How Surveillance Paved the Road to Famine in Gaza
In this, the second blog post in our Palestine series, Neve Gordon and Muna Haddad share their contribution to the Surveillance Studies Network 2024 Conference plenary ‘Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine’, also honouring the influence of Elia Zureik (1939–2023). Other contributions in this series come from fellow speakers on the panel: David Lyon, Mais Qandeel, and Ahmad H. Sa’di.
In the days that followed Hamas’s heinous October 7 attack on military bases, kibbutzim, towns, and the Nova music festival, several high-ranking Israeli officials announced that they intended to deprive the civilian population of Gaza of its most basic needs. At the time, over 80 percent of the goods entering the Gaza Strip came from Israel, which has kept the area under strict blockade for seventeen years.
On October 9, following two days of extensive aerial bombardments, the country’s minister of energy and infrastructure announced that he had ordered water, electricity, and fuel to be cut off. “What was,” he said, “will not be.” The same day, the defense minister, Yoav Galant, demanded a “complete siege” of the enclave: “there will be no food, there will be no fuel.” On October 18 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put the matter in similarly stark terms: “We will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip.” All of these statements were declarations of an intent to deprive the Palestinians in Gaza “of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies” — the legal definition of “using starvation as a method of warfare,” a crime against international law under the Rome Statute. Israeli newspapers, television, and social media, meanwhile, were saturated with calls to destroy the population, in whole or in part: to “erase” Gaza, “flatten” it, turn it “into Dresden.”
Since then, the Israeli military has carpet-bombed entire neighborhoods, killing 39,000 Palestinians, of whom more than 15,000 are children, not including thousands of people under the rubble. Close to 90,000 residents have been injured. Seventy percent of civilian infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged, and about 1.9 million people have been displaced, many of them repeatedly. Meanwhile, aid deliveries entering Gaza are, as UN agencies have warned, “a mere drop in the ocean of what is needed.” Moreover, Israeli troops have killed Palestinians waiting to receive aid: in one instance, which has become known as the flour massacre, at least 112 people who had gathered to collect flour in Gaza City were killed.
Israel, however, has not been content with preventing food from entering the Strip. Since the war began it has taken steps to obliterate the Strip’s ability to produce food and the basic supplies needed for survival. It has destroyed more than half of Gaza’s agricultural land, one third of its greenhouses, and thousands of its irrigation infrastructure — all vital sources of food. Large swathes of that land were eradicated by soldiers using D9 bulldozers and explosives to expand the “buffer zone” on Gaza’s side of the border from three hundred meters to an estimated eight hundred meters, reducing the Strip’s area by 16 percent. Between sixty and seventy percent of meat and dairy-producing livestock have been killed or prematurely slaughtered. Israeli naval forces have also damaged or destroyed fishing ports and most of Gaza’s fishing vessels.
The effect of these actions is clear. Since December aid agencies have warned that Palestinians are at risk of famine. A committee of experts wrote that “Famine is now projected and imminent” for 70 percent of the north’s population — around 210,000 people. According to witnesses, people in the north have been grinding grains used for animal feed into flour; when animal feed ran out, residents began feeding grass to their emaciated children.
Screenings conducted in March in the middle area of the Gaza Strip found that 28 percent of children under two have acute malnutrition; of that group, more than 10 percent have severe wasting. 95 percent of pregnant and breastfeeding women now face severe food poverty. Because mothers who suffer from malnutrition are unable to produce enough milk to breastfeed, more infants must depend on formula milk for survival. But formula requires safe and clean water, which is not available to most mothers — in turn increasing the risk of infection and malnutrition. All this suffering is human-made — a direct outcome of Israel’s unrelenting barrage. But it is vital to remember that like most famines, the one currently unfolding in Gaza, is the product of a longer history.
When Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, about 385,000 Palestinians lived there, of whom 70 percent were refugees, having fled or been expelled en masse from their homes during the nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. Israel immediately assumed control over all major utilities, such as water and electricity, and took over the welfare, health care, judiciary, and educational systems. And just as it had introduced a variety of surveillance mechanisms to manage the Palestinians who remained in Israel in the aftermath of the 1948 war, it also monitored newly occupied population.
Israeli authorities counted televisions, refrigerators, gas stoves, livestock, orchards, and tractors; inspected and often censored school textbooks, novels, and newspapers; made detailed inventories of Palestinian factories for furniture, soap, textiles, olive products, and sweets; used satellite and aerial images to monitor the construction of homes, public buildings, and private businesses; and gathered data to map the distribution of the population across regions, including urban versus rural and refugees versus permanent residents. Israel scrutinized the infant mortality rate, the population’s growth rate, poverty levels, per capita income, and the size and makeup of the labor force: age, gender, and field of occupation. The authorities also paid close attention to the scale and type of industry in the territories, as well as the amount of arable land, the kinds of crops planted, and the number of cattle and poultry. To solidify its control Israel also began tracking the rate of private consumption and the nutritional value of the Palestinian food basket.
The governmental reports illustrate the speed and degree of surveillance to which Israel subjected Palestinian society. Strikingly, they show that in the late 1960s and 1970s Israel was actively trying to increase the per capita nutritional intake of the Palestinians in Gaza. In one study the Israeli Agriculture Ministry boasted that a series of Israeli interventions, including vocational training programs for farmers, had raised the per capita consumption of the average Palestinian from 2,430 calories per day in 1966 to 2,719 calories in 1973. The same report notes that in 1968 Israel helped Palestinians in the Gaza Strip plant some 618,000 trees and provided farmers with improved varieties of seeds for vegetables and field crops.
