When historians look back on the genocide in Gaza, they will be struck by the ways it both echoes and deviates from historical precedents. The deliberate, politically engineered famine combines old instruments of siege, including blockade tactics, with twentieth-century developments in caloric management: the control of food and other essentials to keep a population at subsistence level. It also bears distinctly 21st-century features, like the use of social media and lethal, A.I.-driven surveillance technologies.

In fact, many of these tactics long predate October 7, 2023. Gaza has been under a formal air, naval, and land blockade since 2007 — the same year, ironically, that the U.N. was widening the scope of its Millennium Development Goals for fighting poverty worldwide — but even before that, the territory faced financial isolation, prolonged border closures, and repeated strikes on critical infrastructure. After Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip and dismantled its settlements, Hamas won the Palestinian Legislative Council and assumed political power in early 2006. In response, Israel froze tax revenue transfers collected from imports into the occupied territories, and Western donors cut off aid. In late June, Israeli strikes disabled Gaza’s sole power plant, limiting access to electricity, water, sewage, and healthcare in what the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem described as an “act of vengeance” to “collectively punish” the Palestinian people for an earlier attack on Israeli soldiers by militant groups.

Over the next few years, Israeli officials determined, with bureaucratic precision, the minimum number of daily calories necessary for Gaza’s inhabitants: 2,279, according to one state document. Exactly 106 aid trucks were to be let in each weekday “in order to allow for a basic fabric of life.” This policy, based on a study entitled “Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – Red Lines,” was likely applied from 2007 to mid-2010. In 2012, the Israeli advocacy group Gisha won a long court battle that forced the disclosure of documents related to the policy. The files included calorie requirements delineated by age and sex, and spreadsheets converting needs into grams of food and truck quotas. Gisha also compiled lists detailing which goods were permitted and forbidden; the latter category included fresh meat, dried fruit, seeds, and nuts. To quote Dov Weissglas, who served as an advisor to the Israeli government at the start of the blockade: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

In 2008, Israel began a bombing campaign and ground invasion with the alleged goal of stopping rockets from Gaza, in the process killing over 1,400 Palestinians and destroying over 1.5 million acres of farmland, 124 miles of farm roads, and more than eighty fishing boats, according to the Palestinian nonprofit Ma’an Development Center. By mid-2009, 46 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land was rendered inaccessible, and fishing, once central to Gaza’s food production, was severely limited: Israel cut Gaza’s fishing zone to three nautical miles (a far cry from the twenty miles agreed upon during the Oslo Accords). Amnesty International said Israel’s actions during the 22-day operation were “wanton and deliberate and could not be justified on the grounds of ‘military necessity.’”

The food blockade eased in mid-2010, primarily in response to international pressure, but food insecurity remained pervasive. By 2020, over sixty percent of households in Gaza were “moderately or severely food insecure,” according to the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute. Israel continued to degrade vital systems for water desalination, sewage treatment, and farming. Safe water became desperately scarce, and severe limits on imports of construction materials, exports, and the movement of people remained in place. Some of these restrictions predated the blockade: in the late 1980s, when Gaza was still occupied by Israel, the political economist Sara Roy described the country’s limitations on Gazan agricultural exports as part of a larger “de-development” strategy — a deliberate inhibition of economic growth and independence. 

Since October 2023, “de-development” has evolved into what we might call “a-development.” The severe damage to Gaza’s infrastructure now critically undermines services essential to life. Humanitarian access has plunged to historic lows. Airdrops of food parcels from abroad have been insufficient and at times lethal, with heavy pallets crushing civilians. At the border, aid trucks have waited weeks to enter, and some have been blocked, looted, or set on fire. The IDF and American contractors supposedly helping to dispense aid have opened fire at aid distribution sites. At the same time, according to the U.N., less than five percent of Gaza’s cropland remains available for cultivation, reflecting a broader “collapse of Gaza’s agrifood system and of lifelines.”

Of course, this is not the first time that a government with expansionist ambitions has starved a neighboring population. In 1941, the Nazis designed a so-called Hunger Plan to systematically starve millions in Soviet-occupied territories — redirecting food from Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, and Russians to feed the Reich — and clear agricultural lands for colonization. This explicit starvation policy was integral to the pursuit of Lebensraum (“living space”), the official objective of the German campaign of conquest and demographic engineering. The Hunger Plan resulted in the deaths of up to an estimated seven million Soviet civilians between 1941 and 1944. Like Israel, though to a much greater degree, the Nazis used a policy of caloric management, sometimes allotting Jews living in ghettos only hundreds of calories per day.

In his 2011 book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon distinguishes between a spectacular form of violence and what he calls “slow violence,” which “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space — an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” The current devastation is no doubt spectacular, each day bringing more harrowing images of a population struggling to survive, but the presently unfolding famine is only the most acute paroxysm of the slow violence that has been visited on Gaza’s residents over many years.