Starvation is not only killing Palestinians in Gaza one by one, but also destroying Palestinian society and inflicting permanent damage on bodies and minds, experts say.

As hopes for a ceasefire rise, the threat from extreme hunger is particularly acute because Israel has continued to deploy food controls as a weapon against civilians during previous pauses in conventional fighting, and could do so again.

Starvation forces the body to consume its own muscle and organs for energy, which can cause permanent injury, harms children’s futures by stunting the growth of their bodies and minds, and may even damage the heath of survivors’ children.

It also destroys communities by turning people against each other in their desperation for food and forcing them to do shameful, humiliating or violent things to survive.

Even if they recover physically, the trauma of having to choose between children, turn away relatives begging for food, sell their own bodies or a sister or a daughter for food, stays with them for life, famine experts say.

“You can approach starvation as a biological phenomenon experienced by individuals, but it is also a collective social experience,” said Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, and author of Mass Starvation: the History and Future of Famine.

“Very often that societal element – the trauma, the shame, the loss of dignity, the violation of taboos, the breaking of social bonds – is more significant in the memory of the experience of survivors than the individual biological experience.”

“All these traumas are the reason why the Irish took almost 150 years before they could memorialise what they experienced in the 1840s. Those who inflict starvation are aware of this, they know that what they’re doing is actually dismantling a society.”

This “sociology of starvation” was outlined by Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer and Holocaust survivor who coined the word genocide then campaigned for it to be recognised as a crime in international law, de Waal said.

View image in fullscreen Palestinians gathering to buy bread from a bakery, in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip in October 2024. Photograph: Mohammed Salem/Reuters

In writings during the second world war, Lemkin “spent a lot of time describing rations, rationing as a way of undermining groups”.

The social impact of starvation means an aggressor can use food controls to create a dynamic that de Waal describes as “genocidal humanitarianism”, where just enough calories are provided to prevent mass death, but extreme hunger “destroys the meaning of their life as a group”.

International experts have warned repeatedly during the war that Gaza is approaching the internationally recognised threshold for famine, measured by factors including rates of death and malnutrition.

Chris Newton, senior analyst at International Crisis Group and an expert in famine and starvation as a weapon of war, said that even if that line was never crossed, the effect of spending long periods in a state of extreme hunger could not be fully reversed.

“This is not about a formal famine declaration or a special number of trucks or meals. It’s about Israel’s attempt to starve Gaza indefinitely without the rapid mass death from starvation and disease we call famine,” he said. “This experiment cannot last for ever, though the consequences of starvation can.”

View image in fullscreen Palestinians carry aid supplies from the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in Khan Younis. Photograph: Hatem Khaled/Reuters

One of the most visible signs of social breakdown in Gaza is the regular looting of aid trucks entering the territory, and the near daily shootings of people trying to get limited supplies from distribution centres operated by the secretive US and Israeli backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

“Starvation breaks social order, and transforms governance into just one issue, who can feed people?” said Nour Abuzaid, senior researcher at Forensic Architecture, an agency that investigates human rights violations.

View image in fullscreen Palestinians walk back, carrying parcels collected from a food aid distribution point set up by the privately-run Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) on the Salaheddin road, at the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip Photograph: Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images

“If you can feed people, you can rule them. Because life has been reduced to a single question: What are we going to eat today?”

Forensic Architecture has documented the structural features that make GHF centres so deadly by design, including their location in areas where the Israeli military has ordered civilians to evacuate, and routes to reach them that take civilians close to Israeli military outposts.

Israel can continue to restrict food and channel it through GHF sites even during a pause in fighting with conventional weapons. “This is exactly what happened during the previous ceasefire, which was still in place when Israel cut aid on 2 March,” Abuzaid said.

If it does, the location and architecture of GHF sites mean killings can be expected to continue, she said, citing repeated shootings of civilians who approached a “buffer zone” established by Israeli forces.

“There were over 100 people who were killed during the ceasefire just because they were in proximity to the buffer zone,” Abuzaid said. “So if the model based on (GHF) ration stations placed in or near the buffer zone continues [to be used] we should expect civilian casualties to continue.”

View image in fullscreen Palestinians gather at a food distribution point in Gaza City on 20 July Photograph: Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

Controls on food also mean Israel “can actively destroy civil order even during a ceasefire”, she added.

De Waal said Israel’s control of land and sea borders meant it had full oversight of how much food entered the territory, and UN data providing detailed information about malnutrition among Palestinians meant its leaders could not say starvation there was an unforeseen outcome.

