Photograph Source: CiDiBi – CC BY-SA 4.0

While starvation profoundly affects individuals across all age groups, this essay focuses specifically on Palestinian children to illuminate how deliberate starvation strategies are designed to compromise the futurity of the Palestinian nation by systematically destroying its youngest generation. Beyond the immediate devastation, Palestinian children’s physical health, mental well-being, and emotional development are being deliberately compromised through weaponized hunger. This analysis examines how starvation functions not merely as a byproduct of armed aggression, but as a calculated tool of necropolitical warfare aimed at foreclosing Palestinian futures (Mbembe, 2003)—a process enabled by the global racial hierarchies established through coloniality (Quijano, 2000).

Theoretical Framework: Necropolitics and the Politics of Unchilding

The genocide and the systematic starvation of Palestinian children must be understood as a manifestation of the enduring coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), which establishes a global racial hierarchy that constructs non-European lives as expendable, and as a direct application of Achille Mbembe’s (2003) necropolitics: the sovereign power to decide who may live and who must die. This necropolitical power is exercised upon a population already prefigured as inferior and killable within Quijano’s colonial hierarchy. Applied to Palestine, this sovereign power operates through the calculated weaponization of basic needs against developing minds and bodies. Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s (2019) concept of unchilding provides a complementary analytical lens, exposing “the political work of violence designed to create, direct, govern, transform, and construct colonized children as dangerous, racialized others, enabling their eviction from the realm of childhood itself” (p. 122). Together, these frameworks reveal how hunger functions as a deliberate necropolitical tool, operating within and sustained by a global structure of coloniality that naturalizes Palestinian suffering.

The complete siege imposed after October 2023 intensified pre-existing conditions catastrophically. By early 2024, a UN-backed initiative classified the entire population of Gaza at risk of famine (IPC, 2024). The World Health Organization reported that acute malnutrition among children under two in northern Gaza soared from less than 1% before the escalation of the genocide to over 15% by February 2024 (WHO, 2024).  Despite all these warnings, no serious action was taken.  On August, 22, 2025, according to a new Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis, “more than half a million people in Gaza are trapped in famine, marked by widespread starvation, destitution, and preventable deaths. Famine conditions are projected to spread from Gaza Governorate to Deir Al Balah and Khan Younis Governorates in the coming weeks.” (WHO, 2025)

Physical and Biological Impacts: The Neurochemistry of Necropolitical Violence

Severe malnutrition constitutes a systematic, biological dismantling of the developing brain, directly serving the necropolitical objective of foreclosing future potential. This process operates through a well-understood neurochemical cascade. Chronic hunger and the pervasive terror of bombardment trigger a constant state of fight or flight,  leading to persistently elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This hormonal deluge is acutely toxic to the hippocampus, a brain region fundamental for memory consolidation, learning, and emotional regulation (Carrion et al., 2007). Research demonstrates that in children, this exposure to extreme stress and cortisol correlates with measurable reductions in hippocampal volume—a physical shrinking of the brain’s architecture essential for forming the building blocks of education and stable mental health (Carrion et al., 2007). This is not a metaphorical assault but a literal, biological one: necropolitics operating through neurochemistry, where sovereign power dictates not just death, but a degraded form of life inscribed in the very matter of the brain.

The damage extends beyond isolated structures. Sustained high cortisol disrupts the healthy development of neural networks, effectively rewiring  the brain for survival at the expense of growth. The brain prioritizes hyper-vigilance—constant scanning for threat—over the development of circuits dedicated to learning, memory, and higher-order cognition (Blankenship et al., 2019). Blankenship et al. (2019) found that cortisol reactivity in preschoolers predicted altered functional connectivity in the hippocampus years later, demonstrating how early trauma embeds itself in the brain’s long-term communication pathways. For a child in Gaza, this neurobiological reality translates to a crippled capacity to concentrate in a classroom (if one exists), to form stable memories of lessons, or to regulate the overwhelming fear and anger that are natural responses to relentless trauma. The weaponization of hunger thus achieves a key necropolitical aim: it biologically engineers a population whose cognitive resources are so depleted by the demands of survival that the possibility of prosperity and growth is systematically erased.

Cognitive Devastation and Prefrontal Cortex Compromise

The cognitive impacts of this neurobiological assault are severe, measurable, and tragically persistent. The landmark Barbados Nutrition Study provides a decades-long view of this devastation. It tracked infants who suffered severe malnutrition but then received nutritional recovery and adequate healthcare in childhood. Despite this intervention, these individuals showed profound and persistent cognitive deficits into midlife, including significantly poorer IQ, attention, and executive function compared to matched controls (Waber et al., 2014). This finding is critical: even if the bombs stop and food eventually arrives, the cognitive damage inflicted during critical developmental windows is largely permanent. The study suggests that early malnutrition can cost a child a standard deviation in IQ—approximately 10-15 points—a loss that severely limits educational attainment and future economic potential.

