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The State of Qatar condemned the Israeli occupation forces' bombing of Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis, which resulted in the deaths of innocent, defenseless civilians, and considered it a new episode in the ongoing series of heinous crimes committed by the occupation forces against the brotherly Palestinian people and a flagrant violation of international law.In a statement on Monday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stressed that the occupation forces' targeting of journalists and relief and medical workers requires urgent and decisive international action to provide the necessary protection for civilians and ensure that the perpetrators of these atrocities do not escape punishment.The Ministry also reiterated the urgent need for global solidarity to end the brutal genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, address the catastrophic humanitarian conditions there, and move forward towards achieving a just and sustainable peace in the region, ensuring the establishment of an independent and fully sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Starvation is the slow, silent unmaking of the body. Deprived of basic sustenance, the body first burns through sugar stores in the liver. Then it melts muscle and fat, breaking down tissue to keep the brain and other vital organs alive.As these reserves are depleted, the heart loses its strength, the immune system surrenders, and the mind begins to fade. The skin tightens over the bones, and breathing grows faint. Organs begin to fail in succession, vision fails, and the body, now empty, slips away. It is a prolonged, agonising way to die.We have all seen the images of emaciated Palestinian babies and children withering away from starvation in their mothers’ arms. Yet now that Israel is intensifying its war – embarking on a new campaign to seize control of Gaza City – thousands more Palestinian civilians may be killed, either by bombs or by starvation.“This is no longer a looming hunger crisis,” Ramesh Rajasingham, a senior UN humanitarian official, told the UN Security Council on Aug 10. “This is starvation, pure and simple.” Alex de Waal, an expert on famine, estimates that thousands of Gazan children are now too weak to eat, even if they had access to food. “They have got to that stage of severe acute malnutrition where their bodies just can’t digest food.”There is a growing consensus that Israel is committing the most serious of crimes in Gaza, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare. Palestinian and international human-rights groups raised the alarm about this risk within months of the start of the war, and it has since been echoed by states on every continent, as well as by many in Israel. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for example, has decried what he describes as war crimes in Gaza, and leading Israeli human-rights groups say Israel’s actions in the territory amount to genocide.On Oct 9, 2023, then-Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.” The population of Gaza was dehumanised, and no distinction was made between civilians and combatants – a violation of a cardinal rule of international humanitarian law. The siege shut off all supplies into Gaza for 70 days, imposing collective punishment.This first siege was eased only slightly when Israel allowed supplies to trickle into Gaza in early 2024. By that April, Samantha Power, then the head of USAID, was already warning of famine in parts of Gaza. The following month, Cindy McCain, the executive director of the World Food Programme, announced “a full-blown famine” in northern Gaza.International law prohibits the use of starvation as a weapon of war. As the occupying power in Gaza, Israel must ensure that the civilian population receives adequate food, water, medical supplies, and other essentials. If those supplies cannot be located within Gaza itself, they must be sourced externally – including from Israel.Over the past 21 months, several governments and aid agencies have pleaded with Israel to let them deliver aid. Granting such permission is also a legal obligation: Israel has a duty to facilitate others’ relief schemes “by all means at its disposal.” But Israel has continuously thwarted these efforts. At this very moment, it is blocking humanitarian organisations from delivering aid.In January 2024, the International Court of Justice, through legally binding decisions ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance.” Two months later, it reaffirmed that order and required that the measures be taken “in full co-operation with the UN.” The UN-led humanitarian system was the only one capable of preventing widespread famine in Gaza. During the cease-fire between January and March of this year, the UN and other humanitarian organisations were operating as many as 400 relief distribution sites. But after Israel broke the cease-fire in March, these were shut down, and another siege was unlawfully imposed.Israel justified the new siege by saying that it was cutting off aid to exert greater pressure on Hamas – thus acknowledging its use of starvation as a weapon. When aid resumed in May, the UN was replaced by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a private food-distribution arrangement organised by Israel. But since then, nearly 1,400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces while attempting to obtain food at the GHF’s four distribution sites.Worse, the GHF scheme was never going to work. According to a report from the Famine Review Committee last month, “Our analysis of the food packages supplied by the GHF shows that their distribution plan would lead to mass starvation, even if it was able to function without the appalling levels of violence.”Under international law, the war crime of starvation begins at the point of deprivation. When it becomes a more expansive policy undertaken with the intent “to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” it becomes genocide. Multiple senior Israeli officials have openly expressed such intent – including Gallant in October 2023, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who in August 2024 remarked that “it might be justified and moral” to “cause 2mn civilians to die of hunger,” and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Minister for National Security, who tweeted that “food and aid depots should be bombed.”Palestinians are being intentionally starved to death. Although signs of the coming horrors were clear within months of the war’s onset, many governments averted their eyes. They rationalised the restrictions on aid by arguing that it was going to Hamas – a claim that Israel now says it has no evidence for – and transferred more tonnage in weapons to Israel than they delivered in aid to Gaza. Now, they are failing in their duty to prevent and stop a genocide.History will forever record this moment of global shame. It will archive the images of skeletal children alongside those from past episodes where the world did nothing. One can only hope that the world will act now to salvage at least a measure of our humanity, before even more children die. – Project SyndicateBinaifer Nowrojee is President of the Open Society Foundations.

