Conditions of life for Palestinians in Gaza are collapsing. Yesterday’s Alert from the United Nations’ Integrated food security Phase Classification (IPC) mechanism begins, “The worst-case scenario of Famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip.” All evidence points to a horrifying reality that the enclave has crossed the tipping point into a period of accelerating mass starvation mortality and societal devastation. As a matter of moral, legal, and basic human imperative, States with any leverage at all over the Israeli government must use that leverage now to bring this abomination to an end. To delay further does not bear contemplating. Time has run out.
The moral obligation is palpable. The legal obligation is also clear. Pursuant to the duties to ensure respect for international humanitarian law (IHL) and to act if there is at least “a serious risk” that genocide is being, or will be, committed (on which we elaborate our views below), and given the gravity and urgency of the moment, no lawful measure can be eschewed in the effort to induce Israel to allow Gaza to be flooded with humanitarian assistance, to restore essential services, and to provide the conditions for the sustained, long-term recovery needs of Palestinians in Gaza in a context in which immediate humanitarian provision is necessary but will not be sufficient for survival.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced a number of aid-related policies last weekend:
- air drops (themselves a cosmetic distraction from aid at the necessary scale),
- limited areas in which there will be humanitarian pauses and corridors (the self-avowedly “minimal” scope of which are incompatible with aid at the necessary scale and the implementation of which will advance the concentration of Palestinians into an unsustainably small proportion of Gaza), and
- renewed electricity provision for desalination
Even on a narrow view of the humanitarian emergency, these measures are insufficient, even assuming full implementation. They must not distract from the need for more comprehensive action. That the Israeli announcement of these measures came with the caveat that “there is no starvation in Gaza” is itself discrediting (see also here). Already, Israel’s cabinet is reportedly considering a tightened siege on certain cities in Gaza and cutting off electricity to the Strip.
The time for half-measures has passed.
A Tipping Point
The situation in Gaza has never been worse. The July 29 Alert from the IPC reads:
Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths. Latest data indicates that Famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.
The warning follows a period of increasingly dire accounts of conditions in Gaza. On July 23, the Guardian reported that over 35% of all recorded starvation deaths since October 7th 2023 had occurred in the previous three days. The total was 111 at the time. Four days later, the World Health Organization relayed that 63 of the 74 malnutrition-related deaths in 2025 occurred in July (including 25 children and 38 adults). The next day, 14 such deaths were registered in 24 hours. Assuming the ordinary impact of mass deprivation, this would imply an even higher number of fatalities from infectious diseases made more common and more lethal by malnutrition and poor sanitation.
Given the circumstances, including the usual challenges posed to data collection by armed conflict settings as well as severely restricted access to Gaza, recorded numbers for both trauma and non-trauma deaths are almost certainly a massive undercount. However, a clear and chilling trajectory is discernible across indicators.
On the 23rd of the month, 115 humanitarian organizations issued a statement in which they described “record rates” of acute malnutrition among children, the increased spread of “acute watery diarrhoea,” and adults “collapsing on the streets from hunger & dehydration.” UNICEF has documented the number of children admitted for medical care for malnutrition in the first two weeks of July tracking far higher than the number admitted in June (which was itself a record). Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) says that in its Gaza City clinic, “the number of people enrolled for malnutrition treatment has quadrupled since 18 May, while rates of severe malnutrition in children under five have tripled in the last two weeks alone.” The World Food Programme reports that “almost a third of families miss meals for days at a time.”
Children’s bodies are “shutting down.” Naji al-Qurashali, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Gaza, told the Guardian that around “50% of the hundreds of pregnant women he saw each day were suffering from malnutrition,” with miscarriages increasing significantly and babies carried to term “significantly underweight” and “increasingly born prematurely or with disfigurements.” The exhaustion of therapeutic foods that are essential for treating those suffering from severe malnutrition has left malnourished babies and toddlers with no way to survive. Medical professionals have described a lack of medication and sanitation leading to a rise in life-threatening conditions that they cannot treat.
No one is spared. The 115 organizations that issued the July 23 statement described “witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes.” Doctors are said to be suffering dizzy spells while making rounds. Journalists have detailed their experiences drinking salt water “just to remain standing” and chewing “dried herbs or wild leaves to quiet the screaming inside.”
Scenes of crowds of people desperate for food, reports of people scavenging in garbage for scraps, and stories of theft and chaos all point to the social collapse that is symptomatic of the final stages of famine. The people enduring this speak of their shame, humiliation, and feelings of dehumanization.
