Food for Gaza: India has a role to play as a compassionate power

Israel’s ambitions for Gaza have manifested themselves in the classic colonial tragedy of a man-made famine in Gaza City. As the United Nations-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) confirmed last week, an “entirely man-made famine” has gripped Gaza’s largest city and its surrounding areas, the first officially declared famine in West Asia. According to the IPC’s definition, a famine occurs when at least 20 per cent of the population of a given area suffer from an extreme lack of food. By the IPC’s estimates, half a million people, or a quarter of the Palestinian population in Gaza, is suffering from famine. One in three children or more are acutely malnourished and two in every 10,000 people are dying daily from starvation or malnutrition and disease. These tragic statistics reflect the Israeli government’s attempt to displace Gazans from the remnants of their homeland.

 

This “man-made famine” has been facilitated through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a joint Israeli and United States-backed institution operated by private contractors. Since May, when the Israelis grudgingly lifted a blockade on goods entering Gaza, the GHF has replaced the United Nations-led food-distribution system with a network that weaponised food aid delivery to embattled Gazans. It has replaced the United Nations’ 400 distribution points with just four sites in militarised zones, which requires Palestinians to walk long distances in hot-war terrain to access. The United Nations has recorded the killing of at least 994 Palestinians around GHF centres since May and over 1,700 trying to access aid. Enhancing this cycle of death and denial is the defunding of the United Nations World Food Programme (UNWFP), the largest humanitarian agency, by the United States. The Trump administration has halved funding to the body, which has seen Gaza food assistance cut from $12 per person per month to $8. 

 

With the Western democracies unable to intervene for fear of displeasing an Oval Office incumbent preparing real estate plans ahead of Gaza’s occupation by Israel, the Global South urgently needs to step up. Saudi Arabia has airdropped aid in Gaza but this is insufficient, given the scale of the tragedy, and Indonesia has increased funding to the UNWFP. India, as a prominent claimant for Global South leadership, can play a game-changing role here. In the past, India has provided famine and food aid to Afghanistan, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In an interview to this paper, UNWFP Chief Operating Officer Carl Skau said India could help not just with more funding but by leveraging its established institutional knowhow in foodgrain distribution to enable the institution to scale up globally in Gaza as well as Sudan. Indeed, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s cordial relationship with Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu and the fact that India has refrained from criticising Israel could be leveraged to negotiate an additional channel of uninterrupted aid delivery. Doing so would enhance India’s reputation as a compassionate power in a world where the US appears to have abdicated the field.