Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz has insisted that the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is the outcome of a retaliatory war and not genocide. Others like Israeli historian Raz Segal and British sociologist Martin Shaw have argued that the conflict is a “textbook case of genocide” and warned of the “specter of genocide” yet again haunting the Middle East, respectively. The South African legal team presenting its case to the International Criminal Court of Justice concurs with the latter, and so should we. The legal team made two critical interventions when considering the Gaza conflict’s implications for the field(s) of Holocaust and Genocide Studies: the role of Israel’s (1) humanitarian management and (2) the state’s settler-colonial policies past and present. Outlining Israel’s deliberate and systematic withholding of “objects indispensable to survival” (OIS) and connecting this wartime practice to historical policies of siege and occupation, the legal team situates acts and omissions of genocide not only in the broader context of settler colonialism affecting Gaza long before October 2023. Plenty of historical examples illustrate economic warfare as a strategy to bring the internal or external enemy to its knees. From the Napoleonic Wars and the American Civil War in the nineteenth century to the total wars of the twentieth century, the Nazi “hunger plan,” the US’s Operation Starvation blocking food from entering Japan during WWII, to Putin’s drone attacks on grain silo and loading facilities, food sat and sits at the heart of conflict. The Allied blockades during the First World War are exemplary; British, French, Russian, Italian, and American fleets interrupted food supplies to reach the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) and their Ottoman allies. The Allied blockade of the Mediterranean Sea contributed to a full-fledged famine in today’s Lebanon, causing the death of an estimated 400,000 civilians. Ottoman Armenians died of starvation on the deportations roads. This paper argues that albeit famine hashistorically been used as a tool of war and genocide, Gaza is unique in that system that allows for OIS to be cut of has been carefully constructed over time by the Israeli state and has been part of what Eyal Weizman (2011) has referred to a humanitarian management based on “standards of ‘humanitarian minimum,’” meaning the “calibration of life-sustaining flows of resources through the physical enclosure” allowing for survival but little more.