Human existence is based upon sharing food. The etymology of the word “companion”—someone with whom one shares bread — is just one indicator of how deep this goes. When people can no longer share bread but must instead fight one another for scraps, human society is severely impacted in its ability to function. This is what we see unfolding in Gaza today.
The IPC Alert issued yesterday is not a formal determination of IPC phase 5 Famine. The reason for that is that it is not based upon new data, but on a projection from prior data. Data gathering in Gaza is extraordinarily difficult due to severely restricted access and viscerally dangerous conditions. Data interpretation is highly complicated by the degree of social breakdown we are witnessing, because calculating the proportion of households that are food insecure, or the percentage of children who are malnourished, requires baseline figures that are extremely hard to calculate. Israel has prevented journalists and aid workers from collecting systematic information. But we can nonetheless diagnose “famine” based on the visible symptoms, even in the absence of the level of data upon which an IPC assessment ordinarily relies. In all relevant respects, it is present in Gaza. The very fact that the IPC felt it necessary to issue such a stark warning, short-circuiting its normal protocols for data gathering and analysis, indicates the food insecurity experts’ alarm.
International Legal Obligations
Faced with this reality, leaders ought not require legal advice to see the obvious need to act now. The moral imperative could hardly be clearer.
Nonetheless, there are concrete legal obligations, including for those who might not be sufficiently entangled in the policies that created this situation to be held complicit in future accountability proceedings. It is worth reiterating and focusing on those obligations here.
As each of us has detailed at length elsewhere, for almost twenty-two months, albeit with varying degrees of intensity and occasional pauses, Israel has pursued a multifaceted and varied policy of depriving the population of Gaza of essentials, such as food, water, medical provisions, and the possibility of a dignified life. (E.g. here, here, here, and here).
The policy of deprivation has long been in clear violation of the IHL prohibition of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare (see here, here, here, and here). Whether or not one takes the view that this prolonged action is also discernibly infused with genocidal intent — notably, on Monday, two highly respected Israeli organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights – Israel joined a growing number of experts in inferring precisely that — an overwhelming case can be made that the “serious risk” or “serious danger” of genocide has long been sufficient to trigger third states’ preventive obligations under the Genocide Convention, as elaborated below. Among other evidence, this is a key implication of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) thrice issuing provisional measures orders between January and May of 2024, each predicated on the urgent imperative to address a “real and imminent risk” to Palestinians rights under the Genocide Convention (see Dannenbaum & Dill).
The practical relevance of those ICJ orders reverberates through to the present. The Court’s key concern across the three provisional measures decisions, and the crux of South Africa’s allegation in the case as a whole, is the underlying act of “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” (Genocide Convention, article II(c)).
In the ICJ’s second order (March 28, 2024), the Court required Israel to take:
all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, in full co-operation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance, including food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care to Palestinians throughout Gaza, including by increasing the capacity and number of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary.
This provision was unanimous.
To be clear, the Court did not find Israel responsible for committing the crime of genocide. However, it instructed actions that Israel was required to take to preserve the rights of Palestinians under the Genocide Convention in the face of a “real and imminent risk” of irreparable prejudice to those rights (paras. 26-27). As it had in its first order (paras. 80, 86(4), the Court framed this imperative specifically in terms of responding to the “conditions of life faced by Palestinians” in Gaza (para. 45).
In May of 2024, the Court indicated its third (and, thus far, final) provisional measures, which included a requirement that Israel “maintain open the Rafah crossing for unhindered provision at scale of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance.”
These orders may be understood as specifying Israel’s pre-existing obligations into concrete action-guiding demands and illuminating the goal to which third States must direct their preventive action (Dannenbaum & Dill), a point to which we turn below.
In a parallel process, mass deprivation and starvation have also been the primary focus at the International Criminal Court (ICC), where they form a central basis for the arrest warrants issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant. The Court’s Pre-Trial Chamber found reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant perpetrated a range of deprivation-related war crimes and crimes against humanity, including, centrally, the war crime of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. Notably, per the ICC’s press release announcing the warrants, the Chamber found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that Netanyahu and Gallant deprived Palestinians in Gaza of food, water, electricity, fuel, and specific medical supplies in a way that “created conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of part of the civilian population in Gaza.”