“You can’t starve anyone by accident, you can shoot someone by accident but … in inflicting starvation [you] have 60 or 80 days in which [you] can remedy the error,” he said.

Forensic Architecture has concluded that Israel’s restrictions on food entering Gaza are genocidal in two different ways, said its director, Eyal Weizman.

“Obviously, to intentionally starve people to death is genocidal, and starvation is also used in order to break society. Starvation is the means and starvation is the end.”

“If this system remains in place during any upcoming ceasefire, with control over every calorie and anyone entitled to it, Israel will continue to break Palestinian society,” Weizman said. “The genocide might continue during a ceasefire.”

Mohammed’s skeletal arms stick out of a romper with a grinning emoji-face and the slogan “smiley boy”, which in a Gaza hospital reads as a cruel joke. He spends much of the day crying from hunger, or gnawing at his own emaciated fingers.

At seven months old, he weighs barely 4kg (9lbs) and this is the second time he has been admitted for treatment. His face is gaunt, his limbs little more than bones covered in baggy skin and his ribs protrude painfully from his chest.

“My biggest fear now is losing my grandson to malnutrition,” said his grandmother Faiza Abdul Rahman, who herself is constantly dizzy from lack of food. The previous day the only thing she ate was a single piece of pitta bread, which cost 15 shekels (£3).

“His siblings also suffer from severe hunger. On some days, they go to bed without a single bite to eat.”

View image in fullscreen Mohammed Aliwa is in hospital with severe malnutrition. Photograph: Seham Tantesh/The Guardian

Mohammed was born healthy but his mother was too malnourished to produce breast milk, and the family has only been able to get two cans of baby formula since.

The ward at the Patient’s Friends Benevolent Society hospital is crowded with other skeletal children, some doubled up on the 12 beds. There are only two functioning paediatric teams left in Gaza City, and up to 200 children turn up daily seeking treatment.

Dr Musab Farwana spends his days trying, but often failing, to save them. Then he goes home to share meals that are too small with his own hungry sons and daughters.

The whole family are losing weight fast, because his salary buys almost nothing, and he doesn’t want to risk the deadly race for supplies handed out by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation after another medic, Dr Ramzi Hajaj, was killed trying to get food at one site.

Gaza has never been hungrier, despite several warnings about impending famine over the course of nearly two years of war. Over just three days this week public health officials recorded 43 deaths from hunger; there had been 68 in total before that.

Faiza Abdul Rahman, who has stayed in Gaza City throughout the war, said even the time of the most intense controls on food entering northern Gaza last year were not as bad. “We faced hunger before, but never like this,” she said. “This is the hardest phase we’ve ever endured.”

Testimony from local people and doctors, and data from the Israeli government, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the UN and humanitarian organisations, shows food is running out.

Empty shelves are reflected in soaring prices, with flour selling for more than 30 times the market rate at the start of the year.

Even money or influential employers can no longer protect Palestinians. “Humanitarian organisations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes,” more than 100 aid groups working in Gaza, including MSF, Save the Children and Oxfam, warned in a joint statement this week.

The journalists’ union at AFP said on Monday that for the first time in the news agency’s history it risks losing a colleague to starvation. On Wednesday the head of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said a “large proportion” of Gaza’s population was starving. “I don’t know what you would call it other than mass-starvation – and it’s man-made,” he said.

For months Israel has choked off food shipments. The total amounts allowed in since the start of March are well below starvation rations for the 2.1 million population, and Palestinians are already weakened by the impact of prolonged food shortages and repeated displacement.

“For nearly two years, children here have suffered from famine. Even if some days they felt full, it’s not just about being full, it’s about receiving the nutrients the body needs. And those are completely absent,” said Farwana, the paediatrician.

Those years of malnourishment make them more vulnerable to other diseases, and their low immunity is compounded by the severe shortages of basic medical supplies, which Israel has also blocked from entry.

“Often, I feel devastated because there’s something so simple the child needs to survive, and we just can’t provide it,” he said. Three severely malnourished patients died in intensive care this week, one of them a girl who would have probably survived if doctors had been able to give her intravenous potassium, normally a basic medication, and now impossible to get hold of in Gaza.

“We tried to give her oral alternatives, but due to her malnutrition and resulting complications, she had poor absorption.”