The economic shock from the Iran war is no longer hypothetical. What the United Nations Development Programme modelled as a four-week disruption has already been overtaken by events, with the conflict now stretching into a fifth week and signalling that the projected $120bn to $194bn loss in Arab economic output may prove conservative.  When UNDP released its assessment on 31 March, it warned that even a short, contained escalation would shrink regional GDP by 3.7 to 6.0%, erase up to 3.64mn jobs, raise unemployment by as much as four percentage points, and push between 3.05mn and 3.96mn people into poverty. That scenario assumed temporary trade disruption, limited infrastructure damage and manageable energy shocks. None of those conditions now hold. The conflict has since expanded geographically and operationally, with sustained exchanges involving Iran and spillovers across the Levant and Gulf. Strategic assets, including energy and petrochemical infrastructure, have come under repeated pressure, while rising tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of global oil flows, have heightened market volatility. These developments align closely with UNDP's most severe scenario, which anticipated extreme trade disruption and hydrocarbon supply shocks.  That assessment is borne out by the data. Iran's strike on Qatar's Ras Laffan natural gas terminal wiped out 17% of the country's LNG export capacity, with repairs expected to take up to five years, according to state-owned QatarEnergy. The blow extends well beyond Qatar's balance sheet. Gita Gopinath, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, has written that global economic growth, expected before the war to reach 3.3% this year, could fall by 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points if oil prices average $85 a barrel through 2026. Carmen Reinhart, a former World Bank chief economist now at Harvard Kennedy School, has warned that the conflict is "raising the risk of higher inflation and lower growth," reviving uncomfortable parallels with the stagflationary oil shocks of the 1970s.Nowhere are the risks more concentrated than in the Gulf. UNDP had projected that the GCC economies, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, could see GDP contract by 5.2 to 8.5%, translating into losses of $103bn to $168bn. Oxford Economics has since downgraded aggregate GCC real GDP growth for 2026 by 4.6 percentage points from its pre-war forecast to minus 0.2%, reflecting reduced oil production, exports, tourism and domestic demand. Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE face the most severe downgrades, given their inability to reroute hydrocarbon exports, which means production will need to shut down once storage facilities reach capacity.  A Goldman Sachs economist forecast that if the war continues through the end of April it could shrink Gulf states’ GDP substantially. With energy infrastructure increasingly exposed and shipping routes under strain, the UNDP's upper-bound figures are now edging into view, if not beyond. The bloc could also lose up to 3.11mn jobs, with human development setbacks equivalent to one to two years of progress. In the Levant, where fragility was already entrenched, the impact is sharper still. GDP losses of up to 8.7% are now paired with a disproportionate surge in poverty, accounting for more than 75% of the region's projected increase in deprivation. The war's human toll, including displacement, disruption to education and healthcare, and damage to civilian systems, has compounded the economic shock, reinforcing UNDP's warning of a measurable decline in human development indicators. Inside Iran itself, the erosion is equally stark. UNDP estimates the country's human development index could fall by 0.47 to 0.56 percentage points, effectively wiping out one to one-and-a-half years of progress. With low-income households spending nearly 45% of their income on food, inflation and supply disruptions are rapidly translating into real hardship, particularly for informal workers and small businesses. The World Trade Organisation has said that if oil and gas prices remain elevated for the rest of the year, forecasted 2026 global GDP growth could be reduced by 0.3 per cent. Europe, as a heavy energy importer, could see growth fall by at least one percentage point below previous expectations. Beyond the immediate theatre, the fallout is rippling outward with particular severity through agricultural markets. The Gulf accounts for roughly a third of global urea exports and a quarter of ammonia, with up to 40% of world nitrogen fertiliser exports passing through the Strait of Hormuz. With that passage now blocked, urea prices are up 50% since the war began and ammonia prices have risen 20%. The downstream consequences for food security are acute. The countries of the Gulf region, home to more than 60mn people, are almost entirely import-dependent across staple food categories, meaning any sustained disruption to supply chains will rapidly translate into food shocks. Oxford Economics has modelled a scenario in which prolonged disruption tips the world into outright contraction, with world GDP falling in the middle of the year, calendar-year growth for 2026 slowing to 1.4% and global inflation reaching 7.7%, close to the 2022 peak. Unlike 2022, when the global economy continued to expand through the price shock, the severity of this disruption could tip the world into recession, which Oxford's analysts describe as the worst synchronised downturn in 40 years outside the pandemic and the global financial crisis. Taken together, these developments point to a fundamental shift in the nature of the crisis. What began as a geopolitical confrontation is now manifesting as a multi-layered development shock, affecting growth, employment, poverty and long-term human welfare simultaneously. The longer the conflict persists, the more it entrenches structural damage across interconnected systems, from energy markets to food security. UNDP's original warning was stark: even a brief war could reverse years of progress. Five weeks on, the trajectory suggests something deeper. The economic and human setback now under way is likely to exceed initial projections, with consequences that will endure well beyond the battlefield.