These violations of international law are not relevant only to Israel’s international legal obligations; they have significant implications for third-party States as well. Under international law, States have an obligation to “ensure respect” for IHL (under both treaty and customary IHL) and to “prevent” genocide (under article I of the Genocide Convention). Notably, in its 2024 Advisory Opinion, the ICJ emphasized that “all States parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention have the obligation. . .to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law. . .” These obligations are not secondary to the oft-emphasized function of ex-poste accountability. As one of us argued together with Professor Janina Dill a year ago, these proactive obligations go to the core purposes of these frameworks, which must guide State action in real time, or not at all.
These duties are not contingent on a full and final evaluation by a court. They operate pursuant to epistemic thresholds focused on risk, rather than proof beyond reasonable doubt.
Concretely:
- The duty to ensure respect for IHL is implicated once it becomes clear that IHL violations are being committed, that there is an “expectation” of such violations “based on facts or knowledge of past patterns,” or that there is a “foreseeable risk they will be committed,” [ICRC Geneva Convention I Commentary (2016) paras. 162, 164].
- The duty to prevent genocide attaches as soon as a State “learns of, or should normally have learned of, the existence of a serious risk that genocide will be committed,” or, in a related formulation, is “aware, or should normally have been aware, of the serious danger that acts of genocide would be committed.” [Bosnian Genocide, ICJ (2007), paras. 431-432]
Even on their own terms, these obligations must be understood to apply as much to terminating ongoing violations and their impacts as to preventing prospective violations. For peremptory norms, such as genocide and violations of the basic rules of IHL (ILC Commentary, pp.112-113), as well as crimes against humanity in our view, that connection can be discerned from States’ duty under article 41 of the Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts to “cooperate to bring to an end through lawful means any serious breach” of such rules and to decline to “render aid or assistance in maintaining” a situation created by such a violation. As elaborated below, these legal obligations give rise to a number of specific, concrete duties that third-party States must take.
The IPC and Conditions of Life in Gaza
In its provisional measures orders, the ICJ drew upon, inter alia, the data and analysis provided by the IPC. Although the arrest warrant decisions are not public, it is likely that the ICC did the same. This is entirely appropriate. The IPC’s purpose is to provide timely and accurate information to enable governments to prevent humanitarian crisis, emergency and famine. It was developed so that determinations of humanitarian need could be made in a standardized and consistent manner, without having to wait for a post mortem analysis of the damage done.
Since October 2023, the Famine Review Committee (FRC) of the IPC has warned repeatedly of humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza. Yesterday, it did so once again, in its most dire statement yet.
To the enduring frustration of the humanitarian professionals, there is a tendency in reading the committee’s assessments to focus on the simple and misleading binary of famine versus not-famine, rather than the committee’s desperate descriptions of the unfolding trajectory towards mass starvation. The key reason for the committee’s caution on the former point is that data have not been accessible to demonstrate with sufficient certitude that the specific, highly technical famine thresholds have been formally breached. And yet, each time the FRC has warned that the conditions of life in Gaza are unacceptable and that further deterioration (including into famine) was to be expected, absent significant changes.
Notably, in its May 2024 report that concluded that there was insufficient evidence to make a plausible finding of famine, the committee stressed:
all stakeholders who use the IPC for high-level decision-making must understand that whether a Famine classification is confirmed does not in any manner change the fact that extreme human suffering is without a doubt currently ongoing in the Gaza Strip and does not in any manner change the immediate humanitarian imperative to address this civilian suffering by enabling complete, safe, unhindered, and sustained humanitarian access into and throughout the Gaza Strip, including through ceasing hostilities. All actors should not wait until a Famine classification for the current period is made to act accordingly.
The pattern of Israel’s responses to these warnings suggests that it has been concerned not with the level of human suffering in Gaza, but with managing datapoints to ensure that it does not face the stigma or potential political consequences associated with having caused famine. In that specific respect, the purpose of the IPC – to enable governments to prevent humanitarian crises including famine – has been confounded in Gaza.
Famine is neither a legal category, nor the appropriate moral catalyst for action. In contrast, the information and analysis provided by the IPC have, throughout, been highly germane to the questions of whether destructive conditions of life exist in Gaza, or are credibly forecast to exist there in the near future. That, in turn, is important to informing what actions need to be undertaken to fulfil States’ duties to prevent and terminate violations of IHL and genocide.
The Urgency of the Imperative Today
Israel’s policy has oscillated over time. Amidst sustained periods of severe and, in our view, plainly unlawful deprivation, there were short-lived improvements in humanitarian access during the March-April period of last year (particularly following the March ICJ order, which coincided with pressure from the U.S. Administration that was required to certify that Israel was not obstructing humanitarian aid, in order for U.S. weapons supplies to continue), and again (in the most promising episode) during the ceasefire in January and February of this year.
