Gaza: ‘The strong eat – and the weak die’
Northern Gaza may already be in the grip of famine, and it risks spreading across the besieged enclave, plunging 2.2 million Palestinians into the broadest and most severe food crisis in the world, says the globe’s leading body on food emergencies.
The new report from a cluster of international organisations and charities known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, or IPC, outlined a devastating situation with up to half the population of Gaza – 1.1 million people – facing catastrophic levels of hunger and starvation between now and July. The most immediately affected areas are in the northern regions, which Israeli forces cut off from the enclave’s southern half and which only a trickle of aid has been able to enter.
Compared with the IPC’s previous analysis in December, acute food insecurity in the Gaza Strip has deepened and widened, with nearly twice as many people projected to suffer those conditions by July. The most dire projection is based on an escalation of the conflict, including a ground offensive in Rafah.
In the IPC’s five-tier classification of food crises, Gaza now has the largest percentage of a population to receive its most severe rating since the body began reporting in 2004, Beth Bechdol, deputy director general at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told The Washington Post.
By comparison, today in Sudan, Somalia and Afghanistan – where millions are suffering crisis and emergency levels of food insecurity – none of the population falls into the worst tier of catastrophic food shortages, Bechdol said.
People in areas designated at Phase 5 are considered to be “starving” and facing a significantly increased risk of acute malnutrition and death.
“So, for Gaza to have 1.1 million people in IPC 5 is unprecedented,” she said. She added: “This is 100% a man-made crisis. There’s no hurricane, there’s no cyclone, there’s no 100-year flood.”
The report is likely to add fuel to the increasingly sharp criticism of Israel from governments in the United States and Europe about the grim dimensions of the escalating humanitarian crisis in Gaza. On Monday, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, repeated his assertion that Israel was using starvation as a “weapon of war”.
Israel denies limiting the flow of aid to Gaza. It has accused the United Nations of failing to distribute food aid to those in need – or diverting it to Hamas.
The report noted more than 300 barns, 100 agricultural warehouses, 46 farm storage facilities, 200 farms, as well as over 600 wells used for irrigation have been destroyed, while most livestock has been abandoned, slaughtered or sold.
Moamen al-Harthani, a 29-year-old resident of the northern Gaza town of Jabalya, described how people in the north were eating weeds and other plants to survive.
“There is no rice, no sugar, no beans, no lentils … No fruit or vegetables,” Harthani said. “People eat the food of animals and livestock,” he said.
Since the war began, Harthani said, he has lost around 27kg. His wife and 6-weekold child are weak from malnutrition.
Ahmed Najjar, 29, a resident of Jabalya, is among the thousands of Gazans who for weeks have gathered late at night at key junctures to try to intercept food trucks entering the north.
On Thursday night, Najjar said there was shelling by Israeli forces. He saw the injured and dead pulled from the centre of crowds around the trucks, and he left without getting any flour. “The strong eat,” he said of the situation. “The weak die.”
US President Joe Biden has summoned a senior Israeli military, intelligence and humanitarian team to Washington for consultations over Israel’s plans to launch a major military operation in Rafah, telling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call that any effort to “smash” into the southern Gaza city would be a mistake, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said.
In the talks, which Sullivan said Israel had agreed to, the US will “lay out an alternative approach that would target key Hamas elements … without a major ground invasion.” He said the meeting would be held by the beginning of next week.
The administration has said it “would not support” such military action, but has not said what form that lack of support would take. – Washington Post