Afrasianet - Nihad Zaki - On June 11, 2024, an official account of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted a propaganda clip on the X platform, claiming that "there are no innocent civilians in Gaza." This claim came in a post accusing Palestinian civilians of participating in the October 7 attacks and harboring prisoners held by Hamas during the attack.
The clip quotes a former Israeli prisoner named Mia Shem as saying: "There are no innocent civilians there."
The clip was quickly deleted after receiving widespread critical coverage in the Western press, but it did highlight the way Israeli propaganda dehumanizes Palestinians and psychologically mobilizes occupation soldiers to carry out acts of genocide, and even tries to prepare world public opinion to accept them as "not civilians" or perhaps "not human at all" as a credence to former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who considered Palestinians "human animals."
There are many studies that originate this practice in the field of psychology in general, and war psychology in particular, where the executioner sometimes not only denies the humanity of his victim, but blames her for her tragedy in order to justify excessive violence and free himself from any moral conflict. This approach constitutes a psychological barrier, which allows the killer to live with his actions without feeling guilty, and it even gives him a false sense of power and superiority, because he does not see the victim as an equal and equal human being. Rather, it is just a scapegoat for the realization of its ambitions.
In Gaza, the most horrific manifestations of this strategy are embodied: children dying of hunger, pregnant and lactating women suffering from malnutrition, and elderly people falling into the destroyed roads under the weight of exhaustion. After some 660 days of shelling and starvation, the residents of the Gaza Strip found themselves caught between the "death traps" of hunger that kills them from behind, and the Israeli killing machine that takes their lives from the front. Even humanitarian aid has turned into death traps, after the hungry masses have been shot, killing more than 1,000 people and 6 Thousands of wounded, just because they tried to get a bite to eat.
However, this tragedy is not only a humanitarian catastrophe on the sidelines of the war, but also reveals a systematic policy related to the military objectives of the occupation army in the Gaza Strip, where food has been used as a tool of genocide since 7 October 2023, according to Amnesty International, creating a horrific mix of hunger and disease that has pushed the people of the Gaza Strip into the abyss. Starvation here is not only a tool of physical killing, but a means of breaking the will. It is a deadly psychological weapon, which creates a collective trauma aimed at To break the resistance of an entire people and push them towards surrender.
So how do studies of war psychology explain the use of hunger as a weapon? How do you explain the psychological dimensions of the perpetrators of genocide?
On July 22, 2025, Agence France-Presse issued an unprecedented statement, warning that its journalists in Gaza are at risk of starving to death, in a precedent that the agency has not known since its establishment in 1944. As for the besieged civilians, they are on the brink of a mass catastrophe that could kill 100,000 children, including 40,000 infants, due to the lack of infant formula The occupation has completely prevented the entry of humanitarian aid.
Since last March, Israel has tightened its blockade to the utmost cruelty, denying even the tiny amounts of food that were keeping the population alive. Aid agencies have declared their stocks depleted, markets are empty of goods, and basic prices have risen by 1,400 percent or more. In describing the scale of the disaster, the United Nations Integrated Food Security Classification (IPC) index revealed that the northern Gaza governorates entered the fifth and most dangerous level of the famine ladder, while the southern governorates slipped into the stage Fourth. The collapse of the food system has reached a point that requires urgent humanitarian intervention to save millions of lives.
However, what is happening today is not only the result of the recent war, as Israel's policy of starvation has extended since the imposition of the blockade on the Gaza Strip in 2007, when the occupation reduced the number of food trucks to Gaza from 400 to only 106. According to a report published by the Guardian newspaper in 2012, Israel has made accurate calculations of the amount of calories allowed to the entire population of the Gaza Strip, to keep them on the brink of collapse, and has even prepared a "menu" that determines what is allowed and what is forbidden, in a practice that was described at the time The "Gaza Diet", a codified collective punishment that summarizes the essence of the occupation's policies against the Palestinian people.
