Bones protrude more clearly than skin, and haggard faces and sunken, desperate eyes stare blankly into space. These images have become the defining symbol of Gaza today, where we witness the slow death of children in the Strip, starving to death before the cameras.

Those whose bones haven’t yet emerged are using whatever strength remains to walk several kilometers under the sun and sand, in search of a box of aid. There, Israeli soldiers stand behind metal barriers, indifferent to their empty stomachs, more focused on how to hunt these desperate people like birds and kill them.

The paradox is that the hunger and the death of Gazans is portrayed as a managed process: funded, organized, and costed, as any other project would be.

Hunger there is not a natural accident nor a result of economic failure, but a political strategy, its costs tightly calculated, just as the siege itself is. And the stunning irony: the management of starvation requires vast sums of money—to build the barriers, fund the forces, pay the soldiers who enforce the starvation and kill the hungry who seek food packages, organize the passages through which thousands of Palestinians pass daily for a box of provisions, monitor movements, and even control the route of relief trucks.

All of this costs tremendous amounts of money.

Starvation in Gaza is not only a moral crime, but an entire economic project, fully structured and underpinned by billions of dollars. War spending doesn’t just go toward weapons: it extends to funding a comprehensive system of starvation that deprives local markets of resources and disrupts supply chains.

The economy of war doesn’t operate solely through bombardment and destruction, but through the restructuring of daily life, making mere survival both difficult and costly.

In Gaza, vast sums are directed toward powering the military machinery: soldiers’ salaries, surveillance technologies, tank and aircraft maintenance, building checkpoints, and managing narrow passages that people must walk, sometimes up to 12 kilometers, to access aid that may be withheld at the last moment.

Some commentators have described this strategy as “weaponizing hunger” — that is, hunger is not just deprivation of food but a tool of coercion and negotiation.

This modern siege is managed with meticulous organization: controlling the number of trucks allowed entry, choosing delivery locations, and managing risks in ways that amplify suffering rather than reduce it.

And hunger, contrary to assumptions, is not cost-free. Budgets are allocated to secure the “effectiveness” of the siege:

Constructing and managing security checkpoints.

Thermal surveillance systems and drones to monitor movement.

The costs of preventing or delaying aid, which require field and legal control.

Logistical expenses ensuring that the “pressure” on the population remains constant.

Every dollar spent on these operations is a dollar diverted from rescue or reconstruction efforts.

Destroying Gaza’s food infrastructure is not a temporary event. Generations raised amid famine will face irreversible biological and cognitive harm. This intentional destruction of the productive base and food reserves means reconstruction isn’t just about rebuilding houses, it’s about restoring profoundly damaged human capacity.

Here, economics becomes complicit in crime: budgets allocated to siege and starvation are not neutral, they are participants in the criminal act itself.

Oxfam estimates that less than 3 percent of G7 military spending would be enough to end global hunger and address the debt of the Global South

According to the World Food Programme, the world—spending annually more than US $2.72 trillion on military armaments—has the capacity to end global hunger at a cost not exceeding US $40 billion per year, which amounts to roughly 1.5 percent of global military expenditure.

Even the most ambitious scenarios of eradicating poverty and bolstering agricultural systems, costing up to $265 billion per year, still represent less than 10 percent of what is spent on militaries and weapons

These comparisons reveal a stark paradox: a tiny portion of resources allocated to war could, if redirected, end one of the most widespread forms of human suffering.

In Gaza, this contradiction is painfully visible: the money spent restricting food entry, demolishing homes, hospitals, and schools, or obstructing crossings, if redirected, could transform everything from death to life.

The protruding bones of Gaza’s children are the result of a long-term decision, financed and organized, to weaponize hunger.

The question that should reverberate across the world: How many more fragile bones must appear on our screens before we recognize hunger is not incidental but manufactured? And that ending this industry starts by shifting spending priorities from killing to sustaining life.