There is an Arabic expression that says "bread is life", and another Jewish one that proclaims that "without flour there is no Torah". Both, from different worldviews, understand the same thing: hunger is not a collateral issue, nor collateral damage, nor even a symptom — it is the invisible core of power. Hunger does not speak. It screams. It does not kill by decree. It wears you down. Hunger has no ideology, but it always has authorship. And although it is often thought of in logistical or humanitarian terms, it is, in truth, a sophisticated, brutal, and cynically effective geopolitical tool. There is no greater form of domination than deciding who eats and who does not.
Today, in Gaza, as before in Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, or Ukraine, hunger is not an inevitable consequence of war. It is its darkest language. What escapes the cameras and algorithms. While experts argue over whether what is happening there constitutes genocide in the terms of International Law — with quivering capitals and litigable definitions — an entire population is experiencing the unspeakable: starvation as policy.
But be careful: this is not a text to absolve or condemn unilaterally. Because if there is something more dangerous than a missile, it is a poorly thought-out idea. Neither is Israel the impune Leviathan that many construct in their activist fervors, nor is Hamas merely a romantic liberation movement. Both, in their opposing ways, have subordinated human life to a logic of power that instrumentalizes vulnerability as currency.
And in the middle, there is hunger. The true hostage.
Hunger as a War Device
In theory, hunger has no political color. In practice, it does. Food security — or its absence — has become one of the most insidious forms of indirect governance in the 21st century. Historian Timothy Snyder warns that the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century not only exterminated bodies but did so through control of supplies: Stalin with the Holodomor, the Nazis with the Warsaw ghetto, the Khmer Rouge with their own people.
What distinguishes modern warfare from its predecessors is not the amount of crossfire but the sophistication with which civilian suffering is administered. Humanitarian aid routes are negotiated as if they were border crossings between two powers; food corridors are agreed upon and suspended with the same coldness with which fire lines are drawn. Gaza does not escape this logic. In fact, it exposes it with a rawness that discomforts international observers.
Israel, in trying to break Hamas's operational capacity, has intervened in food distribution mechanisms. This is not new: in Iraq, during the 1990s, UN sanctions translated into massive child mortality, and no one was judged for it. In Yemen, the coalition led by Saudi Arabia — with the silent approval of the West — besieged ports, destroyed crops, and created an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. The pattern repeats: malnutrition is war by other means.
But reducing this reality to the simplistic dichotomy of "guilty and innocent" is as blind as it is immoral. Because Hamas, by hiding among civilians, by building its power from the tunnels that run under the refugee camps, also deliberately exposes its own population to the risk of hunger. Can a government that manages scarcity for strategic purposes be considered merely a victim? Can an actor that sacrifices its people's stomachs in the name of resistance still be called “representative”?
International Law, Structural Hypocrisy, and the Double Standard
The legal discussion about whether there is genocide or not has become a carnival of hypocrisies. The term, so specific in its origin (the systematic annihilation of a group due to its very identity), has been recycled so lightly that it risks losing its normative power. As Bret Stephens rightly points out in the cited text, if Israel's objective were indeed the extermination of the Palestinians “as such,” the devastation would have been much more meticulous, faster, and irreversible. The fact that this has not occurred, while it does not absolve the practices of war, invites a semantic caution that most analysts prefer to avoid for fear of appearing “soft”.
But what does that caution say about our inability to process complexity? Why is a lucid critique of Hamas perceived as complicity with “murderous Zionism”? Why is a legitimate critique of Israel immediately associated with anti-Semitism?
International politics, like hunger, is not binary. It is made up of painful grays. And in that gray, there are dehydrated children, mothers who exchange jewels for flour, hospitals that feed patients with rationed rice. While the leaders of the world deliver solemn speeches at summits and multilateral forums, bodies thin out, eyes dim, life shrinks.
Between the Geopolitics of Cynicism and the Diplomacy of Emptiness
It is impossible to talk about hunger without talking about the international system. The architecture of the world order, built on the ruins of World War II, promised a "never again" as noble as it was fragile. But the Security Council has become a hostage of its permanent members; humanitarian law, a rhetorical artifact that is activated according to convenience. In Gaza, as before in Syria or Darfur, UN agencies operate with meager budgets, blocked by absurd bureaucracies and neutralized by diplomatic vetoes.
The United States, the European Union, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Egypt: all play their game. But few — very few — have placed the priority of feeding the living at the center of their strategy. Because, after all, hunger does not quote on the stock markets, does not occupy headlines beyond episodic morbidity, and does not mobilize votes in distant elections.
But the price is still paid. An entire generation grows up without regular access to food, without proteins, without iron, without zinc. What kind of political subjects are we incubating under these conditions of physiological precariousness? How can we demand citizenship from those who have only known the logic of rationing?
The Stomach as a Territory of Dispute
Hunger is not a metaphor. It is a battlefield. And as such, it requires a perspective that breaks with the aesthetics of horror to address its structural logic. Because what happens in Gaza — as in so many other scenarios — is not merely a humanitarian tragedy: it is a symptom of the moral collapse of an international system incapable of protecting the basic right to food.
We can debate ad infinitum whether or not there is genocide. But that discussion, legitimate and necessary, should not anesthetize another more urgent one: how have we allowed the politics of hunger to become routine? What does that tell us about the kind of world we are inhabiting and legitimizing? And what kind of future can be built upon the chronic malnutrition of entire populations?
The history does not absolve the neutral from pain. Nor does it absolve the cynics who see scarcity as a tactical opportunity. What remains, then, is the possibility of diplomacy that not only signs treaties but guarantees calories. A geopolitics of care that replaces damage management with the protection of life.
Because while we discuss semantics, someone out there is going to sleep hungry. And that, beyond all ideology, is the most inexcusable failure of our civilization.
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