Israel's New Method Of Forced Starvation Is Designed To Keep The Media Onside

Paperwork is taking the place of bombs in Israel's forced famine

Nov 02, 2025

Image source: EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid - Flickr

By Dominick Skinner | 2 November 2025

For years, Israel has made famine a matter of paperwork. After destroying Gaza’s food infrastructure and obstructing direct aid, it has now turned back to using bureaucracy as a weapon of war. A slower tool for mass hunger, no doubt, but to the hungry, it’s just as devastating. The latest move of forcing international humanitarian organisations to re-register under a new Israeli system or lose the right to operate entirely, is a thinly veiled attempt to uphold the same starvation policy that we have grown accustomed to seeing in Gaza.

This new method is designed to avoid the headlines of outlets who had grown tired of defending enforced famine. As world opinion grew increasingly against Israel, the genocidal state felt they needed a new way to starve the Palestinians, while offering an out to those who still support them, for ideological or other purposes.

The Bureaucracy of Starvation

According to documents reviewed by the Financial Times, Israel’s new registration process demands detailed information on staff, local partners, and logistics chains, including the personal data of Palestinian employees. Groups such as Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and the Norwegian Refugee Council warn that the policy places staff at risk of targeting. Many have refused to submit full data on principle.

The issue with this isn’t the registration process, but the fact that these NGOs are already registered for this work.

Under this scheme, their convoys are blocked from entering Gaza, including the medical and food aid on board. Israel can claim, technically, that humanitarian operations are “welcome,” the groups simply haven’t “completed the paperwork.” This is entirely untrue, Israel has again changed the rules, and these NGOs are simply calling them out on their nonsense.

The scale of obstruction is appalling. During the supposed ceasefire, Israel promised roughly 600 trucks of aid per day. UN data shows an average closer to 100, often less. Between 10 and 21 October alone, 99 aid requests were denied entry into Gaza, submitted by 17 international NGOs. Israel’s excuse? “Organization not authorized.”

While Israel fine-tunes its paperwork war, Gaza’s healthcare system has collapsed. The Director of Health in Gaza told Al Jazeera Arabic that Israel has adopted a “drip policy,” allowing minimal medicine to trickle in so that the world cannot call it a complete blockade, while ensuring that hospitals remain crippled.

International NGOs and the Gaza health ministry say that Israel has blocked life-saving surgical drugs, emergency medicines, and children’s nutritional supplements. These are the essentials that keep trauma wards, maternity units, and neonatal incubators running.

Around 350,000 patients with chronic illnesses, diabetes, hypertension, kidney disease, cancer and more, now lack access to their prescribed medication. Cancer treatments requiring cold-chain delivery have been suspended entirely.

WHO and OCHA confirm that more than 15,000 patients require evacuation for treatment outside Gaza. Only a handful are allowed out each day, if at all. Gaza’s hospitals, already overwhelmed by a year of bombardment, are now forced to turn away patients not because Israel will not approve the paperwork that would let them leave.

This is how starvation looks in the age of administrative warfare, and much of the media won’t pay attention.

A Pattern of Control

Israel’s bureaucratic blockade is not new, only more refined. Over the years, it has mastered the art of using permits, inspections, and security “vetting” to throttle civilian life in Gaza and the West Bank. What once applied to building materials and trade goods has now been extended to humanitarian relief, including food and medicine.

When Israeli forces seized control of the Rafah crossing, evacuation numbers collapsed. The following month, Reuters documented over 2,000 medical evacuations blocked under vague “security considerations.” By the end of 2024, the UN described the system as “a web of administrative denials.”

This new re-registration order transforms that web into a legal framework. It places every humanitarian organisation, local or international, under permanent probation. Israel can suspend them at any time, without explanation, under the falsehood of pending authorisation.

It’s the perfect strategy for a government facing international scrutiny. The optics of open starvation are bad; the optics of “regulatory issues” are manageable. Western diplomats can play along, and repeat the old lie that the situation in Gaza is “complex,” before moving on.

The Silence of the West

When Israel changed to this new policy, no major Western government stood up to protest. The European Union, which funds many of these NGOs, issued no official statement of condemnation. The United States is simply too ingrained in the genocide to expect any form of condemnation at this point.

This silence is complicity. International humanitarian law, under Article 59 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, prohibits arbitrary denial of relief in occupied territory. The deliberate obstruction of food and medical aid, even by bureaucratic means, constitutes a violation. Yet Israel’s allies continue to treat the crisis as a technical failure rather than a crime.

The distinction matters. If starvation is a byproduct, you fix it, and you fix it as instantly as you possibly can. If it is a policy, you impose sanctions. Unfortunately for humanitarians and humans who care, Israel has historically been given a shield from sanctions that have been applied to countries like Syria, Iran and Russia, despite all sanctionable crimes being present in Israeli governmental and military policy.

Manufactured Collapse

Reports from Gaza’s hospitals describe scenes beyond chaos. Doctors Without Borders says surgical teams are reusing gauze and sterilizing instruments in cooking pots. Malnutrition among children has quadrupled since May, and one-third of the population is now in what the UN classifies as “catastrophic hunger.”

In northern Gaza, where access is almost entirely blocked, clinics have run out of antibiotics and saline. Even when shipments are approved, they are often stuck for days at crossings because Israel insists on re-checking paperwork each time a truck changes drivers or license plates.

The system kills through time, counting down the clock on the paperwork, and killing Palestinians through that passage of time.

Under international humanitarian law, starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited. The International Criminal Court considers it a war crime under Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute.

By constructing this false administrative block, Israel has effectively built a legal firewall around a war crime, however, this exists only for western nations and media to have an ‘out’ in their continued support for their genocidal ally. But the denials of entry, blocked convoys, withheld fuel, and now the forced re-registration of humanitarian organisations are illegal, no matter what way it is spun in the headlines.

Starvation in Gaza is not a byproduct of war, it never has been. Starvation is the policy, it was the policy in 2011 as much as it is in 2025. Every truck turned away under the excuse of incomplete paperwork represents hundreds of families who will face more hunger, hunger that they are unfortunately all too familiar with.

Israel has learned that in the court of international opinion, bullets provoke outrage, but bureaucracy buys time. The media’s outrage fades as long as they starve Gazans in a manner that reads better in a headline.