Israel began reversing these policies after the outbreak of the first Palestinian intifada in December 1987. In the years that followed, creating food insecurity among the Palestinians became central to the state’s counterinsurgency strategy. Surveillance was crucial for achieving Israel’s goals. Changes on the ground were incremental. In 1989 Israel started exercising stricter control over the flow of laborers from Gaza by issuing magnetic cards that contained coded information about the worker’s “security background,” taxes, and electric and water bills. Shortly afterward, during the first Gulf War, it imposed a “hermetic closure” on the Strip, further limiting the movement of people and goods. In 1994, between the signing of the first and second Oslo Accords, it began building a thirty-four-mile-long fence and patrol road around the territory. This was also when the Green Line, the internationally recognized border between Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, was converted from a “normally open” border into a “normally closed” one.
In the aftermath of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000, Israel completely reversed the policies it had implemented in the late 1960s and 1970s. As part of its efforts to clamp down on resistance, the military destroyed farms, razed more than 10 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land, and uprooted more than 226,000 trees. It was also around this time that Israel consolidated its control of Gaza’s air and sea, bombing the airport built in 1998 as part of the Oslo Accords and, in 2002, destroying a seaport that a Dutch–French consortium had been building. Israel also restricted the areas in which Palestinians could fish to a very small swathe of sea off the coastline, dealing a terrible blow to one of the pillars of food security in Gaza. Such practices, combined with ever more severe restrictions on the movement of people and goods, led to substantial food insecurity. In 2002 the British Medical Journal, reported that the number of children in Gaza suffering from malnutrition had doubled within two years.
In 2005 the Israeli government dismantled the illegal Jewish settlements in Gaza and redeployed its troops to the border. Consequently, it intensified its control of the enclave from a distance, building military bases just outside the Strip, setting up remotely controlled machine guns on watchtowers, increasing the use of drones, and establishing a buffer zone three hundred meters wide that eats up agricultural land and mandates that farmers limit themselves to short leafy crops to avoid blocking the soldiers’ views.
Around this time, Israel began creating lists of products that could not be imported into Gaza, imposing severe restrictions on commercial and humanitarian goods. In 2006, when the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights highlighted how Israel’s regulations had created shortages of flour, baby formula, and medicine, Dov Weisglass, an adviser to Israel’s prime minister and the current head of Haifa University’s board of trustees, explained the government’s policy: “The idea,” he said, “is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Following Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip in September 2007, Israel formally imposed a blockade, locking 1.5 million residents into a region that was already among the most densely populated areas on earth. As part of its guidelines on implementing the blockade, the Israeli Security Cabinet instructed the military and other agencies “to reduce the supply of fuel and electricity.” Only basic types of goods were allowed entry, mainly medical equipment, medicine, and essential hygienic and food products. Banned foods included chocolate, coriander, olive oil and honey — all of which Israel characterized as “luxury items.”
Declassified records have since revealed that Israel had devised a range of mathematical formulas to determine the quantity and types of food that it would allow into Gaza. A Ministry of Health document called “Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip — Red Lines” includes tables and charts breaking down the amount of daily food consumption in the Strip by sex and age. The Palestinian from this point on would be able to import only basics such as flour, rice, oil, powdered milk, and baby formula, while Israel calculated the minimum caloric intake that would allow “nutrition that is sufficient for subsistence without the development of malnutrition.” Such calculations took for granted that the food entering Gaza would be distributed equally among the population, an assumption with no precedent in any historical or geographical setting. Israel assumed, too, that only 10 percent of the population’s dietary needs would be met by food produced in Gaza — an implicit admission of how thoroughly it had come to control Palestinians’ lifelines.
These calculations were based on “regular times.” Yet in every major cycle of violence — of which there have been five since 2008 — Israel has dropped the “minimum” dramatically, leading to spikes in malnutrition. After the 2008–2009 war, the United Nations documented that 75 percent of Gaza’s population was considered food insecure. In 2010, following criticism over Israel’s killing Turkish citizens on Mavi Marmara, the flagship of a flotilla carrying 10,000 tons of aid, the security cabinet issued a plan to ease the strictures on what civilian goods could enter Gaza. Now items like ketchup, chocolate, and children’s toys were allowed in, but the authorities still prohibited thousands of “dual-use” items — things that could be used for both civilian and military purposes. The dual-use list is broad and vague, encompassing cement mixers, materials required for repairing fishing boats, fertilizers, plastic containers for growing plants, and pumps for watering them. The amount and quality of drinking water was also rapidly declining. After it was revealed that 97% of Gaza’s water was contaminated, one human rights organization warned that people in Gaza are “caged in a toxic slum from birth to death… forced to witness the slow poisoning of their children and loved ones by the water they drink and likely the soil in which they harvest.” In other words, well before the current war, Israel had rendered the majority of Gaza’s inhabitants destitute and undernourished.
Newborn children were seven times more likely to die than if they had been born an hour’s drive away in Beersheba or Tel Aviv. In 2021 Gaza’s per capita GDP reached around $1,050, compared with Israel’s $51,100. It is hardly surprising, then, that in 2022 UNRWA supplied food to over a million refugees in Gaza — fourteen times more than it had in 2000. That December UNRWA reported that families were reducing both the number of meals they ate each day and the quantity of food in each meal. This is the backdrop to the current situation. As if this were not enough, for the past seven months Jewish settlers from the West Bank evidently unsatisfied by the devastation Israel has already wrought, have taken it upon themselves to block aid deliveries at the border crossings. They too use surveillance to track down the food trucks. With each new development, one can only wonder what more Israel intends to do to annihilate Gaza’s population and render the region’s recovery impossible.
This is a shortened and updated version of a NYRB article.
