As starvation mounts in Gaza, Jewish voices increasingly rise up in consternation

Yazan, a malnourished 2-year-old Palestinian boy, sit with his brothers at their family’s damaged home in the Al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City, on July 23, 2025. Photo by Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images

(JTA) — As reports and images of hunger surged out of Gaza this week, the American Jewish Committee issued a proclamation on X: “The serious humanitarian situation in Gaza must not be taken lightly,” the group wrote, adding, “Implying that starvation is a legitimate tactic is unacceptable.”

The group was responding to a far-right Jewish congressman, Randy Fine, who had shared a CNN report about Hamas’ claim that 15 people had starved to death in Gaza in the previous day. “Release the hostages,” Fine wrote. “Until then, starve away.”

Fine also disputed the accuracy of CNN’s report. And the AJC’s statement did not lay particular blame for the situation in Gaza. Still, the exchange underscored a searing reality: The hunger crisis in Gaza is now occupying a central place in the concerns of Jews around the world.

It’s difficult to know exactly what is happening in Gaza, where Israel has been battling Hamas since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel. Israel has not allowed independent journalists to enter, and both Israel and Hamas have a strong interest in shaping the story that emerges. Both sides accuse the other of lying.

But around the world, videos of desperate-looking Gazans clamoring for food at distribution points, accounts from adults describing hunger so severe they grow dizzy as they walk, and pictures of gaunt, sickly children are breaking through.

They are provoking soul-searching among Jews around the world who are increasingly concerned that a human rights catastrophe is resulting from a war being waged ostensibly on their behalf.

They are provoking new levels of concern among Jews around the world who are increasingly worried that a human rights catastrophe is resulting from a war that many of them have defended as a legitimate response to Oct. 7, when Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel and took more than 250 hostages, of whom 50 Hamas continues to hold.

Hundreds of rabbis from across denominations have signed onto an open letter calling on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to stop at once the use and threat of starvation as a weapon of war.”

A major Jewish organization is holding an online event focused on “the humanitarian aid crisis in Gaza,” following an open call from a leading progressive rabbi for Jewish groups to do more.

And even right-wing supporters of the Israeli government who have brushed off previous warnings of famine are wringing their hands over the state of affairs, though they remain hesitant to blame Israel.

“Gaza may well be approaching a real hunger crisis. Shocked to be reading this from me? I don’t blame you,” the Israeli right-wing journalist Amit Segal wrote in his daily newsletter on Thursday, which was republished by The Free Press.

Segal cited research by an Israeli professor who found that the price of flour had risen so high in Gaza that, the professor concluded, “without immediate change, a state of mass starvation seems inevitable.”

According to people inside Gaza, the Hamas-run health ministry there and international watchdogs, that state has already arrived. They say people are dying of hunger each day, with those who remain alive in a perilous state as aid remains virtually impossible to obtain. More than 100 international aid groups warned of “mass starvation” on Wednesday, saying that their own workers were going hungry.

“There are no words in the face of the disaster we are in. Kids are dying before the world,” Rana Soboh, a nutritionist at a Gaza hospital, told the Associated Press on Thursday. “There is no uglier and more horrible phase than this.”

“There is no one in Gaza now outside the scope of famine, not even myself,” Ahmed al-Farra, who leads the pediatric ward at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, told The New York Times. “I am speaking to you as a health official, but I, too, am searching for flour to feed my family.”

Both stories reported that hospitals across Gaza were reporting that, for the first time, children were dying of malnutrition despite facing no underlying medical conditions.

Israel cut off aid to Gaza entirely from March to early May, in a fruitless effort to pressure Hamas to surrender. It maintains that it is now providing enough aid to sustain Gazan civilians, though the distribution mechanism it set up with the United States is maligned for being hard to reach and dangerous to access, with daily shootings killing some aid-seekers.

A senior Israeli official who briefed reporters there this week acknowledged that aid is not being distributed adequately and conceded that “action is required to stabilize the humanitarian situation.” He placed the blame on Hamas and the United Nations for not allowing the aid to reach civilians.

A leading Israeli centrist commentator, Times of Israel editor David Horovitz, took aim at that argument in a column on Wednesday, writing that such claims fall apart when Israel has taken control of the vast majority of Gaza militarily.

“Israel, by its own deeds and words, represent[s] itself to its allies and critics alike as the address for all things Gazan — notably as regards the well-being or otherwise of Gaza’s civilian populace,” Horovitz wrote.

He added, “The Gaza terror state built by Hamas in its ongoing declared goal of destroying Israel is largely in ruins, largely uninhabitable, and the Gazans that Hamas most deliberately placed in harm’s way are indeed suffering terrible harm — but with Israel, not Hamas, now having chosen to make itself responsible.”

The grave situation is eliciting a groundswell of activism from Jews and Jewish leaders around the world.

Hundreds of rabbis across at least four continents and from a range of denominations have signed an open letter calling for Israel to deliver more aid to Gaza, with more signing on by the minute.

“The Jewish People face a grave moral crisis, threatening the very basis of Judaism as the ethical voice that it has been since the age of Israel’s prophets. We cannot remain silent in confronting it,” said the letter, which was initiated by rabbis Jonathan Wittenberg in London, Art Green in Boston and Ariel Pollak in Tel Aviv.

It added, “The severe limitation placed on humanitarian relief in Gaza, and the policy of withholding of food, water, and medical supplies from a needy civilian population contradict essential values of Judaism as we understand it.”

Rabbi Jill Jacobs of Truah, a rabbinic human rights group, issued an open call this week for American Jewish groups to acknowledge and contend with the aid crisis and the cost of the war.

“It is time for American Jewry to take an accounting of how many of our communal institutions and leaders are continuing to defend and support a war that has left an unbearable path of death and destruction in its wake,” Jacobs wrote in The Forward, beneath a picture of a starving Gazan child.

There are signs that some may be heeding Jacobs’ call, or otherwise adjusting their own approach to match the gravity of the situation. Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella for nearly 150 local federations that together sent more than $800 million in emergency aid to Israel since Oct. 7, has announced a webinar on the humanitarian situation on Friday.

Some rabbis are gearing up to make the topic the subject of their sermons this Shabbat or sharing messages directly with their communities, often rebutting criticism they know they will receive in the process.

“All the cries about our security and the dismissing of every critic as an antisemite or a self-hating Jew or alternatively blaming everything on Hamas or denying that multitudes are starving, will never justify that people (infants!) are dying of hunger,” Rabbi Steven Moskowitz of the Reform synagogue Congregation Dor V’Dor on Long Island, wrote in a blog post.

“Hamas started this war, but Israel now controls Gaza, and its starving people are now Israel’s responsibility. Their deaths are a stain on our collective Jewish soul,” he added. “Feeding their hungry is now our duty. Has October 7th so hardened our hearts that we have no concern for other human beings?”

Another rabbi, Aaron Weininger of the Conservative synagogue Adath Israel in suburban Minneapolis, addressed the situation on Facebook.

“We are always called to be witnesses. We don’t get a pass when it feels uncomfortable,” he wrote. “There should be no room in Zionism for indifference to the death and destruction in Gaza.”