Famine in Gaza is the mass starvation of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. The United Nations has declared that an actual famine is taking place there, with men, women, children, the elderly and the sick starving to death.[1] The territory is not short of food: there is “plenty of food for everybody,” and the famine exists because the Israeli government will not allow that food to reach the people who need it most.[1]
John Kiriakou characterises the situation as “a war crime,” “a crime against humanity” and “a form of genocide,” and is explicit that the characterisation is not his own invention: “that’s not John saying it. That’s the United Nations saying it. That’s the International Court of Justice saying it.”[1][2] He treats the conditions in the West Bank as a related and simultaneous problem rather than a separate one.[1][3]
The failure of third countries
Kiriakou frames the central question as one of enforcement rather than knowledge: food is being kept out in plain sight, “but all we see is international hand ringing,” and he asks whether countries other than Israel and the United States can force the crossings open.[4] Interviewed on his programme, Roger Waters answered that other countries could act if they considered it part of their mandate, and said the gap between what Western democracies profess and what they do had been “a real awakening” for him.[5][6]
Ethnic cleansing as the stated objective
Kiriakou argues that the declared Israeli war aim no longer explains the campaign. Israel says its goal is to destroy Hamas, but in his assessment Hamas “for all intents and purposes no longer exists, at least not as a fighting force” — and even before October 7 it had no aircraft, tanks or artillery pieces.[7][8] What remains, he says, “seems clear to me. It’s ethnic cleansing, which is to push all Palestinians out of Gaza” — “clearly, obviously illegal,” a war crime and a crime against humanity — while “the self-described most civilized countries in the world are just standing by watching it happen” and the same process runs in the West Bank at the same time.[8][3]
Why Egypt keeps the border shut
On the movement of Gazans out of the territory through third countries, Kiriakou’s response is that this is exactly what the Egyptians have been warning against since the war began. Egypt’s position, as he describes it, is that it loves its Palestinian brothers and wants to help, but that opening the border and letting Palestinians cross into Sinai would do nothing but abet a policy of ethnic cleansing — and so it cannot be done.[9]
He also treats the willingness of other governments to name what is happening as a good in itself: without wanting Palestinians to suffer any more than they already have, he says it is good and important that these countries are finally standing up to the Israelis and saying no.[10]
The most man-made famine since the Warsaw ghetto
In July 2025, as photographs of emaciated children circulated, Kiriakou set the famine against the historical cases. All famines can be argued to be man-made — the Irish potato famine among them — but this, he said, “is the most man-made famine outside of the Warsaw ghetto that we’ve seen in a long time.”[11]
He put the proximity at the centre of it: five miles from people starving to death, others eat couscous and hummus and drink sweet red wine. Inside, surgeons collapse mid-operation from hunger and BBC journalists are dying. “There’s plenty of food. There’s no shortage of food,” he repeated — “the Israelis just won’t allow the food in.”[11][12]
When food is admitted and crowds mob the distribution centres, he says, “the Israelis then just open fire on the crowds”, which he counted at three times in two or three weeks; the host corrected him upward, to almost every day.[12]
Nothing left to donate to
Kiriakou had for some years been sending small sums — “if I have an extra 50 bucks, I send it in” — to a Palestinian medical relief organisation. In July 2025 he received an automated email from the charity telling donors to stop, on the ground that there are no hospitals in Gaza any more. “There’s nothing to donate to.”[13]
It reminded him of the Afghan hospitals he visited in 2000, where Clinton-era sanctions on the Taliban nominally exempted food and medicine and the doctors told him they had not seen a band-aid since the early nineties — field medicine practised indoors, “a nice tent, basically.”[14][15]
The friend who blocked him
A friend of twenty years, a dual American-Israeli national, posted a list of about ten incidents in which Israelis had been harassed abroad — blocked from disembarking a cruise ship at Rhodes, targeted by angry Greeks on Kos, pelted with tomatoes in Cyprus. Kiriakou replied with a photograph of a child starving to death in her mother’s arms, “nothing but skin and bone.” The friend blocked him.[16][17]
He expects no pressure from Washington to change any of it, and is careful that the charge is not partisan: “the US is not going to put pressure on Netanyahu. It’s just not… And I’m not saying this is specific to Donald Trump. The Democrats are exactly the same way.”[18]
After the ceasefire (January 2026)
Asked in January 2026 whether the humanitarian story was falling off the headlines now that a ceasefire was in place, Kiriakou rejected the framing of the ceasefire itself: Palestinians in Gaza “would certainly be getting more attention” if the war were still officially running, “because if you’re a Gaza Palestinian, the war never ended. The ceasefire is a joke. People are being killed every day still.”[19]
His inventory of conditions is careful about its own precision — he corrects himself mid-sentence rather than overstate. There is “still not — I shouldn’t say no food — there’s still not enough food.” Beyond that: “a terrible lack of clean water,” insufficient medical supplies, people unhoused, and “still bodies under the rubble. It’s a hellscape.”[19][20]
Two aggravating facts sit alongside it. Storms had swept through the hundreds of thousands living in tents in the preceding days, making conditions worse again; and “the international press is still not allowed in by the Israelis.”[21] His closing observation is about the coverage rather than the conditions: “we’re not talking about it anymore in the West.”[20]