Neuroimaging reveals the structural basis of this compromise. The prefrontal cortex, the brain’s executive center responsible for complex decision-making, impulse control, and future planning, is particularly vulnerable to early adversity. Studies show that severe stress and malnutrition are associated with reduced prefrontal cortex volume and weakened connectivity to other brain regions (Hanson et al., 2013). This is the neuroarchitecture of lost potential. The concept of toxic stress explains this process: the unrelenting, uncontrollable activation of the stress response without the buffering protection of supportive relationships literally disrupts the development of neural circuits, weakening the connections essential for reasoning, problem-solving, and self-regulation (Center on the Developing Child, 2010). A child affected in this way doesn’t merely struggle in school; they may lack the cognitive capacity to plan, control impulses, or think flexibly—skills absolutely necessary to rebuild a society, engage in complex professions, or prosper. The necropolitical calculation is thus horrifyingly efficient: starve a child, and you don’t just hunger them for a day; you starve their intellect and their capacity for a fulfilling future.

Intergenerational Biological Inheritance: Weaponizing Time

Perhaps the most insidious dimension of necropolitical starvation is its capacity to weaponize time itself, ensuring that trauma echoes across generations through the science of epigenetics. This is not merely a social inheritance of poverty but a biological transmission of vulnerability. Research on historical famines provides stark evidence. Individuals conceived during the peak of the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944–45 had a significantly higher risk of developing schizophrenia and other affective disorders in adulthood (Susser & Lin, 1992). This suggests that extreme nutritional deprivation in utero can leave a molecular fingerprint on the genome, altering how genes are expressed without changing the DNA sequence itself. Later studies confirmed that prenatal famine exposure was associated with differential DNA methylation—an epigenetic mark that can silence or activate genes—six decades later (Heijmans et al., 2008). These altered genes are often involved in stress regulation, metabolic processes, and brain development.

This epigenetic regulation illustrates how necropolitics can operate on a devastating temporal delay. The starvation of a pregnant mother today can alter the neurodevelopmental trajectory of her unborn child, predisposing them to mental illness and cognitive deficits that may not manifest until they reach adulthood themselves. This represents the ultimate foreclosure of futurity: an assault that writes its violence into the biological inheritance of the next generation, ensuring that even children not yet born will bear the scars of today’s siege. Furthermore, the current conditions in Gaza create a resurgence of acute deficiency diseases that induce immediate psychosis, demonstrating the direct biochemical assault on sanity. Pellagra, caused by severe niacin deficiency, can present with dementia and psychotic features like delusional parasitosis, which is reversible with treatment (Prakash et al., 2008). In Gaza, where families burn garbage to cook and lack access to diverse foods, such cases are emerging. This represents necropolitics operating through the most fundamental biochemical means: by depriving the brain of the basic components needed for neurotransmission, it induces a state of madness, thereby completing the cycle of destroying both the body and the mind.

Psychological and Emotional Devastation: The Mental Architecture of Unchilding The psychological impacts of the armed aggression and genocide reveal unchilding’s systematic dismantling of childhood, a process compounded by the neurobiological effects of starvation. (Shalhoub Kevorkian, 2019) Even before the October 2023 escalation, the mental health of Gaza’s children was in a state of crisis due to the prolonged blockade, with a 2022 report finding that 80% of children reported emotional distress (Save the Children, 2022; GCMHP, 2025 and 2025). The Gaza genocide has intensified this baseline of trauma into what aid organizations have termed complete psychological destruction (Save the Children, 2024), a state characterized by severe anxiety, sleep loss, and pervasive developmental regression.  (GCMHP, 2025 and 2025) This mental health catastrophe is not merely a response to violence but is biologically intensified by malnutrition. Scientific studies directly link early nutritional deprivation to later mental health disorders; for instance, Galler et al. (2010) found that children who suffered moderate-to-severe malnutrition in infancy showed markedly higher rates of depressive symptoms and anxiety by adolescence. In war zones, these effects are severely compounded. A meta-analysis by Charlson et al. (2021) confirms alarmingly high rates of PTSD, anxiety, and depression in children exposed to conflict, illustrating how the necropolitical weaponization of hunger and siege synergistically attacks both the body and the mind to foreclose a viable future.

