Two years into the war that began in October 2023, a new study from an Israeli genocide scholar has upended the Israeli government and mainstream media’s repeated denials, concluding that the widespread starvation ravaging the Gaza Strip was the result of deliberate, pre-planned state policy.
Authored by Shmuel Lederman, a researcher specializing in genocide studies, the report titled *Data for Denial: The Smokescreen Behind the Starvation of Gaza* was published last month by the Forum for Regional Thinking at Jerusalem’s Van Leer Institute. Lederman told Middle East Eye he launched the research in response to what he calls pervasive denial across Israeli society of the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, a pattern he says aligns with public responses to historical cases of mass violence.
“There is a thirst for denial,” Lederman explained, noting that most Israeli citizens seek to frame the Israeli military’s actions in Gaza and the broader occupied territories as entirely morally justified and free of systemic abuse. A separate August 2025 investigation from Israeli news outlet Walla corroborates this pattern of denial, confirming that mainstream Israeli television outlets routinely minimize or erase coverage of Gaza’s starvation crisis entirely.
Lederman’s study pushes back against the belated, limited acknowledgement of food insecurity that emerged in some Israeli circles by mid-2025, where commentators framed starvation as an accidental, isolated bureaucratic miscalculation rather than a product of intentional state decision-making. Drawing on core principles of famine research, which holds that hunger is driven not just by total food availability but by equitable access to food, the scholar documents how Israeli policy systematically stripped Palestinians of access to sustenance. Restrictions on the entry of aid, fuel, and cooking gas, the deliberate destruction of critical food infrastructure including bakeries, and repeated disruption of humanitarian operations all combined to create catastrophic levels of food deprivation.
The study’s core conclusion leaves little room for ambiguity: Gaza’s starvation is the product of “deliberate planning, experimentation, and manoeuvring around the humanitarian ‘red line’”, designed in large part to manage mounting international pressure on Israel throughout the course of the war.
A central point of contention in public debates over Gaza’s hunger has been the number of daily aid trucks required to meet the enclave’s basic needs, a metric that Israeli officials have repeatedly manipulated to downplay the crisis. COGAT, the Israeli military body responsible for civil administration in occupied Palestinian territories, claimed in August 2025 that just 80 daily aid trucks would be enough to meet Gaza’s population’s needs, a figure that was widely repeated by sympathetic Israeli researchers and journalists.
This claim has been rejected by nearly every independent and international body: human rights organizations, UN agencies, and even the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden disputed the number. The Biden White House estimated roughly 250 trucks per day were required to avoid mass hunger, while international humanitarian organizations put the necessary number between 500 and 600. What is more, COGAT’s own past data undermines its current claim: in 2008, when Gaza’s population was 1.5 million people, 500,000 less than its current population, COGAT itself stated 178 trucks per day were needed to meet basic needs. As recently as last month, Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom reported that COGAT urged the Israeli government to cut aid truck entries to 250 per day after an October 2025 ceasefire, claiming that level met basic needs. For Lederman, this revelation is an implicit admission that the earlier 80-truck claim was a deliberate falsehood: “In practice, this is an admission of starvation,” he told MEE, speaking after COGAT released its post-report statement.
Lederman traces the origins of Gaza’s starvation to the very start of the war in October 2023. For the first five months of the conflict, until March 2024, Israel allowed only a tiny fraction of the recommended number of aid trucks into the Strip, rapidly deepening the food crisis. UN agencies, human rights groups, and on-the-ground Palestinian testimonies all documented extreme food shortages during this period, with women and children bearing the brunt of the deprivation.
In May 2024, mounting U.S. pressure following Israel’s deadly assault on Rafah forced Israel to allow more commercial trucks into Gaza, but the government simultaneously restricted access for humanitarian convoys. Last month, Wala also revealed that 11 major Israeli supermarket chains won an exclusive tender to supply food and aid to Gaza, generating hundreds of millions of shekels in profit. Lederman argues that this privatization of aid delivery created a profit-driven monopoly that actively worsened the humanitarian crisis, allowing a small number of connected actors to enrich themselves, often in coordination with Israeli authorities, while the vast majority of Gazans go hungry.
While U.S. pressure produced a brief easing of the crisis, Israel reversed course in October 2024, slashing aid shipments back to minimal levels. By March 2025, Israel imposed a full blockade on all food and humanitarian aid entry, pushing Gaza over the edge into full-scale famine. In August 2025, the Integrated Food Phase Classification (IPC), the UN-backed global body that monitors hunger, officially declared famine in Gaza City.
The report also reveals that even as COGAT publicly disputed international warnings about growing hunger, the agency privately warned the Israeli government as early as 2025 that Gaza was on the brink of catastrophic famine. Despite this internal warning, the Israeli government pressed ahead with its policy to advance a clear strategic goal: using starvation as a tool to pressure Palestinians to relocate south out of northern and central Gaza, and ultimately to leave the territory for third countries. This tactic aligns with the controversial “voluntary emigration” plan publicly backed by both the Israeli government and former U.S. President Donald Trump. Lederman cites the creation of the U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) as further evidence of this strategy, writing: “Severe food deprivation in Gaza that would compel Gazans to travel to aid distribution centres was not a ‘mistake’, it was part of the plan.”
Beyond the immediate humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, the study frames the territory as a testing ground for a new model of population control through hunger. “Over the past two and a half years, Gaza has served to a large extent as a testing laboratory not only for methods of warfare, but also for the architecture of starvation and the management of a population through deprivation,” the report reads. Lederman warns that the implications of this experiment will extend far beyond Gaza’s borders, noting that while starvation has been used as a weapon of war in other recent conflicts, few if any cases have so systematically and openly undermined the long-standing international norm banning the practice.
Lederman also emphasizes the shared responsibility of the United States, under both the Biden and Trump administrations, as well as other Western governments, for enabling Israel’s policy, arguing that their diplomatic and military support made the starvation campaign possible. He warns that Israel’s tactics will spread to other conflicts around the globe, as other actors feel empowered to adopt similar methods, shielded from criticism by charges of Western hypocrisy. “What Israel did in Gaza will not stay there, it already has not remained there,” Lederman said. “Therefore, this is not only a struggle against what Israel did to the Palestinians in Gaza, but a global struggle against these kinds of actions.”
