The UN has described Gaza as “the hungriest place on Earth”. Pictured: Palestinians, including children, in Gaza City, lining up to receive food distributed by a charity on August 2, 2025. (Photo: Abdalhkem Abu Riash/Anadolu via Getty Images)

For Mohan Dutta, the images of hungry children in Gaza are a haunting reminder of his family’s stories of the 1943 Bengal famine that killed up to three million people.

The images of emaciated children in Gaza — their hollow eyes and frail bodies deprived of food — burn through our collective conscience.

For me, they’re also a haunting reminder of a past that refuses to stay buried.

My own ancestral memory carries the scars of the 1943 Bengal famine. Stories passed down in my family tell of chronic hunger, of neighbours wasting away, and families selling everything for a handful of rice.

The famine claimed the lives of between two and three million people. But it wasn’t caused by drought or crop failure — it was the product of colonial negligence and exploitation. A man-made catastrophe.

And as I witness the hunger in Gaza today, I’m struck by the chilling parallels. Like Bengal, Gaza’s hunger is manufactured. And like Bengal, it demands our outrage and resistance.

Under Winston Churchill’s administration, British authorities diverted food supplies from India to feed wartime Britain and its allies, prioritising imperial interests over the lives of colonised subjects. Rice continued to be exported even as Bengal’s poor starved, their pleas drowned out by the machinery of empire.

My grandmother’s memories of those years — families stripped of their possessions and dignity, caste and class systems determining who ate and who didn’t — are etched into my understanding of famine as a form of structural violence.

In Gaza today, we’re seeing a deliberate strategy of deprivation. Starvation is being used as a weapon of war, a tool of domination and erasure.

Since the escalation of conflict in October 2023, Israel’s military actions and blockade have choked off food, water, and humanitarian aid to the 2.3 million Palestinians trapped in the enclave.

Reports from the United Nations and other humanitarian organisations describe an alarming picture: More than 80 percent of Gaza’s population faces acute food insecurity, and children and the elderly are dying from malnutrition.

By mid-2025, the UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) had described Gaza as the “hungriest place on Earth”, with 100 percent of the population at risk of famine. More than 100 aid organisations, including Oxfam and Doctors Without Borders, have warned of mass starvation.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system (IPC), which monitors food crises around the world, states that famine is declared when three key thresholds are met: at least 20 percent of households face extreme food shortages; at least 30 percent of children under five suffer from acute malnutrition; and at least two adults or four children per 10,000 people die daily from starvation or malnutrition-related disease.

But political and logistical barriers often delay a formal declaration of famine. As of July, the IPC had classified North Gaza and Gaza Governorates as being in IPC Phase 5 (Famine) “with reasonable evidence”, noting that 70 percent of the population — around 210,000 people — are in “Catastrophe”.

A formal declaration may be pending, but the situation is already critical. Amnesty International has accused Israel of using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war, citing the deliberate restrictions on aid and the targeted destruction of farmland, fishing boats, and food distribution networks.

A joint statement this week from former New Zealand PM Helen Clark and the former Irish president Mary Robinson, who visited the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, concluded that “there is not only an unfolding, human-caused famine in Gaza, there is an unfolding genocide”.

As a communications scholar who studies the interplays between hunger, dignity, and voice, I see famine not as an unavoidable outcome of crisis, but as an extension of colonial violence.

In Bengal, the British exploited caste and class hierarchies, ensuring that the rural poor and oppressed caste communities bore the brunt of starvation while elites hoarded resources. In Gaza, those suffering most are refugees, labourers, and children — the ones already made vulnerable by decades of occupation and blockade.

The Bengal famine killed up to three million people. Pictured, an emaciated family in search of food arriving in Kolkata in November 1943. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

The violence of famine lies not only in the hunger itself, but also in the way it strips away voice, dignity, humanity, and life itself. In 1943, British officials blamed the Bengal famine on local mismanagement and overpopulation, deflecting blame from their own policies. In Gaza’s case, it’s framed as a natural and acceptable consequence of “war” and “conflict.”

These rhetorical moves obscure the real causes: land dispossession, siege, systemic deprivation. They invert the truth, turning the reality of oppression on its head, and blaming the colonised for their suffering while absolving the coloniser.

And yet, in Bengal as in Gaza, there are acts of everyday resistance. My family’s stories testified to the resilience of communities that survived the famine, and their solidarity amid despair. Neighbours shared meagre rations, women bartered skills to feed their families, and local leaders organised relief despite colonial apathy.

In Gaza, we see Palestinians distributing what little aid reaches them, community kitchens struggling to feed thousands, and farmers attempting to salvage crops under siege. But resilience alone cannot dismantle the systems that produce famine.

The coloniality of famine lies in its ability to normalise suffering. To make it seem inevitable. But famine is never inevitable. It’s the product of choices — policy choices, military strategies, global complicity.

The effects of famine will reverberate for generations. In Bengal, the famine fractured communities and eroded the social fabric, forcing migrations and leaving a legacy of trauma that lingers in the stories of community life. In Gaza, the starvation today threatens to rob a generation of health, education, and hope, perpetuating cycles of marginalisation.

This is the colonial logic at work: to weaken a people so profoundly that their resistance, their very existence, is diminished.

So, what is our role, as scholars, activists, and citizens of the world?

The culture-centred approach tells us that we must centre the narratives of Gazans themselves, their stories of survival and resistance, rather than allowing their suffering to be reduced to statistics or political talking points. We must name the structures that silence them, and challenge the narratives that erase them. And we must continue to speak out in solidarity and demand an end to this injustice.

My roots in Bengal remind me that famine is not just a historical event but a lived reality that shapes identities and demands accountability. The hunger in Gaza is a call to action, a reminder that such tools of oppression, whether in 1943 or 2025, are neither inevitable nor invincible.

The suffering of the children in Gaza — the ones who survive, and the ones who don’t — is not just a tragedy. It is a condemnation of our collective inaction.

Mohan Dutta is Dean’s Chair Professor of Communication and Director of the Centre for Culture-Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) in the School of Humanities, Media and Creative Communication at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University. His research and teaching explore the intersections of community organising, Indigenous rights, migrant rights, and global justice. He is a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association (NCA) and Fellow of the International Communication Association (ICA).

E-Tangata, 2025