Gaza is not a natural disaster zone. It is the victim of a political crime

After two years of genocide, Gaza has been almost entirely reframed by the world as a humanitarian emergency. Images of starving children, tents flapping in the wind, queues for water, and aid trucks stalled at crossings dominate coverage. 

These images are real. The suffering is real. But the framing is profoundly misleading.

Gaza is not a natural disaster zone. It is not a drought-stricken land awaiting rain, nor a city flattened by an earthquake that struck without warning or responsibility. 

What is unfolding in Gaza is the deliberate outcome of political decisions, military strategies, and a long-standing system of domination. Treating it primarily as a humanitarian crisis is not only inaccurate, but a form of erasure.

This framing is neither accidental nor innocent. It obscures responsibility, disregards history, and shields Israel from accountability by transforming a political crime into a technical problem of relief and logistics.

Gaza is being destroyed through a systematic Israeli campaign of military violence, siege and collective punishment, carried out with full knowledge of its consequences. Treating this reality as a humanitarian issue rather than a political crime distorts both cause and solution.

Humanitarian language, when detached from political accountability, becomes a tool for depoliticisation. It shifts attention from perpetrators to symptoms, from causes to consequences, from justice to logistics. 

Food parcels replace rights. Tents replace homes. Aid convoys replace freedom. In this framing, Palestinians are reduced to passive recipients of charity, rather than subjects of a political struggle spanning more than a century.

Engineered starvation

This humanitarian language becomes dangerous when it replaces political truth. When Gaza is framed as a site of “need”, rather than a site of oppression, Israel disappears from the story. Hunger becomes an unfortunate condition rather than a weapon. Destruction becomes “infrastructure damage” rather than deliberate targeting. Palestinians are transformed from a people resisting colonisation into a population awaiting assistance.

Famine in Gaza is often framed as being the result of scarcity or unfortunate circumstances. But Gaza’s hunger is engineered. To describe this as a humanitarian emergency without naming it as a weapon is to participate in a dangerous lie. 

Israel has imposed a comprehensive blockade, restricted food entry, destroyed agricultural land, targeted bakeries, limited fuel, and dismantled food supply chains. International organisations have repeatedly warned of starvation, yet Israel continues to regulate calories, crossings and aid access as instruments of control. 

To call this a humanitarian crisis without naming Israel as the perpetrator is to conceal intent. Starvation in Gaza is not merely a failure of aid delivery; it is a policy enforced by Israel.

Aid must be understood as a moral minimum, not a solution. It must be paired with political action, legal accountability, and structural change

The same applies to destruction. Entire neighbourhoods have been erased not by chance, but by sustained Israeli bombardment. Hospitals, universities, water wells, sewage systems and municipal facilities have been systematically targeted. 

Israel’s military doctrine has openly embraced the destruction of civilian infrastructure as a means of pressure. Describing this as “urban collapse” or “postwar damage” strips the violence of agency. Infrastructure does not collapse on its own. It is destroyed.

Humanitarian framing also creates a false sense of temporariness. It suggests that Gaza’s suffering is an exceptional moment that can be stabilised until normal life resumes. But Israel has ensured that there will be no “after”. 

The siege predates this genocide, and Israel has made clear its intention to prevent meaningful reconstruction, political autonomy or recovery. Aid under these conditions does not resolve a crisis; it manages a permanent state of destruction.

This is why calls for more aid, while morally understandable, are politically insufficient. Aid can keep people alive; it cannot give them lives worth living. It cannot restore dignity, sovereignty, or safety. It cannot rebuild a society under permanent siege. 

Worse, when aid replaces political action, it can normalise injustice by making it survivable. When humanitarian assistance becomes the primary international response, it allows Israel and its allies to present themselves as concerned actors rather than perpetrators and enablers.

Moral distortion

There is a profound moral distortion at work. Palestinians are expected to be grateful for aid delivered under Israeli control, while Israel continues to bomb, starve and displace them. Their resistance is reframed as ingratitude or extremism. The question shifts from “Why is Israel doing this?” to “Why can’t Palestinians just survive?” This shift is not neutral; it is political.

This distortion reaches an almost absurd level when Palestinian demands are caricatured as purely material - as if the people of Gaza have endured dispossession, exile, bombardment and erasure for generations simply to secure three meals a day and a better-quality tent. Such framing strips the Palestinian struggle of its ethical core.

There is also an epistemic violence in humanitarian-only narratives, narrowing the range of what is considered “relevant knowledge”. Legal frameworks, historical responsibility, colonial continuity and power asymmetry are pushed aside in favour of metrics: calories delivered, trucks allowed in, shelters erected. 

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These metrics matter, but they are not neutral. They shape policy, funding and public imagination in ways that ultimately protect the status quo. These numbers matter, but they cannot explain why Gaza is starving. Only politics can - and politics leads directly to Israel.

But accountability is conspicuously absent. Genocide does not occur in a vacuum. It requires weapons, diplomatic cover, vetoes, silence and complicity. Humanitarian framing allows those responsible - both directly and indirectly - to appear as benefactors rather than enablers. The same states that arm and shield Israel can thus rebrand themselves as donors and mediators. Aid becomes a form of moral laundering, masking complicity rather than confronting it.

What Gaza demands is not charity, but justice. This means ending the occupation, lifting the siege, dismantling systems of apartheid, recognising Palestinian self-determination, and holding perpetrators accountable under international law. Without these steps, humanitarian efforts, no matter how well-intentioned, are like bandages being applied while the wound is actively being inflicted.

This does not mean rejecting humanitarian aid. People in Gaza need food, water, shelter and medical care now. But aid must be understood as a moral minimum, not a solution. It must be paired with political action, legal accountability, and structural change. Otherwise, it becomes a mechanism for sustaining Israeli violence rather than stopping it.

After more than two years of genocide, Gaza is a mirror held up to the world, reflecting not only the brutality of Israel’s crimes, but the inadequacy of global responses. Gaza is not asking the world to pity it. It is asking the world to name Israel’s actions for what they are, and to act accordingly.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.