Starved Twice: How Gaza’s Food Crisis Became a Weapon of War
The US/Israel War on Iran has not created Gaza’s food crisis, but it has made an already devastated enclave even less able to absorb disruption. Gaza entered this latest regional escalation not on the verge of recovery, but in a state of suspended collapse: a shattered health system, mass displacement, broken infrastructure and a civilian economy that had long ceased to function normally.
According to the IPC, around 1.6 million people in Gaza were still projected to face Crisis or worse levels of acute food insecurity through mid-April 2026, including 571,000 in Emergency and about 1,900 in Catastrophe. This was not a landscape of resilience temporarily shaken by a new war. It was an enclave already living at the edge of systemic failure. That systemic failure was not a natural disaster. It was the accumulated outcome of a military campaign whose conduct and its subsequent access restrictions have been central to the enclave’s unravelling.
The scale of that collapse is difficult to overstate. According to the final Gaza Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment, human development in Gaza has been set back by 77 years, while recovery and reconstruction needs are estimated at $71.4 billion over the coming decade. That figure matters not only because it captures the depth of physical destruction, but because it reveals how little social and economic capacity remained when access tightened again after 28 February. In such conditions, any renewed disruption to crossings, fuel, commercial inflows or humanitarian delivery does not simply add pressure to an already fragile system; it pushes a structurally broken one further into deprivation. Gaza’s worsening food crisis, therefore, cannot be understood through shortage alone. It has to be read through the hardening of the conditions that govern access, distribution and survival.
In this sense, the crisis is not merely one of insufficient food availability, but of the progressive contraction of the systems that make survival materially possible. Hunger in Gaza is increasingly shaped not only by what exists, but by who can access it, move it, distribute it, afford it, and sustain the infrastructure upon which it depends.
According to OCHA, that tightening began immediately after 28 February, when Israeli authorities closed all crossings into Gaza and suspended the entry of aid, fuel and commercial supplies, along with humanitarian movement coordination, medical evacuations and staff rotations; a decision that effectively weaponized access to food, water, and medicine as an instrument of pressure. OCHA also noted that the closure itself drove up prices and increased dependence on humanitarian assistance. By 19 March, Kerem Shalom remained the only operational entry point into Gaza, while Zikim was closed and Rafah had reopened only for limited movement. This was not simply a logistical disruption. OCHA reported that stocks in humanitarian warehouses were continuing to decline because what entered Gaza did not match what was being distributed, while Israeli-imposed restrictions on so-called dual-use items—a designation critics argue has been applied expansively to block everything from water pumps to communications equipment—further slowed operations. Food Security Sector partners, according to the same report, were reduced to distributing half-rations covering only 50 percent of caloric needs. In Gaza, the tightening of access quickly becomes a contraction in supply.
The pressure did not end there. The wider regional escalation matters not simply because it coincided with Gaza’s crisis, but because it altered the strategic environment in which humanitarian access was being negotiated and managed. As regional military priorities shifted and insecurity intensified, the operational space for aid delivery narrowed further, while Gaza’s dependence on already fragile humanitarian systems became even more acute. The US/Israel War on Iran, therefore, functioned less as the origin of the crisis than as a force multiplier acting upon an enclave already in systemic collapse.
According to OCHA’s late-April and early-May reporting, major impediments to aid delivery persisted even after some access improved. The reopening of Zikim helped increase aid entry in mid-April, but the wider operating environment remained constrained by insecurity, delayed approvals and chronic shortages of essential inputs. By early May, OCHA was warning that Israel’s continued restrictions on the entry of generators, engine oil and spare parts—items essential for any functioning civilian infrastructure—were driving widespread system failures across Gaza,affecting food collection and distribution, daily bread production, health services, sanitation, debris removal and even the movement of humanitarian teams themselves. The impact of the war on Gaza therefore cannot be measured only by how many trucks cross the border. It must also be measured by whether the systems that receive, move, store, cook and distribute what comes in are still able to function.
The market effects are just as important as the aid figures. WFP warned in March that border closures at the onset of the crisis had triggered sharp food price increases in Gaza and that, even where some crossings later reopened, prices remained high enough to continue restricting access to affordable food. UN reporting from April points in the same direction. One UN News report described a growing “survival economy,” in which university graduates had been pushed into street vending and informal work simply to keep their families alive. Another noted that the price of basic commodities in Gaza had risen by 37.9 percent in February 2026, further squeezing households already consumed by daily survival. In Gaza, hunger is not only a question of what gets in. It is also a question of who can still afford what remains once it does.
That is why the crisis cannot be read through food alone. Once access contracts, the damage spreads quickly across the wider infrastructure of survival. OCHA’s 2 April report noted that damage to the electricity line serving the Southern Gaza Desalination Plant sharply reduced drinking water availability for an estimated 500,000 people; a line whose repair, like nearly all infrastructure rehabilitation in Gaza, has been subject to Israeli approval and repeated delay. The same report said cooking gas shortages were undermining community kitchens and forcing nearly half the population to rely on unsafe waste burning to cook.
UNICEF’s statement on 17 April revealed how fragile even basic water provision had become: the killing of two UNICEF-contracted truck drivers at the Mansoura filling point in northern Gaza led to the suspension of operations at what UNICEF described as the only operational truck filling point for the Mekorot line serving Gaza City. WHO has likewise warned that delays in the entry of laboratory supplies, medicines and medical equipment leave health workers operating under chronic depletion. These are not separate humanitarian problems running in parallel. They are mutually reinforcing failures inside the same survival system.
Ultimately, Gaza’s worsening food crisis cannot be explained by shortage alone. It is the product of a narrower and more dangerous equation in which access restrictions, supply disruption, price inflation and institutional breakdown reinforce one another under the pressure of a wider war. The US/Israel War on Iran did not produce Gaza’s hunger emergency from scratch, but it has made an already devastated enclave even less able to absorb disruption. What is now unfolding is not simply the humanitarian fallout of regional escalation; it is the deepening of a crisis through the hardening of the very mechanisms that govern entry, distribution and survival. What is described here as a ‘hardening of conditions’ is, in operational terms, the cumulative effect of Israeli access policies whose humanitarian consequences have been consistently documented, repeatedly warned against, and nevertheless sustained.
Gaza increasingly illustrates a wider transformation in contemporary conflict zones, where humanitarian crises are governed less by absolute scarcity than by the fragmentation and degradation of the systems that sustain civilian life. Under such conditions, access itself becomes the central variable shaping survival, and infrastructure failure becomes inseparable from food insecurity.
Unless Israel authorizes, and sustains, meaningful expansion of access for food, fuel, medical supplies, and repair materials, the current trajectory points not to stabilisation, but to a more entrenched and more expensive form of mass deprivation, and even famine.