Hunger as a weapon
More broadly, starvation and blockades are used in wars as cruel tools to tear apart peoples' resilience and force them to surrender. This is what international law professor Tom Danenbaum emphasized in his article published in the Chicago Journal of International Law, where he described the suffocating siege imposed by some warring powers as "mass torture." Danenbaum drew a comparison between physical torture and mass starvation, arguing that both rob the victim of the will and destroy their ability to resist. In a siege, bodies are not targeted with bombs, but are killed by methods Others are similar to what is practiced in prisons, where pain becomes a tool of subjugation.
Deep starvation is the impulse of the body to turn on itself, material and spirit, which undermines one of the pillars of our humanity, the ability to uphold our highest moral obligations, all caused by deliberate deprivation of food. Accordingly, Danenbaum argues that mass starvation is the societal counterpart of individual torture. Although in a state of hunger the victim is not under the direct control of the executioner as in a prisoner, the goal remains the same: to try to subdue the victim and break his resistance, directly or indirectly.
More dangerously, these devastating effects do not target individuals themselves, but strike at the very fabric of society. In his books "Deadly Famine" and "Famine Crimes," Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in the United States, and an expert on famine and humanitarian crises, highlights how hunger is being used as a tool of political coercion, and that it is not just a logistical consequence of wars.
Hunger is used to suppress resistance, dismantling the identity of groups over time. It is a dual weapon: deadly but limited enough to avoid the spectacle of direct victims of violence, while undermining social cohesion and the ability to govern, and it is also a form of long-term genocide through food control, in which enough calories are provided to prevent mass death, while maintaining the extreme hunger that destroys the life of the group, in terms of being a gathering of people capable of organizing in a single framework.
This brutal approach is simply aimed at arming biology against humans, as Danenbaum puts it. It seeks to re-engineer society on a large scale from being a resistance bloc upholding its highest values and commitments, to scattered individuals mired in individual struggles for survival. In other words, hunger destabilizes the social order, reducing political and social action to a single issue: who can feed the people? In the absence of food, there is no ability to resist, to exercise political action, or even to express society's basic commonalities.
They don't see them as human beings.
At one aid distribution center, a Palestinian man from Gaza was on his knees, picking up pasta scattered from the ground. He was not armed and posed no threat at all, he was just hungry looking for a bite. Yet, the U.S. security officer sprayed him with a whole can of pepper spray!
This shocking image was included in the testimony of a former American soldier who worked for the notorious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is tasked with distributing aid in the stricken enclave. He could not bear to see the brutality practiced under the guise of aid, so he left the institution, which he described as "inhumane."
In his testimony, he spoke of the killing of a Palestinian woman by a stun grenade fired by security personnel, and of indiscriminate shooting at hungry civilians to drive them away from the aid distribution center. "I served as a soldier for more than 25 years, and I participated in four wars, but I never demanded that I shoot unarmed civilians like what happened in Gaza," he says.
Under a deceptive name, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was established in February 2025 with flashy slogans such as "alleviating hunger", while its actual function is to militarize aid and turn it into a tool of control, while preventing humanitarian organizations from doing their duty. Amnesty International, in its report issued on July 3, condemned this deadly plan, carefully formulated by Israel and supported by the United States, to use aid as another weapon in the war of starvation.
According to Human Rights Watch, the destruction of infrastructure, the targeting of hospitals, and the denial of access to food and water are deliberate policies promoted by prominent Israeli ministers such as Yoav Gallant (former defense minister) and Itamar Ben-Gvir, making it a full-fledged war crime as required by UN Resolution 2417 of 2018, which criminalizes the use of starvation as a weapon.
With the launch of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, it became the sole controller of the path of hunger and death, and the road to the sack of flour became paved with blood. Under the guise of "aid," death ambushes were set up for Palestinians. This brutal use of power raises a bitter question: How can the perpetrators of the genocide close their eyelids in reassurance when they have trapped two million people until their bellies are twisted and their children go hungry?
