“There are no longer natural famines in the world; there are only political famines. If people in Syria, Sudan or Somalia starve to death, it is because some politician wants them to.” — Yuval Noah Harari

Gaza City is now officially the site of a full-on famine.

That’s according to The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC. Established two decades ago amid one of Somalia’s recurring food crises, IPC assessments are a crucial tool for gauging the severity of the threat in locales where the populace is menaced by food insecurity.

Friday’s updated assessment marked the first time the IPC delivered an official famine declaration for an area in Gaza since the onset of the war in 2023. Indeed, the declaration marks just the fourth official IPC famine declaration since 2004 in Somalia.

“Famine confirmed in Gaza Governorate, projected to expand,” read the title of Friday’s report. “This is the fifth time the Famine Review Committee has been called to review an analysis on the acute food security and nutrition situation in the Gaza Strip,” the report read. “Never before has the FRC had to return so many times to the same crisis; a stark reflection of how suffering has not only persisted but intensified and spread until famine has begun to emerge.”

As I put it earlier this month, “you know, just like I know, just like everyone else knows, what’s going on” in Gaza. Some people are inclined to excuse it citing the survival imperative: “On October 7, 2023, they made it clear: It’s us or them, and it damn sure ain’t gonna be us.” Some people blame Gazans for “electing” Hamas. Some go so far as to contend, publicly or privately, that in fact all Gazans are guilty, not just by association, but quite literally in the sense that they’re raised and indoctrinated to hate Jews and will one day be inclined to violence against the Israeli state — “better to just kill them now.” On the other side, some people put on the keffiyeh and protest in the streets. Some people chastise the Benjamin Netanyahu government on podcasts. Some people pen editorials. Some people write to their congresspersons to complain. And some people sit around and grouse about the inhumanity of it, then sigh: “But what can I do?”

Regardless — i.e., whoever you are and however you’re inclined to assess the situation both in terms of culpability and with regard to the Israeli right’s uncompromising “ends justify the means” calculation vis-à-vis guaranteeing the security of the Israeli state — we all know what’s going on in Gaza in the summer of 2025. If you’re paying any attention at all, you know.

Israel’s deliberately starving the population and in many cases, luring them with the promise of food into lines and slaughtering them like cattle with their food bowls. It’s a war crime perpetrated at scale. It’s an unimaginable atrocity. It’s systematic. It’s deliberate. It’s mass murder. It’s genocide.

I don’t traffic regularly in guarantees, but here’s one: I guarantee that with the passage of time, fewer and fewer people will admit they supported this. Within 50 years, everyone will claim they opposed it outside of a handful of people on the Israeli right. There’s nothing justifiable anymore about what’s happening in Gaza. It’s just wanton bloodlust, and now it’s morphed into something even worse: The deliberate fostering of disease and the creation of famine conditions in the service of eradicating a people by engineered biological degradation.

In the simplest terms: These people — Gazans — are disintegrating. In a very literal sense. For example, the IPC on Friday described “a surge [in] acute watery diarrhea” among children who are at risk of dying from exposure to disease-ridden water polluted by “open defecation.”

The Netanyahu government this month indicated its intention to take over the entire Gaza Strip, but ultimately decided to focus on establishing complete control of Gaza City and, by extension, the area north of the city where conditions are the worst of any area in the enclave. That’s the section of the strip — Gaza City and the surrounding areas — covered by the IPC’s famine declaration.

In the report, the IPC said it’s likely that Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis will meet the conditions for a famine declaration “in the coming weeks.” For reference, here’s how the IPC defines famine on their five-level threat scale:

Households have an extreme lack of food and/or are unable to meet other basic needs even after full employment of coping strategies. Starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident.

Elaborating specifically on the Gaza Governorate — where the Israeli military’s in the process of overrunning Gaza City — the IPC described the proliferation of “multi-drug-resistant infections, rendering previously treatable injuries fatal,” said a total collapse of neonatal ICU capacity “is exacerbating neonatal mortality rates,” cited “a convergence of widespread malnutrition, untreated illness [and] deteriorating [sanitization] conditions” in explaining “surging child diseases” and indicated that between the presence of “established famine-related mortality pathways,” “the sharp rise in acute malnutrition” and a “corresponding surge in deaths,” there’s enough evidence to establish that the area has “reached the famine mortality threshold.”

Israel claims this isn’t true. The country’s security services said the IPC’s using “partial and unreliable sources” for its assessment while “ignoring” Israeli data which, apparently, is completely reliable. Write your own morbid jokes.

“As this famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed,” the IPC went on, beseeching someone — anyone — to do something. “The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present. And is rapidly spreading.”

In a separate response, the Israeli foreign ministry said simply, “There is no famine in Gaza.”