Starvation as a Weapon of War

Lord Callanan Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My Lords, this has been an excellent, albeit brief, debate. I, too, thank the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Silvertown, for securing the debate and for her extremely powerful opening remarks. It is worth putting on record my party’s deep-felt relief that a ceasefire has now, hopefully, been reached in Gaza, that the remaining hostages have been released and that the war that has caused so much death and destruction over the past two years now appears to be over, although, while I join the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, in very much hoping that it is at an end, there is still an awful long way to go.

As the noble Lord, Lord Browne, observed, it is hardly a pleasure to contribute to this debate on such a tragic subject. It is a worry that reports of starvation being used as a weapon of war are still in abundance and, frankly, getting worse across the world. The noble Baroness, Lady Brown, and others have drawn attention to the situation in Sudan. It remains a wonder to me that, while we have seen thousands marching on our streets regarding Gaza, we have seen virtually no one marching regarding the much worse situation in Sudan and it makes me wonder about the motivations of some of the protesters.

The reports that we have seen include, from Sudan, an estimate by the UN of 25 million people being deliberately starved; 4.5 million in Somalia; and accusations of a covert, and sometimes overt, starvation operation by Russian forces in Ukraine, among others. Sadly, none of those has yet led to any prosecutions, which speaks to the difficulty of verifying the use of starvation as a weapon of war in general, let alone in some of the active war zones. That point is driven home by the fact that there has never been an international prosecution of this as a war crime on its own. It is for that very reason that it is hard to verify cases of weaponised starvation. If they are, punishment must be executed in a timely fashion so that justice may be seen to be done. It is not something, as other speakers have observed, that can be solely delegated to judges in The Hague; the UK and our allies must continue to commission and support the gathering of evidence and press for those cases to be brought to court.

I sympathise with Ministers; Ministers in my Government also spent much time on this matter. But producing change of course requires more than paying it lip service; it means interacting with international partners, including those currently at war. We in the previous Government secured commitments from the Israeli Government, by working and collaborating with them, to open specific pathways for aid, such as the Erez crossing and the port of Ashdod. We extended aid hours and ensured that more aid trucks were promised entry.

I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. We should all benefit from hearing from the Minister about the steps the Government are taking to ensure that starvation is not used as a weapon of war. We are proud signatories of the Rome statute, and we should be doing our utmost to take practical actions to uphold it.