By LaPier, Rosalyn R.
A number of United Nations and assistance groups have warned repeatedly that there is growing evidence that hunger-related deaths in Gaza are being caused by widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease.
The worst-case scenario of famine is currently occurring in the Gaza Strip, according to a July 29, 2025, alert from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a global initiative for improving food security and nutrition, as access to food and other necessities is declining to an unprecedented level.
The U.N. said that starvation is affecting around 500,000 Palestinians, or one-fourth of Gaza’s population. Additionally, all 320,000 children under the age of five are at danger for acute malnutrition, which can have major long-term effects on their physical and mental health.
Israel has been charged by U.N. experts with employing famine as a barbaric weapon of war, which is illegal under international law.
They are demanding that Israel immediately bring the UN humanitarian system back to Gaza.
Cutting off access to food and water as a weapon of war is not unique to Israel. I know that nations like the US and Canada have used famine to subjugate Indigenous peoples and take their territory because I am an Indigenous scholar who studies Indigenous history. I also understand the long-term effects of forced famine because I am descended from ancestors who suffered from it at the hands of the U.S. government.
Dismantling Indigenous food systems
In an effort to drive Indigenous communities off the land, settler colonists frequently attempted to remove their access to food, whether it was their farms and livestock or their ability to access areas with wild animals, from the time the United States and Canada were founded until the 20th century.
The Wea Tribe, who inhabited the Ohio River valley, a fertile region with a long history of cultivating corn, beans, squash, and other fruits and vegetables, had their lands and livestock destroyed by Secretary of War Henry Knox in 1791 at the direction of President George Washington.
In her 2018 book, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest, historian Susan Sleeper-Smith noted that Knox destroyed their corn fields, uprooted vegetable gardens, chopped down apple orchards, razed every house to ash, and slaughtered the Indians who tried to flee. Children and women were captured. Destroying farms and villages was intended to drive out Indigenous people and prevent them from coming back.
General Kit Carson launched a campaign to expel the Navajo from what is now Arizona and New Mexico 72 years later. Like Knox, he massacred their livestock, devastated their villages, crops, and water supplies, and down more than 4,000 peach trees. More than 10,000 Navajo were forced to flee their homeland by the U.S. troops.
Indigenous famine
According to historian Dan Flores, settlers’ planned, quick, and complete annihilation of bison—also in an attempt to obtain more Indigenous land—caused multiple famines to afflict Indigenous communities in the U.S. and Canada by the late 19th century. At the moment, a U.S. military colonel said: Kill as many buffalo as you can!An Indian is lost for every buffalo that is killed.
Prior to American and Canadian colonization, there were an estimated 60 million bison; by the 1890s, that number had dropped to less than 1,000. Native American and Canadian people living on the northern Great Plains, who considered bison to be a holy animal and depended on them for clothing, food, and other necessities, were left without sustenance.
The Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald did little to stop a multiyear famine on the Canadian Plains, in what is now Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, between 1878 and 1880, according to historian James Daschuk’s 2013 book, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. Macdonald made no secret of his plans. He claimed that by refusing supplies until the Indians were in danger of famine, he and his government were doing everything within their power.
On the Canadian Plains, Native Americans were compelled to consume their own moccasins, dogs, horses, and even the bodies of poisoned wolves. The famine affected an estimated 26,500 members of the region’s Indigenous populations. Hundreds perished from malnutrition and illness.
A member of the House of Commons at the time, Malcolm C. Cameron, charged that his government was utilizing a policy of starvation-inspired submission against Indigenous peoples. His criticism had little effect on their policy.
What my great-grandparents experienced
Many families of Indigenous people in the United States and Canada have survived government-imposed famine. So does mine.
My grandmother’s and grandfather’s parents went through what is known as the “starvation winter” on the Blackfeet reservation in modern-day Montana during the winter of 1883–1884.
A famine occurred on the Blackfeet reservation as a result of American settlers nearly eradicating bison, much like what occurred in Canada. Blackfeet chiefs used their own funds to buy food in an attempt to slow the hunger, but the U.S. government supply system delayed its arrival, resulting in a terrible scenario.The U.S. administration recorded half as many deaths from famine as Blackfeet leaders, who recorded 600 deaths during that one winter.
The well-fed people in the area did nothing to help the Blackfeet, as historian John Ewers pointed out.
In order to hunt and gather Native foods, a few men and women in my family were able to ride horses far from the reservation, which is how we survived. Like most Blackfeet, I grew up hearing the tale of the famine winter. And now I tell my own kids these stories.
Weapon of war
In Gaza, many of youngsters suffer from malnutrition and die from hunger-related reasons.
Israel is halting its attacks in some areas of Gaza for a few hours every day in response to growing international pressure, but experts say this is insufficient.
Two million people are at issue. Bushra Khalid, an Oxfam official, told The New York Times that a population that has been starving for months will not be satisfied by 100 trucks, a pause, or a few hours of peace.
There is no longer a threat of starvation. On August 10, 2025, Ramesh Rajasingham, director of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, declared, “This is starvation, plain and simple.”
A common misconception is that the use of famine as a weapon of war only occurred in the past. However, it is currently taking place in locations like Gaza.
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Rosalyn R. LaPier teaches history.
