Engineering Hunger: How Did Israel Inherit the Silent Weapon of Nazism?

Author: اسماعيل جمعه الريماوي

In Gaza, people do not only die under bombardment, but they die silently, of hunger, in front of the world's eyes, and in front of institutions that claim humanity, but practice the harshest forms of humiliation. Famine is no longer an incidental state or a side effect of a long war; it has become a weapon of war in itself, managing the conflict and imposing will. The food that is supposed to be the first line of defense for life has turned into a strategic weapon in the hands of the Israeli occupation, used not only to eliminate resistance but to break the collective spirit of the Palestinian people.
Food has turned into bait, flour into a trap, and aid into well-crafted snares. Thousands of families walk long distances among the rubble, stepping over bodies, and sneaking under the bombardment, just to get a bag of flour or a can of beans, but they are met with gunfire. Massacres are committed under the banner of "distribution," and death is justified in the name of "chaos" and "security." Thirty to fifty Palestinians are killed each day while trying to reach aid, in addition to hundreds injured, in a scene that recalls the tragedies of Jewish neighborhoods in Europe when Nazism regulated food and turned it into a means of extermination.
The only difference is that the victims today are not in the 1940s, but in 2025, while the world watches, finances, and colludes,
and their descendants are the ones practicing starvation against another of our people,
The "Humanitarian Gaza" organization, managed by the United States and claims to be the body responsible for relief, is merely an administrative cover for an organized starvation project. Instead of delivering food to the population, the organization manages a selective process to subjugate the population, according to distribution schedules aimed at creating a class division in hunger itself. Some receive 1,750 calories daily, while a person in an emergency needs at least 2,100; however, most of Gaza's residents receive a quarter of that figure, and some, as Oxfam states, live on less than 250 calories a day – less than what a can of fava beans contains.
But the danger lies not only in the numbers, but in the strategy behind it. This famine is not chaos but a plan, just as Nazi Germany devised a hunger plan for the Soviets and Jews, Israel is doing today with Gaza: a starvation plan to destroy will, dismantle social fabric, and push people towards surrender or extinction. What the Nazis did by distributing "racial rations" is being repeated today, where food is allocated to part of the population while leaving the rest to die, in a grotesque repetition of the experiences of the Warsaw Ghetto where Jews were trapped.
However, what distinguishes the Israeli case from other repression regimes is that the use of starvation is not just an incidental result of the siege or a secondary pressure tool, but a devoted, central, and deliberate approach.
Most fascist regimes in modern history – from Mussolini's Italy to Argentina under military rule – practiced repression, violence, and enforced disappearance, but they did not make starvation a policy of extermination as Nazi Germany did, which turned concentration camps into laboratories for regulated hunger, to destroy the human psychologically and physically before death.
Now, Israel is reapplying the same model – not in a remote camp, but in a territory inhabited by more than two million people. The famine imposed on Gaza does not resemble a traditional siege but resembles an engineering structure of hunger, akin to what happened in Nazi concentration camps, where bread was rationed to kill the spirit before the body.
Most painfully, this food siege is accompanied by brazen rhetoric from the highest levels of Israeli leadership. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich stated clearly: "Not a single grain of wheat should enter Gaza," while Israeli forces allow armed gangs to loot aid and punish those who try to protect it, as happened when 12 aid guards were killed in Israeli airstrikes, not for any reason other than because they tried to prevent the theft.
In the West, everything is justified in favor of Israel. An Israeli organization in Britain shamelessly declared that "the war helps reduce obesity in Gaza." It is not a war on terrorism, nor a reaction to an attack. It is a war against the idea of survival, against the poor, against children, against mothers gathering flour from the dirt to feed their young.
Even the director of the "Humanitarian Gaza" organization resigned, warning that what is happening does not align with any human standard, but he left quietly, just as conscience departs from its seat in front of news screens.
What is happening in Gaza today is slow mass execution, a starvation that aims not only to kill but to crush dignity, and strip humans of their humanity. The whole world is complicit in this crime – those who fund, those who remain silent, and those who justify.
There is nothing spontaneous about the famine; it is a project, a decision, an engineering of collective death wearing the mask of "humanitarian aid," and anyone who passes flour from one gate and fires bullets from another is not a partner in relief but in murder. Hunger has become the new language of occupation, and the question today is not: "Who dies of hunger?" but "How much time is left before hunger turns into declared extermination?".