledges, and acts.

The twin tragedies of Gaza and El-Fasher are not separate catastrophes; they are a final warning. Unless humanity reclaims its conscience, starvation will define 21st-century warfare, stripping human rights of all meaning and leaving morality as nothing more than empty rhetoric.