Media continues to frame mass starvation in Gaza as natural disaster rather than deliberate siege tactic

AdamJohnson

March 15, 2024

The evidence that Israel planned and carried out starvation as a deliberate policy choice and siege tactic is overwhelming. Rarely in the history of war crimes has a war crime been so telegraphed, openly discussed, and executed to the letter.

In its Dec. 18 report, “Israel: Starvation Used as Weapon of War in Gaza,” Human Rights Watch lays out all the relevant evidence: “Since Hamas-led fighters attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, high-ranking Israeli officials, including Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Energy Minister Israel Katz have made public statements expressing their aim to deprive civilians in Gaza of food, water and fuel – statements reflecting a policy being carried out by Israeli forces.”

The report details how Israel has blocked the overwhelming amount of food aid, and repeatedly cut off fuel, water, and electricity, all in a clear-as-day campaign of collective punishment. Virtually every major humanitarian and human rights group—Amnesty International, OxFam, the EU’s foreign affairs chief—has stated that Israel is using the denial of food as a weapon of war in Gaza.

Yet one would hardly know this from the US media’s coverage, which depicts mass starvation in Gaza as an inevitable, increasingly grim reality. With at least 21 children dying of starvation over the past few weeks, and mounting pressure on the US to stop its lockstep support of Israel’s genocidal war, the stakes of framing this accurately—as a tactic of war, rather than a natural disaster—couldn’t be higher. Yet US media has largely failed to do so, instead treating the mass starvation campaign as something more akin to a tornado or earthquake.

Headlines from the past week from major media outlets leave readers entirely unaware this is a policy choice by the US-Israel coalition, rather than an act of god:

• New York Times: The 10-Year-Old Boy Who Has Become the Face of Starvation in Gaza The harrowing image of a skeletal Yazan Kafarneh circulated widely on social media and has served as a graphic warning about the enclave’s dire food situation (3/09/24)
• New York Times: Ramadan Begins as Hunger and Fear Stalk Gaza (3/11/24)
• New York Times: The Daily Hunt for Food in Gaza (3/12/24)
• CNN: ‘Catastrophic’ hunger in Gaza (3/07/24)
• CNN: ‘We have nothing’: Children face starvation in Gaza as supplies run out (3/06/24)
• Politico: Ramadan begins with hunger worsening in Gaza and no end to war in sight (3/11/24)
• NBC News: Hunger in Jabalia as civilians struggle to survive in northern Gaza  (3/12/24)

Many of the reports do mention, typically a few paragraphs down, that the starvation is a product, at least in part, of Israelis blocking aid convoys at the Egyptian border. But none mention the explicitly genocidal statements made by Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Energy Minister Israel Katz, where they lay out their plan to collectively punish Gazans using hunger. There’s no sense of intentionality, or that this is a well-documented tactic. It’s just mentioned in passing that Israel blocks aid, and it’s almost always framed as a security measure to prevent the shipping in of weapons. This is despite the fact that several high-ranking Israeli officials explicitly said starvation would be used as a siege tactic, and major human rights groups believe that it is.

Given that only 40% of Americans even read past the headline, framing intentionality is important in terms of how the public assigns blame, and thus demands the US act. Without this intentionality, without a sense that this is a deliberate siege tactic to collectively punish a civilian population, all moral content is stripped from the story and the horrific images are easily compartmentalized and indexed as simple, but regrettable, cases of “Oh, Dearism.”

The only headline from the aforementioned outlets to get the framing right was one CNN article from March 7, with the headline “Newborns die of hunger and mothers struggle to feed their children as Israel’s siege condemns Gazans to starvation,” which assigns both blame and intentionality.

But this was the exception to the rule. Overwhelmingly, Western media outlets have chosen to obscure both responsibility and intent. This squeamishness, however, was non-existent when US media covered Russia cutting off food to Ukraine in its invasion; Western outlets routinely framed hunger in Ukraine as the result of a specific plot with intention and execution:

• New York Times: How Russia Is Using Ukrainians’ Hunger as a Weapon of War Residents of Mariupol, Ukraine, described how they are surviving a monthlong siege of the southern port with little food and other necessities. “No roof, no food and no water,” survivors texted relatives. (3/30/22)
• Politico: The starvation of a nation: Putin uses hunger as a weapon in Ukraine The specter of the Holodomor famine of the 1930s is haunting Russia’s war (4/1/22)
• CNN: Why Russia is being accused of using food as a weapon of war (6/10/22)
• NBC News: Putin’s newest instrument of war: Food (6/28/22)
• CBS News: How Russia is using hunger as a weapon in Ukraine (5/7/22)

Enemy countries deliberately starve civilians because they are ontologically evil. The US—and the allies it arms, funds, and backs at the UN—are passive observers to the human suffering they unleash. Or, more perversely, they are humanitarian saviors because they announce a trivial or pointless PR stunt to work around the very horrors that they, themselves, deliberately created. “Urgent aid en route to Gaza amid severe food crisis,” CBS news announces while showing triumphant b-roll of US war ships carrying token, PR-driven aid deliveries to circumvent a blockade they, themselves, are arming and funding. “Inside a U.S. airdrop mission to rush food into Gaza,” another CBS News report breathlessly proclaims.

This inversion of reality is not a new phenomenon. For years, US media ignored or downplayed the US role in the famine in Yemen while painting the US military as a heroic humanitarian force bringing aid to the very war zone it was helping bomb and siege.

The goal, of course, is to keep temperatures down, to not inflame the so-called “Arab world” or anger progressives stateside. Western media can document the horrors, it can even humanize them, but it cannot clearly assign blame for them. It cannot make deliberate policy of starvation by the US and Israel the story, despite this being the most important and politically consequential part of it. Highlighting widespread human suffering without clearly stating its causes, its human authors, and its human agents isn’t journalism—it’s moral pornography.