Why Israel should starve Hamas

STARVING your enemy to death, or at least to surrender, is a tactic of warfare as old as history. The idea that starving an enemy is immoral would have astonished the ancients. Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War in the 5^th century BC, wrote: ‘The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil. When full, starve them.’

Not only the ancients used starvation. It has been a commonly used weapon throughout the modern age. President Abraham Lincoln, one of the ‘good guys’ of history, advocated that it was ‘lawful to starve the hostile belligerent, armed or unarmed, so that it leads to the speedier subjection of the enemy’.

Lincoln’s ‘Lieber Code’ issued during the American Civil War, which included this statement, became the foundation for the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.

Throughout the 20^th century, starvation remained a justifiable war tactic. The British naval blockade of Germany in WWI contributed to its surrender. In WWII the German army starved the Russians at the Battles of Leningrad. The Germans employed starvation tactics when they crushed the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. 

Less written about is the American attempt to starve Japan into submission at the end of the Pacific War. After the great US naval victory at the 1944 Battle of the Philippine Sea, any hope of Japan winning the war ended. Yet the Japanese stubbornly refused to surrender. Instead, they resorted to the ultimate sacrifice demanded of any death cult – suicide. At the last Pacific War battle on the island of Okinawa, 1,500kamikaze pilots were called into action. As with Hamas and other jihadi death cults, dying for Emperor Hirohito guaranteed eternal life, though without the promised houris (beautiful companions described as ‘fair maidens with wide, black eyes) popularly, but incorrectly, referred to in the West as 100 virgins. Japan’s aim was to impose such devastating losses on the US forces that a reasonable peace deal could be negotiated with America.

So, lacking in any scruple about starving an enemy civilian population, the US sent their B-29 bombers to lay mines around Japan. General Curtis LeMay called it Operation Starvation. It worked. Food shipments from Korea across the Sea of Japan were interdicted; so too Japan’s intercoastal food supply lines. The Japanese civil servant charged with the relocation of the 5million Tokyo residents rendered homeless by American firebomb attacks recalled: ‘The food situation affected all classes . . . the chief trouble was not so much in rice but in secondary articles of diet – vegetables, fish, particularly in the cities.’

After the horrors of World War II, there was a moral and legal reset regarding the conduct of war. The Geneva Convention of 1949 was followed by additional protocols in 1977. It was explicit about starvation. Article 14 of the 1977 protocols affirmed that ‘starvation of civilians as a method of combat is prohibited’. (It should be noted that starvation of enemy combatants was allowed.) Importantly Article 51 (5) (b) introduced the concept of ‘proportionality’.

It is against this new legal background that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have had to operate. From the election of Hamas in Gaza in 2005 to the October 7 massacre in 2022, Israel had to provide food, water, electricity and employment to Palestinians, while batting off 28,000 rockets aimed at their own civilians. 

Since October 2022 the Israeli conundrum of how to fight Hamas and retrieve the 58 remaining hostages, at the same time staying within the bounds of international law, has become ever more complicated. Apart from President Trump and his administration, the West has constantly berated Israel for lacking ‘proportionality’ in its military campaign in Gaza. 

The international law courts, dominated as they are by Muslim prosecutors, have reinforced ‘the proportionality’ narrative. Europe’s patsies, plus Canada, have played along. In the case of Sir Keir Starmer in the UK, his fear of losing of his Muslim constituencies as well as jihadist fellow travellers in schools and universities is a main driver of his pandering to Hamas. Not only has the West largely ignored Hamas’s illegal use of civilians as human shields but it is now looking to reward this jihadi death cult with statehood. 

In recent days Britain, France and Canada have all threatened sanctions against Israel. They decry Israel’s supposed starvation of Gaza’s population – based entirely on an exaggerated farrago of fact and fiction provided by the propaganda of Hamas’s Health Ministry.

The food issue is complicated. Since the start of the war Israel has overseen the shipment of over 1.3million tons of food and medicines to Gaza. It is an amount that represents 3,163 calories per capita per day, much more than the humanitarian Sphere Project’s recommended minimum intake of 2,100. Shipments into Gaza were ceased in March because warehouses were full.

Now stocks are running down but the assertion in a BBC interview by the UN’s Tom Fletcher that ‘there are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours unless we can reach them’ has been shown to be a risible lie. Nevertheless, the story went viral worldwide. Subsequently there were 600,000 social media posts. 

Fletcher’s comments may well have been the mens rea for the tragic assassination of a couple who worked for the Israeli Embassy in Washington last week. Did the BBC, which issued a mealy-mouthed correction, take down the Fletcher interview? No. Has Tom Fletcher been sacked or reprimanded by the UN? No. Has his gullible BBC Radio 4 interviewer Anna Foster been sacked or reprimanded? No.

The roots of Fletcher’s lies are political. Not only is the UN a strongly anti-Semitic organisation – there are 49 Muslim countries to one Jewish – but the UN and its Palestine aid agency UNRWA also fear the loss of its raison d’êtreunder new US and Israel plans on how to feed Gaza. 

Until now distribution of food in Gaza has been in the hands of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency). Set up in 1948, UNRWA’s mandate extends to all Palestine refugees from the failed invasion of Israel by five Arab states – Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Uniquely Palestinian refugee status is treated as a perpetual generational inheritance – presumably until Israel and all Jews are wiped off the face of the earth. That is, after all, the ambition written into Hamas’s constitution. 

The problem is that UNRWA, like the UN but more so, is not an honest broker. Ample evidence revealed by Israeli intelligence shows that UNRWA has been entirely suborned by Hamas. Some 1,462 UNRWA employees in Gaza are members of Hamas. The UN Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) has received evidence that at least 18 UNRWA employees actively participated in the October 7 massacre.

Israel’s plan, supported by the US, is to replace UNRWA with private-sector contractors under the aegis of the recently established Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) in Geneva. The UN’s vested interests would thus be sidestepped. The squeals of horror have been predictable. Thus, on May 13, the aforementioned Tom Fletcher blasted Israeli-US proposals, describing them as a ‘fig leaf for further violence and displacement [of Palestinians]’. 

GHF will set up four Safety Distribution Sites (SDSs) in Gaza, three in the south and one in the north. Satellite photographs show that construction work has begun on what will essentially be armed garrisons. Food convoys will enter by a main gate and pedestrians will be delivered food individually. 

The US Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has insisted that the GHF would not be an IDF operation. But the IDF ‘will be involved in keeping the perimeters safe’. The SDSs aim to provision 300,000 people each. The objective is to deny food and control to Hamas’s combatants – perfectly legal under the Geneva Convention.