Famine does not arrive with the roar of a bomb, but with the empty silence of a swollen belly. It is an absence that weighs heavier than any presence, a non-sound that resonates louder than any explosion. In 2025, for the first time in the history of the Middle East, this absence has an official name: Phase 5 IPC famine in the Gaza Governorate. It is not the careless hand of nature tightening around the population’s throat, but the calculated hand of man turning bread into bullets, water into weapons, the simple reality of human need into complex war strategy.

Numbers have the cold comfort of objectivity. Over 640,000 souls trapped in the grip of catastrophic hunger, while another 1.14 million struggle in emergency conditions. These figures, in their statistical crudeness, hide a deeper truth: 157 children who no longer cry because they are too weak to do so, their emaciated bodies becoming the final refuge in a war fought without weapons. The prices of essential goods have ceased to follow the laws of economics and now follow the laws of siege: flour skyrockets to levels of +3,400%, not due to crop failure, but by strategic design.

The very landscape has become complicit in this strategy of starvation. Over 98% of arable land lies mutilated, a cemetery of agricultural potential. The greenhouses, once symbols of resilience, have been reduced to dust by 70%, while agricultural wells stand nearly 80% unused. The olive trees, pillars not just of economic but of cultural Palestinian life, have been 90% felled - not as collateral damage, but as a deliberate amputation of identity. The FAO now classifies Gaza among the world’s four worst food crises, alongside Sudan, Yemen, and Afghanistan, but with a unique characteristic: it is the only one where the famine has been entirely man-made.

The mechanism of this artificial famine operates with surgical precision. The siege is no longer just military; it becomes metabolic, attacking the very process through which a body transforms food into life. The food distribution system has been replaced by militarily controlled entities, like the controversial “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” which, according to IPC analyses, not only distributes insufficient aid but deliberately excludes the most vulnerable. The result is a grotesque paradox: even when food manages to get in, it does not reach those who need it most.

UN agencies speak of numbers that betray a strategy: often, less than 15% of the food necessary for minimal survival makes it in. UN trucks are systematically looted not out of criminality, but out of that “growing desperation” that turns civilians into starving ghosts. The bakeries still standing close one after another not for lack of bakers, but for lack of flour. This is hunger as architecture, designed brick by brick through restrictions on humanitarian access, calculated interruptions of supplies, the methodical demolition of food self-sufficiency.

Gaza is not an exception, but the most vivid example of a global pathology. In 2025, armed conflicts emerge as the primary cause of acute hunger for 140 million people worldwide. Nearly half - 47% - of all global acute hunger cases are born directly from war. The Global Risks Report 2025 ranks interstate armed conflict as the most urgent global risk, testifying to how geopolitics is increasingly choosing the stomach as a battlefield.

The global scenario shows invisible threads linking different crises: the Russia-Ukraine war demonstrated how global food systems can become hostages to geopolitical tensions, with Moscow and Kiev together representing over 30% of world cereal exports. In Sudan, famine has been confirmed in the ZamZam camp, while in Yemen, eleven million children live through one of the planet’s worst humanitarian crises. They are pieces of the same mosaic depicting a world where food is increasingly becoming a weapon of mass destruction on a slow fuse.

Faced with this reality, international law stands like an extinguished lighthouse. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, born from the ashes of the Nuremberg trials as a bulwark against impunity, clearly defines war crimes and crimes against humanity. Article 8 selects specific “elements of crimes” that include the deliberate destruction of civilian livelihoods, the intentional deprivation of food and water, the siege of inhabited civilian areas.

And yet, despite this legal architecture, starvation continues to be employed as a tactic of war with relative impunity. The International Criminal Court, as analysts recount, operates under immense political difficulties - from opposition by the United States and Israel to criticisms of its timelines and costs - while international enforcement mechanisms show all their cracks. The principle of complementarity, whereby the Court intervenes only when states “are unwilling or unable” to prosecute the guilty, often proves a perfect alibi for inaction.

What is happening in Gaza therefore represents something deeper than a humanitarian crisis: it is a symptom of an ethical collapse, an indicator of a fracture in the very conception of shared humanity. When food becomes a weapon, it is not only the body that dies, but the very social contract that binds civilized nations.

Humanitarian organizations - FAO, UNICEF, WFP, WHO - repeat the same request like a mantra: an immediate ceasefire and unimpeded humanitarian access. But their voices are lost in the clamor of geopolitical interests and the ruthless logic of asymmetric warfare. The WHO Director-General speaks of “man-made starvation,” while the UNICEF Executive Director describes children “too weak to cry or eat.”

Perhaps the deepest question is not how this is possible, but why we continue to allow it to happen. Why, faced with the transformation of the most basic need into a tool of oppression, the international response proves so inadequate. Hunger as a weapon does not only kill bodies - it kills trust in law, in diplomacy, in the very idea of civilization.

In the silence that follows the last cannon shot, only the dull sound of an empty stomach remains. And in that sound, the echo of a failure that is not just political, but profoundly human.