The people of Gaza did not need this week’s official confirmation from UN-backed hunger experts that the “worst-case scenario of famine” was unfolding there. For months they have watched as their children waste away.
Over the course of the week, Gaza passed two appalling milestones. The official Palestinian death toll passed 60,000, although the real figure, including those buried under the rubble from Israeli airstrikes, is likely to be far higher.
The human cost is likely to continue to rise steeply as starvation catches up with bombs and gunfire as an indiscriminate killer. On Tuesday, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a panel of experts from the UN and other aid organizations, which had long warned of the threat of famine, confirmed that the line had been crossed.
Photo: REUTERS
“The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip,” the IPC said, as it called for a ceasefire to prevent further “catastrophic human suffering.”
The 2.2 million people of Gaza have long been experts in hunger, forced to scavenge for food each day in the face of Israel’s deliberate and severe restrictions to aid deliveries.
Jamil Mughari, a 38-year-old from Maghazi in central Gaza, said that food was almost nonexistent: “We can go for a week or two without any flour. Sometimes we only have one meal a day, which is lentils, and sometimes we find nothing at all to eat — we spend the day drinking water just to feel full.”
His family has had to move seven times since the war began, forced to flee repeated Israeli offensives, but there was no way to escape the hunger that now grips the entire territory.
“Sometimes we get lentils from donations or charitable people, or we borrow some money to buy them, that’s it,” he said. “We don’t receive any food aid from soup kitchens; those are only for certain camps, in small quantities.
“They [Israelis] spread news about aid coming in, but only the strong and those with weapons seize the trucks and sell the goods at extremely high prices. How can the poor afford to buy them at such prices?” he said.
The four food distribution sites across Gaza run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation are open for only a few minutes a day, leading to huge crowds of desperate people, who have come under Israeli fire while seeking humanitarian assistance, leading to mass casualties.
Among the horrors the Israel-Gaza war has brought to its people, the torture of parents seeing their children starve and being powerless to save them is surely one of the worst.
“My youngest daughter is 14 years old, and her ribcage bones are clearly visible due to extreme weakness and malnutrition,” said Abu al-Abed, a father from Deir al-Balah. “I have four daughters and three sons. They suffer from dizziness and fatigue because of the lack of food. If I, their father, feel this way, how much worse must it be for them?”
He said they did not receive any aid and that the food market was expensive and they could afford to buy only a little there.
“The prices are extremely high; they haven’t reached such levels of inflation even in European countries. And here in Gaza, there is no source of income at all,” he said, adding that he no longer believed the world had any sense of responsibility.
“For years, they boasted about human rights and the protection of lives. What I see now is that all of this was a lie, we were deceived by these slogans,” he said.
The official IPC recognition of what the people of Gaza knew only too well — that they are starving — brought some faint hope that the outside world would finally stir itself to act, although long experience did not bring much confidence that would happen.
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