Addis Abeba — The deaths now reported from Tigray's internally displaced persons (IDP) camps are neither sudden nor unforeseeable. They are the cumulative result of political failure, economic collapse, and the deliberate neglect, by both federal and regional authorities, of repeated early warnings, long after the guns fell silent.
Hundreds have died since July 2024 alone, collapsing after days without food, medicine, or care. Elderly people, women, and children are bearing the brunt.
This is starvation in plain sight.
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But this starvation ravaging Tigray's IDP camps is not simply a shortage of food. It is the consequence of a systemic, deeper collapse: livelihoods destroyed by war, markets left to wither, and community support systems, once the first responders in times of crisis, systematically dismantled. What remains is a population trapped between political paralysis and institutional abandonment.
The Pretoria Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (CoHA), signed in November 2022, promised more than the silencing of guns. The federal government committed to restoring public services and rebuilding infrastructure "students go to school, farmers and pastoralists to their fields, and public servants to their offices." Nearly three years later, that promise lies in ruins.
Hitsats is not an isolated tragedy. Earlier reports from Shire, Axum, Adigrat, and Adwa describe daily deaths, overwhelmed camps, and IDPs receiving no assistance at all. In August 2024, Addis Standard reported that in Shire alone nearly 300 displaced people died in just three months. Across the region, healthcare systems have collapsed, schools remain closed, and preventable diseases are claiming lives already weakened by hunger.
Aid cuts have further tightened the noose, forcing humanitarian agencies to suspend distributions. But even before these cuts, the humanitarian response was already failing millions who have endured the longest state-orchestrated siege in human history.
After the CoHA, hundreds of thousands of IDPs, violently uprooted from Western and parts of Southern Tigray, were meant to return home. Instead, they remain trapped in camps, while thousands were pushed into premature and poorly planned "returns" to districts such as Tselemti and Mai Tsebri in western Tigray, and Raya Ofla, and Raya Alamata in southern Tigray, only to find destroyed homes, no services, and no protection. Most alarmingly, they were returned to the mercy of the very forces responsible for their ethnic cleansing. For them, return became yet another form of cruel displacement.
Early warnings were neither scarce nor subtle. UN agencies cautioned against looming aid cuts. Humanitarian actors raised alarms over registration bottlenecks, prolonged aid blackouts, and the exclusion of IDPs living outside camps. This publication repeatedly reported that nearly one million people were receiving insufficient or no assistance. These warnings were ignored.
Even now, national attention came not through institutional response, but through social media - images of emaciated bodies, testimonies of daily burials, and desperate voices piercing an official silence. This is not how early warning systems are meant to work. It is how catastrophes are allowed to deepen.
The crisis is inseparable from political fragmentation within Tigray's leadership either. While IDPs starve, political elites have splintered into power struggles that paralyzed decision-making and sidelined humanitarian priorities.
Opposition parties trade accusations. The TPLF points to Addis Abeba and international guarantors; critics accuse it of placing political survival above human survival.
What remains undeniable is this: CoHA has collapsed, not on paper, but in lived reality. A peace agreement that permits mass starvation is not peace. A political settlement that restores elites while abandoning survivors is not reconciliation. A peace agreement that keeps Tigray trapped in a perpetual limbo between death and destruction cannot be called peace.
Responsibility is shared, but it is not equal. The federal government cannot outsource its constitutional obligations or hide behind security narratives. Tigray's political leadership cannot continue internal battles while presiding over famine-like conditions. Donors and international guarantors cannot retreat into procedural caution while people die waiting for approvals.
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What is required now is an emergency action: immediate food and medical assistance; restored and unobstructed aid pipelines; expanded registration to include IDPs outside camps; and accountability for failures to act on early warnings.
But beyond emergency relief lies a harder truth Ethiopians must reckon with: the starvation unfolding in Tigray is not merely a humanitarian crisis. It is a political verdict. One from which the federal government, constitutionally mandated to protect citizens, cannot absolve itself by shifting blame.
The civilians now wasting away in IDP camps were not always dependent on handouts. They had homes, livelihoods, and communities rooted in work and solidarity. They were rendered invisible by bad politics, forced displacement, and prolonged uncertainty. Hunger did not strip them of dignity, political failure did.
Their continued confinement in camps is not inevitable. It is a political choice.
It must end. Now.
