Gaza and the logic of necropolitics: Sovereignty measured by killing
8 Min Read
As Gaza’s death toll rises, the concept of necropolitics is explored, revealing a deliberate strategy of destruction and disposability, where "Israel's" sovereignty is defined through the erasure of Palestinian life.
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How necropolitics is applied in Gaza (Illustrated by Batoul Chamas; Al Mayadeen English)
As Gaza’s death toll nears 53,000, with most of the martyrs being women and children, and its hospitals, schools, and refugee camps lie in ruins, the world watches a catastrophe that defies the conventional language of warfare. This is not a war fought over territory or military objectives. It is something more systematic, more sinister. It is necropolitics in its rawest form: the calculated governance of death.
“This is an effort to erase not only Palestinian life but the evidence of its existence,” said renowned British-Palestinian doctor and humanitarian Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, who served in Gaza’s hospitals during the early weeks of the ongoing Israeli genocide.
Coined by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, necropolitics expands on Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, the power to regulate life, by centering the state’s power to determine who may die. Mbembe wrote of “death-worlds”: spaces where populations are rendered disposable. Gaza has become a textbook case. What "Israel" frames as military necessity is, in fact, an architecture of abandonment. The targeting of hospitals, fuel lines, and so-called "safe corridors" is not collateral damage; it is policy.
“Starvation has become statecraft,” said Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Al-Dameer Foundation for Human Rights, Mustapha Ibrahim. “And the silence of the world makes it complicit in a slow, deliberate extermination.”
The siege of Gaza, enforced now for nearly two decades, has transformed the strip into a laboratory of engineered precarity. In a disturbing display of necropolitical calculus, Israeli officials have spoken openly about rendering Gaza “uninhabitable". When UN-run schools are bombed and electricity and water infrastructure are deliberately dismantled, sovereignty is declared not through governance, but through erasure.
'Bread and Bullets': Humanitarianism as spectacle
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s claim to “uproot” Palestinians for their safety while continuing to occupy their land is not humanitarianism; it is the weaponization of displacement. As an academic and writer in international affairs, Dr. Mohammad Sweidan told Al Mayadeen English, “This is necropolitics in twenty-first-century form: the simultaneous circulation of bread and bullets.”
This performative contradiction is further laid bare by the same Western powers that ship arms to "Israel" one week and open “humanitarian corridors” the next. This is not diplomacy. It is a choreography of life and death.
The United States, the EU, and other Western governments are not merely spectators. They are enablers, arming "Israel", shielding it from accountability, and allowing international law to be twisted into a tool of governance-by-siege.
Even US President Donald Trump’s transactional approach, sidestepping Palestine while courting Gulf regimes, did not challenge this necropolitical logic. It reaffirmed it. “Palestinian lives remain bargaining chips; proof of Mbembe’s thesis that sovereignty is now exercised through gradations of the disposable," Sweidan observed.
Forced displacement as strategy, famine as policy
The humanitarian narrative itself has become a theatre. The media spectacle surrounding the release of one Israeli-American captive, while half a million Gazans inch toward famine, is not compassion. It is deflection. “You spotlight a single life,” Sweiden said to Al Mayadeen English, “to mask a population penned into zones of death.”
Mass displacement in Gaza is not incidental. It is strategic. “It fragments Palestinian society and creates a territorial vacuum easier for Israeli forces to control," said Sweiden. Necropolitics turns entire peoples into movable, precarious subjects, erased from one map, redrawn as threats on another.
The brutality is not random. It is bureaucratic. “Evacuation maps updated by the hour; calorie quotas calculated to the gram,” Sweiden noted. “This isn’t chaos, it’s control.”
'Israel' targeting life itself
In April 2024, a quiet but devastating tragedy unfolded amid the rubble in Gaza. An Israeli airstrike targeted Al Basma IVF Center, the Strip’s largest fertility clinic, obliterating five cryogenic tanks that stored more than 4,000 embryos and 1,000 other genetic materials. The tanks, reliant on liquid nitrogen to preserve these fragile beginnings of life, were ruptured when the facility’s embryology unit was bombed. The lids were blown off, and the future dissipated into smoke.
“It was a massacre of potential lives,” said Dr. Bahaeldeen Ghalayini, a Cambridge-trained gynecologist who founded the clinic in 1997. “We know deeply what these 5,000 lives, or potential lives, meant for the parents, either for the future or for the past.”
For many Palestinian couples, the embryos and stored reproductive material were their only remaining chance to have children, especially in a population increasingly marked by war-related infertility, displacement, and trauma. “My heart is divided into a million pieces," Ghalayini added.
Palestinian correspondent Nadra El Tibi told Al Mayadeen English, “When state sovereignty is transformed into the right to distribute death, fertility clinics in a besieged territory become a testament to a necropolitical logic that measures strength not by construction, but by the ability to destroy.”
This deliberate or collateral targeting of perhaps the most intimate and fragile realm of human life and reproduction demands more than sterile military terminology. It forces us to confront a darker calculus. Again, this is necropolitics: the power to determine not just who may live or die but who is permitted to be born in the first place.
When an actor exercises this form of control, its war strategy extends beyond battlefield targets and enters the domain of biological existence. The destroyed embryos were definitely not combatants, beyond doubt not threats. They were frozen hope, futures planned by couples already navigating the impossible. Their erasure represents not just a loss of life but a systematic targeting of the capacity to generate life.
And so, “Israel’s” war on Gaza is no longer confined to land, water, or infrastructure. It is now a war on reproduction itself, a silent genocide of possibility. It is existential.
In the calculus of necropolitics, the casualties are not only those killed but those never allowed to be born.
In El Tibi's view, "In Gaza, not only the living body is being targeted, but even the embryos frozen in fertility clinics are being bombed, as if the occupation is trying to erase the future before it is born."
The collapse of human rights
The latest IPC report warns that famine in Gaza is now “increasingly likely". In response, Oxfam has issued a damning statement, “Gaza’s starvation is not incidental, it is deliberate, entirely engineered—and has now created the largest population facing starvation anywhere in the world.”
Thousands of aid trucks remain idle at Gaza’s borders, while entire communities starve.
"Oxfam staff and partners are witnessing scenes that defy belief: families wasting away from hunger, malnourished children too weak to cry, and entire communities surviving without food or clean water. In one displacement camp. Only five of 500 families had any flour left to make bread," said Mahmoud Al Saqqa, Oxfam Food Security coordinator in Gaza.
The militarization of aid, an egregious violation of international humanitarian law, is now a tool of war. Oxfam calls on the international community to demand a permanent ceasefire, unrestricted humanitarian access, and accountability for the use of starvation as a weapon.
Commenting on this issue, Ibrahim told Al Mayadeen English, “Gaza is the only place on Earth where bombs enter freely, but milk is blocked at the border.”
What we are witnessing is not the fog of war. It is its architecture, meticulously designed by an entity that has turned occupation into doctrine, siege into normalcy, and humanitarianism into spectacle. Gaza is not just a humanitarian crisis, it is a necropolitical one: a place where sovereignty is expressed not through diplomacy but through the deliberate denial of breath.
If the world continues to accept this logic, Gaza will no longer be the exception. It will become the model.