However, those brief moments of relative respite served only to temporarily slow the march towards famine (and avert a famine determination by the IPC), not to end it. In recent months, that process has been accelerating.
From March 2 to May 19, Israel imposed a total siege, allowing no humanitarian access at all into Gaza, claiming in its defense that the population was adequately supplied from the deliveries during the ceasefire and that Hamas was diverting aid. Even at the time, these were implausible arguments. As the findings of investigations into incidents of aid looting and theft have been made public, these claims have only weakened. In forcing the population to exhaust food stocks, the policy laid the foundation for what is happening today.
Under political pressure, Israel began to allow a trickle of aid in in late May. At the same time, it pivoted to a new aid distribution model in which impartial humanitarian organizations and the United Nations were sidelined, while a new and opaque U.S.- and Israel-backed distribution agency—termed the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—took the lead. From the beginning, the militarized and private-contractor-dependent Foundation was widely condemned by humanitarian experts, with GHF chief executive Jake Wood quitting within weeks of starting on the grounds that it was “not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.”
The system has been disastrous for Palestinians. While failing to deliver anything like the required level of aid or humanitarian support, distributing packages composed of goods that lack nutritional balance, and concentrating aid distribution in just four locations (down from approximately four hundred), the GHF framework has also ushered in a new dimension of horror.
The GHF describes its locations as “secure distribution sites.” But for the many people who have been killed or injured while seeking aid at these sites, they are anything but safe. Detailed documentation by the group Forensic Architecture shows how they function. They are situated in military zones, remote and hard to access. In their first six weeks of operation, they were open for an average of just 23 minutes each day, with opening times advertised only shortly beforehand — and on some occasions, not opening at all despite announcing an opening time. People were therefore forced to compete for inadequate food, and near-daily mass-casualty attacks on civilians seeking aid, including on the “women only” day that was supposed to mitigate these effects. A former GHF employee has described “war crimes” at its stations. Accounts of staff describe how the food boxes are swarmed by the strongest young men who carry off as many boxes as they can, often opening them to take the more valuable items, who are followed by younger boys and some women and less fit adults, who pick through the abandoned items until they are dispersed by the GHF contractors firing stun grenades.
In its comment appended to the latest IPC Alert, the Famine Review Committee writes:
Our analysis of the food packages supplied by the GHF shows that their distribution plan would lead to mass starvation, even if it was able to function without the appalling levels of violence that have been reported. The fact that people continue to risk being shot or caught in stampedes at distribution sites indicates the extremely desperate level of hunger that the population is experiencing.
In June, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett pointed to a video of armed men atop an aid truck as evidence for Hamas theft. The nonprofit group that organized the shipment challenged his claim, and Forensic Architecture tracked that incident. The true story is that a community group liaised with the UN to protect vehicles from bandits, and it was their guards that were pictured in the video. The sequence shows the vehicles safely reaching their destination, a World Food Program warehouse, and the food being safely distributed. But on the basis of the false claim, Israel shut down the route.
The immediate impacts are manifest in the trends described above: rising starvation mortality, rapidly increasing levels of malnutrition, and increased susceptibility to disease.
In June, the World Food Programme reported:
Most families reported surviving on one meagre meal a day – thin broths, lentils or rice with salt, macaroni, cans of beans or peas, and boiled legumes. One-third said they go entire days without eating or rely on a single piece of bread and duqqa (a blend of herbs, usually eaten with olive oil). Many drink water to calm hunger pangs, a coping strategy widely reported. As one parent shared: “[When my children wake up at night hungry] I tell them drink water and close your eyes. It breaks me. I do the same – drink water and pray for morning.” Adults routinely reduce their food intake to prioritize children, the elderly, and the ill. Those without income or able-bodied rely on small quantities of borrowed basic food from relatives and neighbours. Around 15 per cent resort to scavenging for food in the garbage or rubble.
In its comment on the IPC food insecurity assessment in May, the Famine Review Committee forecast that under a “reasonable worst case scenario” of limited aid and ongoing Israeli military action:
The vast majority of people in the Gaza Strip would not have access to food, water, shelter, and medicine. This would exacerbate civil unrest and competition over remaining scarce resources, further eroding whatever limited community coping and support mechanisms remain … [and] food insecurity, acute malnutrition and mortality would surpass the IPC Phase 5 (Famine) thresholds.