Social and Familial Breakdown: Corrupting the Sites of Resistance

The necropolitical strategy extends beyond physical starvation to systematically corrode family and community structures—the very fabric of social resilience that has historically allowed Palestinian society to endure. This process is vividly exemplified in the perversion of humanitarian relief. Aid distribution points, which should be zones of safety, have instead been transformed into sites of extreme violence and humiliation. There have been numerous documented instances of Israeli forces opening fire on crowds desperately awaiting food, turning the struggle for sustenance into a death zone. In one such attack on February 29, 2024, over 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded while seeking aid at the al-Rashid Street in Gaza City, an event witnesses described as a massacre of people who posed no threat (OHCHR, 2024; MSF, 2024). The organization of aid delivery itself often functions as a tool of degradation. There are widespread reports of convoys being subject to lengthy, arbitrary delays at checkpoints, and of soldiers occasionally throwing food parcels from trucks onto the ground, forcing starving civilians to scramble in the dirt for scraps—a calculated tactic designed to compound physical deprivation with profound psychological humiliation and to obliterate the societal values of generosity (karam) and compassion (takaful) that are central to Palestinian culture (Al Jazeera, 2024). This forced atomization, where families must fight for every morsel, severs the bonds of communal solidarity and reduces social relations to a desperate competition for survival.

Within this context, the family unit, the primary site of cultural preservation and resistance, becomes a source of additional trauma. When caregivers cannot fulfill their most sacred duty—to feed and protect their children—the fundamental trust that underpins the parent-child relationship is shattered. This erosion of the caregiver’s role is a core goal of unchilding (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019), as it ensures that the home, the last refuge of safety, is compromised. Parents report unbearable feelings of guilt, shame, and powerlessness, which can manifest as withdrawal or anger, further traumatizing children who rely on them for emotional regulation and security (Save the Children, 2024 and Abu Jamei, 2025). For the child, this parental failure—though entirely imposed by external forces—is internalized as a profound betrayal of their world’s basic order. This experience is a direct pathway to debilitating mental health conditions. It fosters learned helplessness—a psychological state where one learns to believe they have no control over their situation—and exacerbates the effects of toxic stress, which disrupts brain architecture and can lead to lifelong impairments in learning, behavior, and both physical and mental health (Center on the Developing Child, 2010). The child is thus wounded twice: first by the hunger itself, and second by the destruction of the protective relationships that are essential for healing from such trauma.

This systematic degradation of aid distribution represents a profound assault on the foundational values that have historically sustained Palestinian communities through decades of oppression. The traditional Arab and Palestinian ethics of karam (generosity), neighborly love, and collective solidarity (takaful) have long served as pillars of resistance, enabling communities to endure extreme hardship through mutual support and shared resources. By forcing starving individuals to undertake grueling journeys—often walking miles on foot—to compete for meager rations, the current aid distribution system deliberately corrodes these communal bonds. Where families once shared their last morsel with neighbors, they are now compelled to hoard whatever they can secure, prioritizing immediate family survival over the broader community welfare that has traditionally defined Palestinian social organization. This transformation is captured in the words of one Gaza resident who described the moral devastation: Now we see martyrs on the side of the street and we just keep walking to get the food to save our souls (Rombout, private conversation, September 10, 2025). This statement reveals not merely individual trauma, but the systematic destruction of the moral economy that has enabled Palestinian society to maintain its coherence and humanity under siege. The necropolitical strategy thus operates not only through physical starvation but through the deliberate erosion of the social and ethical infrastructure that has historically enabled collective resistance and survival.

Conclusion: Dismantling the Necropolitical Regime

The weaponization of hunger against Palestinian children exists within a broader global architecture of necropolitical violence that simultaneously manifests in Sudan, where 24.6 million people-half the population-face acute food insecurity, with famine confirmed in at least five areas and projected to expand to five additional areas between December 2024 and May 2025 (Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, 2024; United Nations News, 2024). The Sudan Doctors Union estimated in January 2025 that 522,000 children have already died, while over 700,000 children have faced acute levels of malnutrition since the conflict began (Wikipedia, 2024). This parallel crisis illuminates how necropolitical starvation operates as a global technology of racialized violence, enabled by the same colonial hierarchies that render Palestinian and Sudanese lives expendable within Quijano’s framework of coloniality of power.

