Israel’s prolonged conflict has produced an internal crisis that receives far less attention than its military or diplomatic fallout: a deepening problem of food insecurity. According to estimates compiled by Israeli food-security organisations, nearly 39 per cent of food produced or consumed in the country is wasted, a systemic failure that cost the economy around 26 billion shekels (approximately $7 billion) in 2024 alone.
The scale of waste stands in stark contrast to rising deprivation. Roughly 1.5 million people in Israel now experience food insecurity, even as surplus food is discarded across supply chains. Over the past decade, cumulative losses from food waste have crossed 211 billion shekels, draining household welfare and public resources alike (National Insurance Institute of Israel).
In macroeconomic terms, food waste in 2024 alone accounted for nearly 1.3 per cent of Israel’s GDP, while the average household discarded food worth close to $2,900 annually. These figures underline how inefficiency and inequality have come to coexist within the same economic system.
Food insecurity is not merely a question of hunger. Israeli health and welfare assessments estimate annual health and environmental costs exceeding $2.7 billion, driven by malnutrition, stress-related illness, and the environmental impact of large-scale waste.
The war has sharply intensified these pressures. Labour shortages in agriculture, caused by mass mobilisation and restrictions on Palestinian and foreign workers, have disrupted planting and harvesting cycles. As a result, fruit and vegetable prices have risen, pushing fresh food further out of reach for low-income households.
Even before the current conflict, Israel struggled with high food prices driven by market concentration, weak competition, and protective customs barriers. Wartime conditions have magnified these structural problems, leaving domestic food production both more fragile and more expensive.
While international attention has largely focused on military spending, the broader economic contraction has received less scrutiny. Israel’s GDP shrank by 20.7 per cent in the final quarter of 2023, marking one of the sharpest quarterly declines in the country’s history.
At the same time, military expenditure surged, rising from roughly $1.8 billion to $4.7 billion by the end of 2023. The Bank of Israel estimates total war-related costs for 2023–2025 at approximately $55.6 billion, a burden that will constrain public spending for years.
The social consequences are now visible. More than a quarter of Israeli families are experiencing food insecurity, according to welfare organisations and civil-society assessments. What was once concentrated among marginalised communities has widened into a structural condition affecting working-class households, welfare recipients, and families battered by inflation and war-driven instability.
This crisis is neither accidental nor temporary. It reflects the domestic blowback of prolonged militarisation and war. A December 2025 assessment found that nearly 60 per cent of government aid beneficiaries reported a deterioration in their financial situation since the war escalated, while food costs for low-income households have nearly doubled.
Food insecurity in Israel has thus become a policy outcome, not a marginal welfare issue. Under conditions of permanent conflict, state priorities are reordered. Defence spending is treated as non-negotiable, while social protection is delayed, narrowed, or rendered conditional. Hunger is reframed as an unfortunate side effect of national security policy rather than a political failure requiring structural correction.
Geography compounds the problem. Around 30 per cent of Israel’s agricultural land lies in conflict-affected areas near Gaza and along the northern border. Farms in these regions have been abandoned, harvesting cycles disrupted, and long-standing production systems fractured.
Israeli agriculture has long depended on foreign and migrant labour, particularly for seasonal harvesting. The war sharply reduced this workforce, exposing the fragility of domestic food production. Delayed planting, reduced yields, and higher costs followed. To compensate, Israel increased reliance on imports, tying food security more tightly to volatile global supply chains and price shocks.
For low-income households, the consequences are immediate. Rising food prices have eroded purchasing power, while state assistance has failed to keep pace with inflation. What has emerged is not mass starvation, but persistent, structural hunger—managed bureaucratically rather than addressed politically.
This is where the concept of blowback becomes analytically useful. Blowback is not moral judgement; it is the delayed domestic consequence of external policy choices. In Israel’s case, prolonged military engagement and siege-based strategies have reshaped internal labour markets, welfare systems, and household survival itself.
At the same time, analytical clarity requires a strict distinction between Israel’s internal food insecurity and the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Gaza. By late 2025, international humanitarian bodies had recognised Gaza as facing a man-made famine, with over half a million people suffering severe starvation.
Gaza’s crisis is the direct result of siege, blockade, destruction of food systems, and the obstruction of humanitarian aid. Israel’s food insecurity, by contrast, is internal and policy-driven. One is an instrument of war; the other is a consequence of waging it. Conflating the two obscures responsibility rather than clarifying suffering.
The Israeli government’s response has been largely technocratic: emergency grants, limited food assistance programmes, and short-term subsidies. These measures manage scarcity without confronting its structural drivers. There has been no serious reassessment of military spending priorities, no comprehensive plan to stabilise agricultural labour, and no acknowledgment that prolonged war corrodes the social contract.
Citizens are increasingly encouraged to endure deprivation as a civic duty, while systemic failure is masked by rhetoric of resilience. Over time, this produces legitimacy strains. A state capable of sustaining one of the world’s most advanced military systems while failing to guarantee affordable food for over a quarter of its population reveals a profound imbalance of priorities.
Israel’s emerging food crisis is not an anomaly. It is the domestic cost of organising society around permanent conflict. Militarisation consumes not only budgets, but social cohesion and political accountability. War has costs that cannot be indefinitely externalised.
This is not karma, nor moral reckoning. It is political arithmetic. Hunger, in Israel today, is blowback.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.