“These cases haunt me, they never leave my mind. This child could have gone back to her family and lived a normal life. But because one simple thing wasn’t available she didn’t survive.”

Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza from 2 March. When the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, lifted it on 19 May he claimed the government was acting to prevent a “starvation crisis”, because some of the country’s staunchest allies told him they would not tolerate images of famine.

In fact the Israeli government simply shifted course to draw out the starvation crisis, letting in only minimal quantities of aid so that Gaza’s descent towards famine progressed a bit more slowly.

The Israeli government announced plans to channel all aid through a secretive US-backed organisation that runs four militarised distribution points.

Hundreds of people have been killed trying to get food handed out at sites Palestinians describe as “death traps”, which have handed out supplies that meet only a fraction of Gaza’s needs.

By 22 July, GHF had been operating for 58 days but the food it had brought in would only have sustained the population of Gaza for less than a fortnight, even if it was distributed equally.

View image in fullscreen The Khalidi family children: Sabah, 12, Saba, 11, Zeina, 10, Ammera, two, Mohammed, seven, and Yousef, 13. Photograph: Seham Tantesh/The Guardian

On Tuesday Umm Youssef al-Khalidi was preparing to try her luck at a GHF distribution centre for the first time. She had avoided them for months because her youngest child is two and her oldest 13 and her husband is paralysed and confined to a wheelchair.

“We have been silencing our hunger with water,” she said. “My fear for my family is greater than my fear for myself. I fear something bad will happen to me, and I’ll leave them without anyone to care for them.”

But her family went without food for four days last week, and when they broke the fast, eight of them had to share a bag of rice and two potatoes given to them by a passing stranger.

The children were excellent students before the war, who always won scholarships. Now they spend their days sitting on the edge of the street under a bombed mosque in al-Wehda neighbourhood in Gaza City, where the girls try to sell bracelets rather than just begging.

There is little demand for cheap jewellery in Gaza today, and although sometimes a passerby takes pity on the gang of skinny kids with dirty faces and tattered clothes, soaring prices means it buys little food.

View image in fullscreen The Khalidi family sit in front of the rubble of a bombed mosque while in front of them is a table where children sell bracelets made of beads. Photograph: Seham Tantesh/The Guardian

“My children have become skeletal, skin and bone,” Khalidi said. “Even the slightest effort makes them dizzy. They sit down again, asking for food, and I have nothing to give. I can’t lie and say I’ll bring them something when I know I won’t be able to.”

So she had decided that in the grim calculus of risks for her family, the hope of getting a little food finally outweighed the risk of losing the adult who held their lives together.

Her husband’s phone had been stolen earlier in the war, so they would have no way to communicate over the long hours that she would spend trekking to the GHF site, then racing to try to get food, and walking back. The family would just have to wait and hope.

“I have no one else to send,” she said. “It’s painful to watch them suffer, and their health gets worse every day they go without food.”

A cruise liner carrying Israeli tourists has been forced to reroute to Cyprus after being turned away from the Greek island of Syros after a quayside protest over the Gaza war.

Around 1,600 Israeli passengers on board the Crown Iris were prevented from disembarking amid safety concerns when more than 300 demonstrators on the Cycladic isle made clear they were unwelcome over Israel’s conduct of the war and treatment of Palestinians in Gaza. A large banner emblazoned with the words Stop the Genocide was held aloft alongside Palestinian flags.

A statement from the protesters also took issue with Greece’s increasingly close “economic, technological and military” relationship with Israel. “As residents of Syros but more so as human beings, we are taking action that we hope will contribute to stopping this destruction from the genocidal war that is taking place in our neighbourhood,” it said.

Some passengers on the vessel reacted by raising Israeli flags and chanting patriotic slogans, eyewitnesses said.

Confirming the incident, Mano Maritime, the Israeli shipping firm operating the vessel, said: “The ship arrived at Syros, encountered a demonstration by pro-Palestinian supporters, and passengers were stuck on board without permission to disembark.”

Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, contacted his Greek counterpart, George Gerapetritis, over the incident, the Greek foreign ministry confirmed. It did not release any details of their discussion.

In recent years, Greece has become popular among Israeli tourists, reflecting the increasingly close ties between the two Mediterranean nations.

Although the protest concluded without injuries nor arrests, the episode highlighted mounting disquiet in Greece over Israel’s actions in Gaza. Anti-Israeli graffiti have proliferated across the country, as has signage in support of Palestinians.

