Half a million in Gaza face starvation

NEW YORK – The Gaza Strip is at high risk of famine and almost half a million people there face starvation because of a catastrophic lack of food, a group of global experts said Tuesday, though it stopped short of saying that a famine had begun in the enclave as a result of the Israel-Hamas war.

The experts said the amount of food reaching northern Gaza had increased in recent months. Israel, under intense pressure from global governments and aid organisations, recently opened border crossings for aid in the north.

The analysis by the group, called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, carries considerable weight. The group is a partnership of United Nations (UN) bodies and major relief agencies, and global leaders look to it to gauge the severity of hunger crises and allocate humanitarian aid.

After Hamas led a deadly attack on Israel on Oct 7, Israeli officials declared a siege of Gaza, and they have severely restricted the entry of humanitarian aid, saying they do not want it to help Hamas. From October to early May, the daily number of aid trucks entering the territory through the two main crossing points in southern Gaza dropped around 75%, according to UN data, and reports of hunger and malnourishment have been widespread.

Khalil Al-Satri, a 43-year-old graphic designer from Gaza City, said that over the past two months, his family of seven was only able to procure one bag of flour and a few canned goods. “Prices have skyrocketed, making it impossible to buy everything we need,” he said.

Al-Satri said he worried about the long-term effect that the lack of nutritious food could have on his children. He said that his 5-year-old daughter, Mariam, has told him that “there is no hunger in heaven” and becomes upset whenever she sees images of food on his phone. Children cannot endure hunger as well as adults, he said, adding, “It’s a difficult and harsh feeling.”

Israeli officials have said for months that there is no limit on the amount of food and other aid that can enter Gaza. In recent weeks, Israel has increased the number of commercial vehicles carrying food and other goods across the border.

While acknowledging the hunger in Gaza, Israeli officials have accused Hamas of stealing or diverting aid. Ismael Thawabteh, deputy head of the Hamas government media office in Gaza, said last month that those allegations were “absolutely false and incorrect.” He added that, while there had been some looting of relief supplies, it had been done by a small number of people who had been forced into desperation by Israel.

Some Palestinians in Gaza have also accused Hamas of benefiting from looted aid.

The IPC report said that almost all of Gaza’s population of around 2.2 million faced high levels of acute food insecurity, and it put Gaza at Phase 4, the “emergency” phase, on its five-level classification scale. But it also said that 495,000 people faced “catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity,” which is Phase 5 on the scale.

“In this phase, households experience an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion of coping capacities,” the report said.

In March, the IPC predicted that famine would likely occur in northern Gaza by the end of May. But on Tuesday, it said that the amount of food and other nutrition delivered there had increased in March and April.

Those increases “appear to have temporarily alleviated conditions” in the north, the report said, adding, “In this context, the available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring.”

Sally Abi Khalil, the Middle East director of Oxfam, an aid agency that contributed to the IPC report, said the slight improvement in conditions in northern Gaza showed that Israel had the ability to end the hunger crisis.

“The figures in this report are a shameful testament to the failure of world leaders to heed earlier warnings and hold Israel to account for its deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war,” Abi Khalil said.

In early May, Israel’s military sent ground troops into the southern Gaza city of Rafah, and more than a million people, many of whom had previously been displaced from their homes, fled to a coastal area that lacks basic infrastructure, making them acutely vulnerable.

The military operation closed the Rafah border crossing from Egypt and disrupted aid deliveries at the Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel. The situation in the south has since deteriorated, the report said.

The UN and aid groups have said that Gaza’s hunger crisis is human-made. Most incidents of severe and widespread hunger occur in parts of the world inaccessible to aid where the population has been weakened by years of drought. Aid groups say that there was relatively little malnutrition in Gaza before Oct 7.

The arm of the Israeli military that implements government policy in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, known as COGAT, said Tuesday that “more and more aid is entering Gaza,” a position at odds with that of Israel’s allies, who have for months pressed the country to scale up assistance.

“We continue to press Israel to create better conditions for facilitating aid delivery inside Gaza,” said Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN She also said it was unacceptable” that Israel’s system for aid groups to notify it of their locations — a system known as deconfliction — remained ineffective.

On Monday, President Emmanuel Macron of France and King Abdullah II of Jordan called for all restrictions at the different crossing points into Gaza to be lifted.

The IPC said that to be able to buy food, more than half of households in Gaza “had to exchange their clothes for money, and one-third resorted to picking up trash to sell.” It added that more than half of households often did not have any food to eat and that more than 20% went full days and nights without eating.

The IPC identifies a famine when at least 20% of households in an area face an extreme lack of food, at least 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition and at least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people die each day from starvation or disease linked to malnutrition. Since the IPC was established in 2004, its approach has been used to identify only two famines: in Somalia in 2011, and in South Sudan in 2017.

After the group’s warning in March that Gaza was at risk of imminent famine, South Africa asked the UN’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, to issue emergency orders for Israel to stop what it called the “genocidal starvation” of the Palestinian people. The request was part of South Africa’s broader case that accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza, a charge that Israel rejects.

A month ago, the court, which is based in The Hague, ordered Israel to “immediately” halt its military offensive in Rafah, and it emphasised the need for open land crossings as part of its request for “the unhindered provision” of humanitarian aid. The Rafah offensive continues, but the order increased global pressure on Israel to scale back its attacks and limit civilian casualties.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Source – Bangkok News