The differential treatment of Palestinian and Sudanese children reveals the unconscious pre-selection mechanisms that determine which children are projected into valued futures and which are discarded as disposable others. As Katie Gentile (2023) argues in her analysis of fetal fetishism, certain bodies-particularly white, cisgender fetuses-are imbued with “magical properties required to create a more certain future in the face of increasing uncertainty,” while racialized children are systematically excluded from this protective temporal fantasy. Gentile’s concept of “dense temporalities” exposes how “temporality itself is formed through colonialism, White supremacy, and heteropatriarchal values,” creating futures that are “a temporal colonial privilege grown only on the violated and tortured backs of Blackness and Indigeneity” (Gentile, 2023, p. 56). Palestinian and Sudanese children, positioned within this racialized temporal hierarchy, are denied access to the protective futurity reserved for those deemed fully human within Wynter’s “genre of man.”

While both Palestinian and Sudanese children experience unchilding, the mechanisms operate differently within the global colonial hierarchy. Palestinian children undergo what Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019) identifies as active unchilding—the systematic construction of Palestinian children as “dangerous, racialized others” who must be contained, surveilled, and controlled. This process transforms them from innocent children deserving protection into potential threats requiring elimination. Sudanese children, by contrast, experience what we might term passive unchilding—a form of necropolitical abandonment where they are rendered invisible within international consciousness, effectively placed outside the protective framework of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Their unchilding operates through systematic neglect and the suspension of international legal protections, as if they exist beyond the reach of universal human rights frameworks.

This differential treatment reveals how the coloniality of power operates through both hypervisibility and invisibility. Palestinian children are hypervisible as threats within the Israeli security apparatus and Western media discourse, justifying their systematic targeting. Sudanese children are rendered invisible, abandoned to starvation without the international mobilization that other humanitarian crises generate. The international community’s differential response—mobilizing resources for some humanitarian disasters while maintaining “deafening silence” about others-reflects the embedded colonial logic that pre-determines which children possess futures worth preserving and which may be sacrificed for geopolitical objectives.

Both crises are explicitly described as entirely man-made tragedies (International Rescue Committee, 2025; Norwegian Refugee Council, 2024), revealing how sovereign power deliberately deploys hunger as a weapon to achieve political objectives through the systematic destruction of childhood. In Sudan, as in Gaza, the targeting of children represents a calculated strategy of unchilding, where conflict parties actively obstruct humanitarian access to starving populations. The ongoing starvation operates through “senseless warfare” that includes “entire villages destroyed, civilians executed, women raped, and homes lost to shelling and airstrikes” (Norwegian Refugee Council, 2024)—a pattern that mirrors the comprehensive assault on Palestinian social structures described throughout this analysis.

While Sudan might be perceived by the international community as merely an internal conflict, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine explicitly establishes that sovereignty is not a shield behind which mass atrocities can be committed with impunity. The R2P framework, codified in paragraphs 138-139 of the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document and reaffirmed in UN Security Council Resolution 1674 (2006), creates a clear hierarchy of responsibility: first, each state has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing; second, the international community has a responsibility to assist states in fulfilling this protection; and third, when a state “manifestly fails” to protect its populations, the international community must be prepared to take collective action through the UN Charter, including Chapter VII measures (United Nations, 2005; Ban Ki-moon, 2009). Sudan’s systematic obstruction of humanitarian aid and the deliberate targeting of civilians clearly constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes, triggering the international community’s responsibility to protect.

However, the coloniality of power, embedded racial hierarchies, and economic interests systematically tarnish the implementation of R2P principles. As Chandler (2004) argues, humanitarian intervention often serves as a mechanism for maintaining global hierarchies rather than genuinely protecting vulnerable populations. The selective application of R2P reveals how certain lives are deemed worthy of protection while others-particularly in the Global South-are abandoned to what Mbembe describes as necropolitical calculation. Economic interests further compromise R2P implementation, as powerful states prioritize resource extraction, arms sales, and geopolitical positioning over civilian protection (Hehir, 2012). In Sudan’s case, the international community’s “deafening silence” reflects not merely political neglect but the systematic devaluation of Sudanese lives within a global racial hierarchy that renders their suffering invisible and their deaths acceptable collateral damage in broader geopolitical games.

The global dimension of this necropolitical project becomes evident in the international community’s response—or lack thereof. As one humanitarian official observed about Sudan: “Twenty years ago, we had presidents and prime ministers engaged to stop atrocities in Darfur. There are today many times as many lives at stake – this is the world’s worst crisis — but we are met with deafening silence” (Norwegian Refugee Council, 2024). This selective attention reflects the racialized calculus of coloniality, where certain populations are systematically rendered invisible and their suffering normalized within global consciousness. The same mechanisms that allow Palestinian children to starve in Gaza enable the world to ignore what has been termed “the most extreme hunger crisis globally” (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 2025) in Sudan.

