Food as Necropolitics: The Starvation of Palestinian Sovereignty and Stakes of Geopolitical Ecology
Publisher: Political Geography
Author(s): Garrett Graddy-Lovelace and Malini Ranganathan
Date: 2026
Topics: Basic Services, Conflict Causes, Livelihoods
Countries: Palestine
This article theorizes the deliberate starvation of Gaza as “food-as-necropolitics” and argues that this forced famine clarifies the analytical stakes of the emerging field of geopolitical ecology. Gaza's forced hunger and the weaponization of food aid over the past two-and-a-half years is not a region-specific humanitarian emergency but a geopolitical project of human and ecological destruction, territorial conquest, and racialized dehumanization that tests—and reveals the limits and hollowness of the so-called rules-based liberal international order. The authors review media, legal, and human-rights reporting on food-related deaths, deprivation, and humanitarian access in Gaza from January 2024 to August 2025, identifying two mutually reinforcing axes: (1) deliberate deprivation through siege, blockade, and the destruction of agrifood systems and ecologies; and (2) the weaponization of food aid through militarized distribution and repeated attacks on aid workers and starving aid seekers. Tracking these modalities enables a critique of the dominant liberal order as a racialized formation that not only fails to prevent starvation-as-war, but also supplies diplomatic, legal, and epistemic cover for settler-colonial land and resource capture and impunity. Finally, we foreground Palestinian and transnational agroecological and food sovereignty practices as counter-hegemonic geopolitical ecologies that persist and connect across scales, even as they are met with securitization and criminalization.