The answer, as psychological studies indicate, is that controlling the victim gives the executioner a false sense of superiority, as he sees her not as a human being, but as a scapegoat. Such dehumanization, coupled with racist hate speech, has permeated the discourse of the occupation since the beginning of the war, ever since former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described the residents of Gaza as "human animals," while Netanyahu invoked biblical narratives urging the extermination of the "Amalekites."
Hunger... A weapon to conquer both body and mind
In November 1944, Europe was reeling from a famine caused by the horrors of World War II, necessitating the search for solutions for post-disaster rehabilitation. American biologist Ansel Keyes launched a daring experiment known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, conducted in the University of Minnesota dormitories, involving 36 volunteers who agreed to undergo deliberate starvation for a year under medical supervision.
During the experiment, the year was divided into 3 phases: a normal diet (3200 calories per day), followed by 6 months of starvation by reducing calories to 1570 calories based on two poor meals of vegetables, bread and pasta, and then 3 months of re-nutrition. During this period, the participants underwent strenuous physical tasks for long hours a day.
The results were shocking: 25% of the participants' weight, 40% reduction in muscle mass, physical weakness, low temperature, and a slow heart rate. But the psychological impact was most severe, from depression, anxiety, obsession with food, searching for remnants in the garbage, and constant dreams about eating. Over time, a state of apathy and emotional numbness emerged, which doctors described as "pure surrender", faces without expressions, and bodies heading to their fate without anger or resistance.
This harsh experience, although carried out under full medical supervision and voluntarily, has left a horrific effect on those who have experienced it. Victims of war (including today's Gazans) are subjected to deliberate starvation that is even more severe and cruel, to the point that one can be left for days without little food, and those who are lucky enough to get a loaf of bread or a small plate of pasta or lentils. This constant hunger pushes a person to the brink of despair and psychological collapse, and this is exactly what the occupation wants!
The starvation weapon in Gaza is accompanied by another harsh campaign, as explained by American journalist Belyn Fernandez, in an article titled "Israel's Psychological Warfare in Gaza", where she says that Israel is systematically targeting the destruction of the psychological state of everyone living in the Strip, using "psychological operations" methods to break the will of the victims.
There are many means of this psychological warfare, between recordings of the screams of children and women broadcast by drones in the middle of the night to draw civilians into the open to become targets of snipers, evacuation orders issued at the last moments before the bombing to increase chaos, and displacement decisions that force residents to flee permanently without a destination, while the safety spaces are shrinking day by day.
In a May 2025 report, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) described these policies as a deliberate attempt to turn Gaza into a living hell, a series of ongoing psychological trauma that drives people to collapse. Under this constant pressure, some Palestinians stop displacing and prefer to remain in the rubble of their homes, despite the realization that death could come to them at any moment. Fernandez emphasizes that dropping eviction leaflets and then bombing those who comply with them has made the eviction itself part of psychological warfare. It means survival, but submission to the blackmail of death.
It is another war other than the war of bombs and planes, an open psychological prison, imprisoned by fear, shock and hunger. These strategies aim to paralyze the victims psychologically, so that they become prisoners in their bodies, trapped inside their minds, in the face of a weapon more dangerous than bombs, hunger that invades both the body and the mind. But on the other hand, events always reveal the enormous capacities of man to resist and insist on living with dignity despite all this suffering.
This is clearly expressed in the paper published on November 11, 2024 by Australian Professor Michelle Pace at the Australian Institute of International Affairs, entitled "Gazans: A People of Irresistible Courage, Faith, and Kindness," in which she referred to the pre-war lifestyle of the people of Gaza, and how "despite the blockade and suffocating restrictions by the Israeli occupation army, they were finding ways to adapt to their lived reality and the means to build social solidarity networks that drive the life of society," and that these dynamics The capabilities have contributed in one way or another to providing the society with methods and tools for survival and resilience, and they have been strengthened by the succession of wars and the variety of means of killing and destruction that have not left the Gaza Strip throughout the past period.