The unfolding starvation in Gaza reveals the inadequacy of the terminology typically used to describe acute hunger and its consequent misrepresentation in public discourse. Since 2007, Gaza has endured a partial siege imposed by Israeli forces, which escalated into a comprehensive blockade in 2023, marked by heavy bombardment, the complete closure of border crossings, and the systematic destruction of farmland, food outlets, and distribution networks. This unparalleled level of military aggression has deprived Gaza’s civilian population of access to what constitutes basic sustenance. By early 2024, a number of international agencies characterised the crisis as an impending famine. Ultimately, on 22 August 2025, the United Nations formally declared the situation a ‘famine’1.
Declaring the catastrophe as famine is of course an important step towards addressing it more urgently. However, the term famine remains highly misleading. Linguistically, it evokes natural disaster, passivity, or inevitability, thereby obscuring the deliberate political choices underlying this catastrophe. For long, the term famine has concealed the political action and structural causes of the crime, presenting hunger as a natural or unavoidable event. This article deconstructs famine by translating it into starvation, in order to capture the deliberate, organised, and systematic violence behind mass deprivation, making visible the human decisions that produce death.
In fact, Gaza today compels us to confront the hidden boundaries of language within the term famine and its ethical failures. Referring to what is taking place in Gaza as famine functions as a way of neutralising responsibility and depoliticising murder. This neutralisation of responsibility has deep roots in colonial history. The historian Mike Davis provides an example from colonial India, where the British continued to compel the local population to export grain to Britain in the midst of what they themselves described as famine. By refusing to recognise it as starvation, this policy led to what Davis terms a ‘holocaust’, in which millions of Indians perished, while the role of human agency and imperial violence through starvation was obscured under the category of famine2. Similarly, though with even greater violence, the application of the term famine to Gaza risks normalising the ‘structural’ and ‘deliberate’ deprivation of food and the imposition of death by starvation, both of which constitute crimes against humanity.
In this sense, a more precise conceptual framework should also distinguish between two forms of starvation. ‘Structural starvation’ refers to the chronic and systematic reproduction of deprivation under capitalism. ‘Deliberate starvation’ designates the weaponisation of food denial as an instrument of political or military domination. This article argues that deconstructing the term famine in the twenty first century requires employing both categories of starvation, in order to expose the criminal mechanisms of hunger that the term famine has historically concealed.
Structural Starvation
Structural starvation refers to the chronic, socially reproduced undernourishment embedded in the capitalist political economy and global inequality. It is a form of hunger that is not accidental, but a long term condition produced by dispossession, neoliberal restructuring, and its colonial continuities. Political economist David Harvey describes this process as ‘accumulation by dispossession’, in which privatisation and commodification of formerly public resources displace peasant populations from the land under the pressure of imperial markets in the Global North. These mechanisms are consistently enforced by institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO3. By displacing subsistence farmers and reorganising food production for global markets, structural starvation ensures that vulnerability is normalised and persistent. In favour of Global North markets, populations in the Global South are systematically deprived not by a simplistic scarcity of food, but by structural inequalities embedded in the global economic order. Structural starvation thus constitutes a form of hunger inherent to the mechanisms of global capitalist accumulation, producing populations that remain exposed to acute and predictable crises of starvation.
Deliberate Starvation
Deliberate starvation occurs when hunger is intentionally weaponised, turning the vulnerability of populations into a deliberate instrument of political or military domination. Unlike structural starvation, which is systematic and long term, serving capitalist accumulation in the Global North, deliberate starvation is immediate, targeted, and orchestrated with death as an explicit objective.
Sociologist Jean Ziegler emphasises the political intentionality of hunger in his work on the Nazi ‘Hunger Plan’ (1941–44). The plan sought to starve millions in Eastern Europe and some Soviet territories to death by diverting local food supplies to the German forces and civilian population4. Hunger in this instance was deliberate; it was not the result of a natural event, but of political decision making. This example from Nazi Germany demonstrates how framing famine as an inevitable disaster obscures its true criminal character as deliberate starvation, a weapon of war and genocide designed to annihilate populations.
Even more alarmingly, today the Israeli actions in Gaza exemplify deliberate starvation through blockades, the targeted destruction of food infrastructure, and the control of aid, all of which constitute the intentional denial of sustenance and produce death as a strategic objective.
Conclusion: Naming the Crime Honestly
Deconstructing the term famine exposes the political and structural processes that conventional terminology conceals. ‘Structural starvation’ captures the systematic reproduction of deprivation under global capitalism, while ‘deliberate starvation’ identifies the targeted weaponisation of hunger with the aim of annihilating a population. The two are interrelated, with structural starvation generating chronic vulnerability, and deliberate starvation exploiting it for political or military objectives.
Deconstructing famine and renaming it as starvation provides both analytical clarity and ethical accountability. Recognising this distinction, with its two types—structural and deliberate—is urgent. Only by naming famine as starvation honestly can we confront the human agency behind this crime against humanity, which has too often been naturalised, depoliticised, or sanitised as famine. The starvation of Indians by the British Empire, Eastern Europeans and Sovients by Nazi Germany, and today Gaza by the Israeli occupation, alongside contemporary global crises, demonstrates that famine is rarely accidental; it is a continuum of starvation, sometimes structural, sometimes deliberate, but always the result of criminal intent.
This article has been lightly proofread using AI assistance.
- United Nations. ‘UN Declares Famine in Gaza, Urges Immediate Action to Prevent Further Starvation.’ UN News, 22 August 2025, accessed 26 August 2025, https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/08/1165702. ↩︎
- Mike Davis. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. Reprint edition. London: Verso, 2007. ↩︎
- David Harvey. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. ↩︎
- Jean Ziegler. Betting on Famine: Why the World Still Goes Hungry. New York: Verso, 2013. ↩︎