Both Gaza and Sudan demonstrate how necropolitical starvation transcends isolated conflicts to reveal the enduring structure of colonial violence that continues to organize global relations. The parallel timing of these crises-escalating simultaneously in 2023-2024—exposes the interconnected nature of systems that determine which children deserve to live and which may be sacrificed for geopolitical objectives. This global pattern of unchilding demands recognition that Palestinian suffering cannot be understood in isolation from the broader architecture of racialized violence that simultaneously consigns Sudanese children to death by starvation.

Reversing the necropolitical trajectory that has systematically targeted Palestinian and Sudanese childhood requires far more than humanitarian aid; it demands a fundamental dismantling of the structures of violence and domination. First, and most immediately, permanent ceasefires must be secured in both Gaza and Sudan. In Palestine, the siege must be entirely and permanently lifted, and arms transfers to the Zionist entity must be halted. In Sudan, all warring parties must cease hostilities and guarantee safe humanitarian corridors. The continuous, unimpeded flow of food, water, medicine, and fuel is the bare minimum required to stop the active destruction of children’s bodies and minds in both contexts. International law is unequivocal: the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited and constitutes a war crime. This law must be enforced, not merely lamented, regardless of whether the perpetrators are state or non-state actors.

Second, we must demand robust, transparent mechanisms to hold the perpetrators of these genocidal policies, war crimes, and crimes against humanity accountable in both Palestine and Sudan. The impunity enjoyed by those orchestrating systematic starvation has been a primary enabler of their violence. This requires supporting international legal proceedings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC), and advocating for national jurisdictions to exercise universal jurisdiction. For Sudan, this means pursuing accountability not only through international mechanisms but also ensuring that regional bodies like the African Union fulfill their responsibility to protect African children. Accountability is not about retribution; it is a necessary step toward justice for the victims and a critical deterrent for future violations. The architects and executors of policies of deliberate starvation and unchilding must be named and face consequences, whether they operate from Tel Aviv, Khartoum, or any other seat of power.

However, these immediate steps, while vital, are insufficient if they are not coupled with a sustained challenge to the root pathology: the coloniality of power and the embedded racial hierarchy that underpins the necropolitics of the modern sovereign state. The dehumanization of Palestinian and Sudanese lives—the calculus that their pain is an acceptable cost or that their children’s deaths are merely unfortunate casualties—is rooted in a colonial logic that constructs them as lesser, dangerous, or simply invisible within global consciousness. This hierarchy is what allows the international community to respond with complicit silence or performative condemnation while continuing to arm and fund the machinery of destruction in Palestine, and to systematically ignore the “world’s worst crisis” unfolding in Sudan.

Therefore, our most important and diligent work is to constantly expose and challenge this coloniality. It is the ideology that allows a state to frame the right to self-defense as a right to exterminate Palestinian children, and that renders Sudanese children’s mass starvation invisible to international consciousness. Ending these genocidal projects requires more than ceasefires; it requires a profound ideological shift that dismantles the racist assumptions granting some people safety and sovereignty while condemning others to systematic elimination or abandonment.

For the generation of children who have already been scarred in both Palestine and Sudan, the path to healing is long. Massive investment in trauma-informed mental health services, nutritional rehabilitation, and the rebuilding of schools and hospitals is critical, drawing on proven models of intervention (Galler & Bryce, 2012). But true healing cannot occur under the constant threat of violence—whether in the open-air prison of Gaza or the war-torn landscapes of Sudan. Ultimately, only just political solutions can truly secure their futures: for Palestinians, this means dismantling the apartheid system, ending the occupation, and guaranteeing equal rights, self-determination, and the right of return; for Sudanese children, this requires genuine democratic transition, equitable resource distribution, and an end to the extractive economic relationships that fuel conflict. Both solutions demand the fundamental principle that all children, regardless of their geographic location or racial categorization within global hierarchies, possess inherent dignity and the right to futures free from systematic violence.

This is the only way to break the necropolitical cycle that currently consigns Palestinian and Sudanese children to premature death and build a future where all children can live in safety, with dignity, and with the freedom to dream. The interconnected nature of these crises demands an interconnected response that recognizes how the colonial architecture enabling Palestinian suffering simultaneously renders Sudanese children invisible. Only by dismantling this global structure of racialized violence can we hope to protect the children who represent our collective future.

Acknowledgment: I am grateful to Dr. Sacha Rombout, founder of the  Australia-Palestine Mental Health Network, for his feedback and invaluable support, and insight as I wrote this essay.

References

Abu Jamei, Y. (2025, January). Living through the unimaginable: A testament from Gaza. CounterPunch.

Al Jazeera. (2024, March 3). ‘We are forced to eat animal feed’: Stories of starvation in Gaza. Al Jazeera.https://www.aljazeera.com/

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