Gaza – Israel’s Starvation Practices, Erasing Food Cultures as Memoricide

It is the summer of 2025, and harrowing images of emaciated babies, children, and adults, along with those depicting desperately hungry Palestinians searching for food and water amid the relentless Israeli-imposed starvation and genocide in Gaza, are filling our screens. I scroll through, lingering on some images and writings that are heartbreakingly haunting, and that unnervingly evoke fond memories of food making, sharing, and remembering with friends and family.

Food making and sharing have always been some of the most signficant and yet mundane memory- and meaning-making practices, bringing together Palestinians, particularly women (mothers, daughters, granddaughters) to create, imagine, talk, tell stories, and remember. It is through food making and sharing that those meanings and stories are passed down, and communal identities forged, even during displacement and war.

From antiquity, depriving populations of access to food, water, and other means to sustain life has been a deliberate and critical tool of war. The deliberate withholding or destruction of objects indispensable to the survival of civilian populations has often been used as part and parcel of policies that systematically target groups with an impact equal to, and potentially even more widespread than, acts of killing. However, the policies and actions that produce and sustain starvation are treated as lesser crimes than killing. In fact, when described as famine, these calamities are frequently portrayed as natural or unintentional crises of hunger or malnutrition. And, as I suggest here, these acts of war are rarely discussed as ‘memoricide’ (literally the killing of memory)—one of the many ‘-cides’ (scholasticide, urbanicide, culurocide, ecocide, etc.) that fall under the more generic term genocide, in the case of Gaza, all intended to delink Palestinians from their homeland and from a cherished past.

More broadly, memoricide as a practice, refers to the deliberate destruction of the material structures within which cultural, social, collective identities, and memories are produced and reproduced. These constitute a society’s or a group’s cultural heritage, namely: architecture, paintings, art collections, archives, photographs, manuscripts, periodicals, housing, and land and property ownership papers. Memoricide, as such, not only aims at erasing the social and cultural frameworks that sustain what Maurice Halbwachs^[1] has called ‘collective memory,’ but also the personal memories and the social and cultural practices and everyday experiences that form the basis of personal, social, and collective identities and memories.

As Ilan Pappé^[2] and Nur Masalha^[3] write, memoricide refers to the processes and practices that extend beyond the temporality of war and that, as they show, take place within the broader contexts of occupation and settler-colonial practices of the Zionist regime. For Pappé, ‘memoricide’ has been a central practice in Ben-Gurion’s master plan of expulsion and destruction. Masalha, too, uses the term systematically to refer to strategies and patterns that began in the pre-Nakba period and that were pursued far more drastically thereafter in order to erase Palestinian memory and detach Palestinians from their history. One of the most obvious tools was the literal erasure of the indigenous Palestinian toponymic memory from history and geography through renaming places like valleys, towns, streets, and rivers. Another less-discussed tool is Israel’s systematic efforts to dismantle and erase cultures of food making and the transmission of knowledge embedded in these cultures.

The role of women, men, and children in maintaning histories and cultures of food making and sharing has been discussed extensively elsewhere, as has Israel’s continued violent interference to prevent this transmission. Eating and food practices are inseparably linked to Palestinian culture and to what it means to be Palestinian. Sharing food is a deeply rooted cultural practice, as is the cultivation of the land and tending to its produce. In a recent issue published in the Jerusalem Quarterly,^[4] various authors discuss how Palestinian food practices are interwoven with relationships and identities. Reflecting on Gaza during the first year of the ongoing genoice, Lila Sharif,^[5] for example, discusses creative stories of food making and sharing disseminated through social media platforms, such as those of the charismatic 10-year-old vlogger Renad^[6] from Gaza, who shares her recipes from war for an English-speaking audience.^[7] As Sharif writes, food content creation during the first nine months of the Gaza genocide can be seen as a vital record of Palestinian presence-making and presence-affirming. Alongside what is called ‘guerrilla gardening’ practices, these are powerful forms of non-violent popular resistance and examples of Palestinian sumoud (perseverance). 

Examining food and food cultures through the prism of the genocide in Gaza, we can appreciate how the transmission of food cultures reveals interlinked facets of cultural survival and resilience. But it also becomes clear that Israel’s systemic destruction of food sources and prevention of access to food must be recognized as a form of memoricide and a practice of epistemic violence intended to deprive Palestinians not only of the right to memory and culture but also their agency as knowable subjects/agents. It is a war against knowledge, ways of life, and living itself, as much as it is a war against access to water, resources, and fertile lands, and sustenance.

[1] Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

[2] Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006).

[3] Nur Masalha, “Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory: The Appropriation of Palestinian Place Names by the Israeli State,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 14, no. 1 (2015): 3–57.

[4] Special Issue, Food and Foodways (Part Two), Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 99 (2024). Online at https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1656546.

[5] Lila Sharif. “How Dough Rises in Gaza: Palestine’s Foremothers and Recipes against Genocide in Food and Foodways,” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 99 (2024): 56–73.

[6] Renad Attallah, Instagram: @enadfromgaza.

[7] Recent stories from Renad show her looking pale and emaciated as she calls for urgent support in providing food.