Israel’s government is pursuing an “unacceptable and morally unjustifiable” policy in Gaza, the Catholic Latin patriarch of Jerusalem has said after visiting a church in the territory that was attacked by Israeli forces last week and meeting survivors.

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa said he had witnessed extreme hunger on the brief trip, his first into Gaza this year, and described Israeli blocks on food and medical shipments as a “sentence” for starving Palestinians.

“Humanitarian aid is not only necessary, it is a matter of life and death,” he told journalists in Jerusalem after the visit. “Every hour without food, water, medicine and shelter causes deep harm.”

Pizzaballa travelled to Gaza with the Greek Orthodox patriarch Theophilos III, in a show of cross-denominational solidarity after the attack on the Holy Family church that killed three people and injured nine others including the priest, Gabriel Romanelli, who used to receive daily calls from the late Pope Francis.

The cardinal accused Israel’s government of pursuing a war without justification, and warned against plans to force Palestinians to leave the territory, which are backed by much of the Israeli cabinet.

“We need to say with frankness and clarity that this policy of the Israeli government in Gaza is unacceptable and morally we cannot justify it,” he said. “There can be no future based on captivity, displacement of Palestinians or revenge.”

After international pressure over the attack on the church, including from Donald Trump, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the pope to express “regret” for the attack, which he said was caused by “stray ammunition”.

Some Catholic leaders have questioned that explanation, and the Vatican’s top diplomat, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, said in an interview with Italy’s state broadcaster that it “can legitimately be doubted”.

Asked whether he thought Israeli forces had targeted the church, Pizzaballa said he did not have the military expertise to assess the damage, but that regardless of intention, Christians had repeatedly been attacked and killed by Israeli forces.

“Gaza is almost totally destroyed, and nobody is exempted,” he said. “This is not the first time it happened. There was also [attacks on] the Holy Family and St Porphyrius in the first weeks of the war. And every time it was a mistake.”

Israel has issued evacuation orders for the areas surrounding the two compounds where Gaza’s Christians have taken shelter during the war, but the community of about 560 people do not intend to leave.

“They know very well that we are determined to remain,” Pizzaballa said when asked whether the Christians would follow the evacuation orders.

In the months since his last visit, at the end of last year, destruction of whole neighbourhoods had left parts of Gaza City unrecognisable, Pizzaballa said. Neighbourhoods around the Christian-run al-Ahli hospital, which the clerics visited, were “totally erased”, he said, reduced to rubble.

Inside the hospital wards the delegation met doctors and nurses who described patients too malnourished to heal, and met victims of other attacks.

Pizzaballa sounded emotional as he described speaking to a father keeping watch at the bedside of his blind, badly injured son, the only survivor of his six children. “It was difficult to bear,” he said of the meeting.

Hunger was everywhere, Pizzaballa said, describing long queues of people waiting hours in the sun in hope of something to eat as “a humiliation that is hard to bear when you see it with your own eyes”.

Israel authorised church authorities to take 500 tonnes of aid into Gaza after the attack on the Holy Family. The complex logistics meant the food could not cross the border with the delegation, but people are so hungry that news of the planned delivery brought crowds to the church and even members of the congregation had to be shown proof their leaders had come empty-handed.

The community is surviving on small rations of mostly bread and rice, and told Pizzaballa that they had not eaten meat, fruit or vegetables since February.

He called for an end to the war and said the Christian community saw it as “our moral duty to be part of reconciliation” when peace comes.

“After almost two years of war I think everyone starts thinking and arrives at the conclusion that it is about time to stop it.”

The moon will help us track down Saturn, the sixth planet in the solar system, this week. Currently residing in the constellation of Pisces, the fishes, Saturn is gradually building in brightness as the Earth’s orbit is carrying the two planets closer together. This year, the closest approach between them will occur on 21 September.

In the meantime, the moon can be useful as your guide to locate Saturn and then watch it over the coming months as the planet performs a lazy pirouette in the sky, known as retrograde motion. This is an optical illusion caused by our changing line of sight to the planet as Earth overtakes it on the inside.

The chart shows the view looking east from London on 16 July at midnight BST, soon after the moon and Saturn have risen.

The moon will be almost 20 days old and in its waning gibbous phase, rising later each night. Just over 72% of the moon’s visible surface will be illuminated on this night, and it will be 373,842km away from Earth. Saturn, on the other hand, will be 1,368m km away.

The conjunction will be easily visible from the southern hemisphere.