The Weaponisation of Women's Bodies: Unveiling the Silenced Price of Food in Gaza

Starvation is increasingly being used as a weapon in modern warfare, and perhaps in no place is this more clearly illustrated than in Gaza, where Israeli military actions, blockades, and redirection of humanitarian aid have not only limited food supplies, but also dignity, agency, and bodily autonomy—especially for women. Starvation in Gaza is not just about food; it is also about gender, power, and rights, and the bodies of women have been rendered voiceless battlefields. This article examines the gendered toll of the weaponisation of access to food in Gaza by considering the structural, lived experience, and legal and moral frameworks for accountability.

Fight for Life through the Famine

The food system in Gaza was already weak before the renewed hostilities of 2023–2025, which have been exacerbated by the long Israeli blockade since 2007 that has restricted imports of agricultural inputs, hampered movement of goods and people, and limited fishing and farming, all slowly depleting local food production capacity. The war has hastened this collapse: airstrikes and ground operations have destroyed farmland, bakeries, mills, food processing facilities, and supply chains. A recent review concludes that Gaza has become a "place of death and despair" with catastrophic levels of hunger and malnutrition. (Muller, Tackling violence against women and girls in Gaza, 26)

Famine was confirmed by the WHO and partner agencies by mid-2025, with more than half a million people in catastrophic food insecurity, with adults going days without food and children exhibiting dangerously high levels of acute malnutrition. The scale of this crisis shows that Gaza has long since moved beyond "food insecurity" and has reached the threshold of mass starvation.

According to international human rights observers, starvation is not an unintended consequence but a planned part of the military strategy in Gaza. Human Rights Watch argues that Israel has employed starvation of civilians as a tool of war—a war crime—in Gaza by deliberately restricting food, water, and fuel, denying humanitarian access, and targeting objects essential to civilian life. HRW has reported that in December 2023, high-ranking Israeli officials publicly declared their intent to starve civilians, and ground operations have reflected those statements.

Documentation of “I Starve Myself So My Children Can Eat”

The weaponisation of food aid in Gaza is now considered a war crime by the United Nations human rights office. Since late May 2025, more than 410 people have been killed by Israeli fire while trying to reach food distribution points, with civilians facing the choice between starvation and death. UN officials argue that the highly militarised management of aid delivery compounds the inequities of access and safety. Thus, the context into which women—and women’s bodies—enter is not one of neutral humanitarian collapse but of an orchestrated, strategic deprivation. In some households in Gaza, women bear the brunt of sacrifices, missing meals, going without, or cutting back so that their children and male family members can eat. According to the Women’s Refugee Commission, which documents in its report I Starve Myself So My Children Can Eat, women are reported to go 48–72 hours without eating, to ensure that their children can have at least some nutrition. Militarised food distribution sites exclude women, and women in the field of study report that the sites are death traps or graveyards. And because women often have caregiving responsibilities and lack mobility, they are frequently left behind, reducing their access even further. These gendered practices are not limited to the home. Women might be physically barred from aid lineups and distribution sites, or they might avoid them for fear of harassment, violence, or indignity. Women collapse from hunger in the queues, give birth without nutrition, and are pushed into early or forced marriages in exchange for flour or cash, as the WRC report documents. The overall effect is to increase the nutritional and health vulnerabilities of women (weakness, anaemia, reproductive harm, and maternal mortality increase under long-term deprivation).

Hunger has created a space of desperation that is ripe for sexual exploitation, abuse, and coercion, including reports from Gaza that women have been offered food, money, or other aid in exchange for sex, and that local men (some of whom are connected to the aid effort) have promised to help in exchange for sexual access. This is a form of transactional rape or sexual exploitation that weaponises the body of the desperate; the coercive dynamics of this abuse happen in the cracks of humanitarian aid, where women have no leverage or recourse, and the power asymmetry is so great that the women who seek food are forced to accept abuse or die of starvation. The weaponised scarcity becomes the condition of violation. Reproductive health services have been disrupted by war: maternity wards bombed or rendered nonoperational, an IVF clinic destroyed, and UN investigators calling attacks on women’s health infrastructure "genocidal acts," since they erode collective reproductive capacity.¹⁶ Physical attacks have been accompanied by the restrictions on imports of medical supplies, nutritional supplements, prenatal care, and maternal health services, which further limit women's reproductive sovereignty. Reports from Gaza document sexual violence, public stripping, threats of rape, and sexualized torture (Olofsson, Health and Health Care for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 76). The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory has documented Israeli security forces employing forced nudity, sexual harassment, and assault, including on genitals, as control and terror tactics, which are not random but part of a pattern of violence linked to war strategy. Hunger, the collapse of health services, and the threat of sexual violence combine to ensure that the bodies of women are not only exploited for reproductive purposes but are also sites of coercion, violation, and dominance.

Food in Exchange for Women’s Bodies

The "price" of food in Gaza cannot be calculated alone in calories or in lives lost, but in the whittling away of dignity, self-determination, and future generations. The systems of control illustrate how the work of women's bodies is diverted from self-determination into spaces of power, discipline, and exploitation. Women spending hours in lines, at risk of gunfire, fainting from starvation, laying their bodies open to abuse—all experience deep violence to their dignity. The psychological cost is stupendous. Women describe hopelessness, shame, worry, and trauma as a result of being compelled to exchange their bodies for meagre survival. Even without physical violence, the coercive situation debilitates their self-worth. Mothers who starve so their children can eat share more than survival. Prenatal deprivation causes low birthweight, stunting, developmental impairment, and long-term illness. Women who give birth during conditions of famine will give birth to infants too frail to cry. Girls are frequently married early as a survival tactic, yet again fueling cycles of gender vulnerability and deprivation. The cost is structural and intergenerational. In the militarised context of aid, women's voices are silenced. Systems for distribution, security protocols, checkpoints, and violence are planned and managed without significant involvement of women. Humanitarian agencies are pressured to adapt to security logics, at times concentrating aid in militarised areas where women's movement is restricted. Women's experiences—in their bodies—are therefore made invisible within the planning and governance of aid. Under traditional international humanitarian law, famine is also forbidden as a weapon of war; deliberately starving civilians or obstructing relief is a war crime. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court similarly bans weaponising starvation and subjecting access to sources of life to conditions of power. When the UN human rights office announces that food weaponisation "constitutes a war crime," it emphasises this legal framework.

In Gaza's crisis, the real price of food cannot be measured in the dead or the starving alone. It is etched on women's bodies—on their frail flesh, on their lost dignity, on their lost fertility, and on their forced decisions. Through the system of management of distribution and exploitation, the war machinery has used women's bodies to consolidate control and subordination. Witnessing hunger is not enough. We have to call the gendered violence by name, require accountability, and humanise aid. The bodies that pay the silent cost have to be the site of justice, rather than collateral damage. The international community, humanitarian responders, and feminist movements have to react not merely to famine but to the deliberate attack on bodily autonomy and gender justice in Gaza.

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Bibliography

1. Müller, Catherine, and Jean-Pierre Tranchant. “Tackling Violence against Women and Girls in Gaza.” International Institute for Environment and Development, 2017. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep02733.

2. Roy, Sara. “The Gaza Strip: A Case of Economic De-Development.” Journal of Palestine Studies 17, no. 1 (1987): 56–88. https://doi.org/10.2307/2536651.

3. Henley, David D., Eva Bergholtz, and Gunnar Olofsson. “Health and Health Care for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.” Journal of Palestine Studies 15, no. 2 (1986): 132–40. https://doi.org/10.2307/2536832.