Notwithstanding the increased flow of basic foodstuffs into the Gaza Strip since May, the IPC confirms that the “worst case scenario” is indeed unfolding. This is most clearly manifest in daily-increasing reports of cases of severe acute malnutrition and starvation deaths. Stabilizing and recovering from this becomes more challenging with every passing day. Malnutrition impacts all organs of the body, affecting individuals at the cellular level. Refeeding is not simply a matter of accessing nutrition. Specialized ready-to-use nutritional foods and intensive hospital care for the severely acutely malnourished are necessary for potential recovery. The risks are manifold, the effects are lasting, and recovery is medically complicated. Already, medical professionals are predicting that mortality in “August is going to be significantly higher because a lot of the children have already passed the point of no return where their physiology has eroded to the point where even refeeding could potentially cause death itself.”
Although they inevitably grab the headlines, the biological aspects of the current trajectory capture only part of what is being done to Palestinians in Gaza. Crucial to understanding the nature of mass starvation, and the criminality of bringing it about, is an appreciation of its societal dimensions. Mass starvation is characterized by the breakdown of livelihoods, communities, and families. Parents are forced to make choices, such as deciding whether to take a severely acutely malnourished child to hospital while leaving other children who are also very hungry in the care of relatives or neighbors, or to spend every hour seeking food for the family as a whole. Should one or more of their children die, the trauma of this impossible choice will be lasting. Social death is manifest in the violation of basic norms of exchange and reciprocity, and by feelings of shame, humiliation, and degradation. People are reduced to intensive competition for food, which can be experienced as a profound loss of human dignity. Those who are starving often have a significantly altered appearance and may experience their condition as dehumanizing.
The impact is not limited to the present. The harm inflicted through early childhood and in utero malnutrition entail lifelong injury. Children exposed to severe malnutrition at a vulnerable stage of development may face irreparable harm in the form of reduced physical and mental capacities. Indeed, that harm may be transmitted to the next generation.
In connecting these effects to the concept of destructive conditions of life, Raphael Lemkin (the lawyer who famously developed the term “genocide” and was instrumental in the development of the Genocide Convention) was attentive to the social dimensions of starvation. In his 1953 lecture on the Holodomor famine in Ukraine, he described starvation as a weapon wielded against the Ukrainian people as a community, designed to destroy their “national spirit.” This chimes with research in social anthropology and memory studies that emphasize the experience of famine as loss of a way of life, rupture of community, or dispossession of collective dignity and autonomy.
Third-Party States’ Duties
Faced with this prospect, what must States do?
The answer will include actions along several dimensions. Most obviously, those Sates that have knowingly (or, on an alternative legal interpretation, purposefully) made a significant contribution to existing violations — and thus bear some level of existing complicit liability — must cease those contributions immediately. (ILC, ARSIWA, art. 16(a) art. 30, & Commentary pp.66 (para. 5), pp. 88, 115 (para. 11); Bosnian Genocide, ICJ (2007), paras. 420-21). Equally importantly, particularly given duration of the harm in contexts of mass starvation, these complicit States must discharge their reparative obligations with respect to harms to which they made a causal contribution (ILC, ARSIWA, art. 31).
More broadly, all States are bound by the duties to ensure respect for IHL, to prevent genocide, and to cooperate to bring violations to an end. Where the risk or danger of an ongoing violation is sufficient (as it surely is here), they must “do everything reasonably in their power to prevent and bring [ongoing IHL] violations to an end” and must “employ all means reasonably available to them” to prevent genocide or bring it to an end. (ICRC 2016 Commentary, para. 154; Bosnian Genocide, ICJ (2007), para. 430).
This raises two questions. The first is how to conceive of the path to bringing the ongoing violations in Gaza to an end. The second is what kind of contribution any specific State must make to that objective.
As noted above, although directly binding only on Israel, the ICJ’s orders from last year provide concrete guidance in response to the first of these questions, at least as it might have been answered in mid-2024. Israel’s manifest failure to live up to the ICJ’s orders has been the most important factor in the deterioration of conditions of life in Gaza and the prospect of a precipitously worse trajectory today. In principle, then, the order’s import has only intensified.
And yet, under the momentum of the descent into mass starvation, the measures required by the ICJ a year ago are now plainly inadequate. There is a sense in which that momentum blurs the traditional legal distinction between prevention and reparation. The ongoing violation is not neatly time bound. Some who are alive today have passed the point of no return. Others among the starving need far more than nutrition—they need a careful, medically supervised process of refeeding. Still others may need long-term medical support due to the impacts of acute malnutrition on cognitive and central nervous functioning. As the physical, psychological, and societal impacts of starvation reverberate into the future, a strong case can be made that the work of prevention, and of cooperating to bring serious jus cogens violations to an end, must follow.
On that line of reasoning, third-party States cannot satisfy their preventive duties merely by seeking to influence Israel to open the gates and allow unfettered humanitarian access (although that they must do). They must also deploy their leverage towards a more comprehensive objective — one that demands that Israel facilitate and ensure the full-spectrum recovery of Palestinians in Gaza from the brink of physical and social destruction.
Implicit in the IPC Alert is the imperative of better information, which means a release on harsh restrictions to accessing suffering Gazan populations. In order for an appropriate and effective response to implement the variety of crucial actions detailed below, humanitarian workers and States who support them with funds and diplomatic action need sufficient information to identify and locate the most critical needs. There is also a general imperative to establishing, with comprehensive data, the full extent of the crisis so as accurately determine whether it is an IPC-5 Famine, and assess the trajectory of the humanitarian emergency and necessary responses. This requires unhindered humanitarian data gathering and reporting by international journalists, both of which are currently highly restricted.
Concretely, those suffering malnutrition in Gaza do not simply need food; they need nutritional balance, the expansion of intensive and therapeutic feeding centers for acutely malnourished children, and the regeneration of food systems. Palestinians in Gaza do not simply need medical aid; they need permanent and stable institutions of medical care that can provide the backbone of sustainable recovery, rehabilitation, and individual and collective survival in the coming years. These cannot be dismissed as ideal, but unrealistic goals. They are the bare minimum objectives if the destructive conditions of life that are present today are not to briefly abate only return in ever more virulent form every time the crossings are closed.
What it means for any given State to act towards these objectives will vary according to the form and degree of its ability to impact actions by Israel (Bosnian Genocide, ICJ (2007), para 430). In the domain of duties to ensure respect for IHL, prevent genocide, and bring violations to an end, States “remain in principle free to choose between different possible measures” (ICRC, 2016 Commentary, para. 165; similarly ILC, ARSIWA, Commentary p.114 (para. 3)). However, as the “gravity of the breach” rises, the intensity of the obligation to prevent it is also enhanced, arguably narrowing State discretion regarding what that might entail. (ICRC, 2016 Commentary, para. 165). Here, that gravity manifests both in the present acute crisis and in the multifaceted future harm that has already been set in motion.
In a statement striking for its rarity in the practice of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the organization’s president Mirjana Spoljaric recently insisted that States “must do more,” warning that “every political hesitation” in failing to bring the “abhorrent” practice of “extreme deprivation” and indiscriminate attacks in Gaza to an immediate and decisive end “will forever be judged as a collective failure to preserve humanity in war.” In a similar vein, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk urged governments to put “all possible pressure on the Israeli Government to end the carnage in Gaza – permanently.” He even suggested, “[c]ountries that fail to use their leverage” in this context “may be complicit in international crimes.”
Each State must determine for itself what levers it can deploy. Plainly, the time for strongly worded statements or calls for Israel to “deliver on its pledges” is over. Equally, States must immediately cease any contributions to, or encouragement of, the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza, including through the transfer of arms (ICRC 2016 commentary para. 162) and dual-use supplies. Other forms of leverage, such as suspending the EU Association Agreement should also be deployed with a view to inducing Israel to allow the necessary full-spectrum response. And States must act to quash the growing climate of impunity in this context, ending public equivocation regarding whether they would execute arrest warrants such as those issued by the ICC, responding collectively to those that fail to uphold that duty, denying overflight permission to wanted individuals, and moving with urgency to activate the EU Blocking Statute to protect ICC officials and others from U.S. sanctions aimed at the Court’s work in the Palestine situation.
Warnings of mass starvation, as intolerable human suffering and as a crime, have been consistent, reliable, and increasingly urgent. Failing to act on these warnings is, at the very minimum, a shameful abandonment of humanity. For those involved or complicit in starvation crimes in Gaza, legal reckonings must follow.
For those deliberating about the appropriate response, this is not the moment for equivocation. It is not the time for symbolic gestures such as air drops. It is time for comprehensive, full-spectrum, sustainable, and coordinated humanitarian action. States globally must act without delay on that imperative.
