As the war on Gaza extends into its 90th day, impending famine and starvation are haunting the besieged strip.
According to an assessment of the integrated food security phase classification initiative, a UN-backed body that sets the international standard that determines the severity of the food crisis, food shortage in Gaza is solely a consequence of war. Before it began, about 150 to 180 food lorries entered Gaza every day. Since, the end of the “humanitarian pause” a month ago, only about 30 do so. They are blocked by Israeli bombardment, fighting on the ground, and by restrictions and inspections on the border with Egypt, imposed by the Israeli and Egyptian authorities, cites The Times.
More than a million people are displaced in Gaza but none is safe from hunger. It is rampant in Gaza, it is in the wasteland of al-Mawasi encampment in Gaza where handfuls of dirty flour are kneaded by mothers to make bread for their children. It is in the fires, stoked with plastic bottles, which produce nothing but choking black smoke. Children in Gaza no longer play but lie around, exhausted by hunger. It is in food that is rotten and makes you sick but is eaten just the same.
Camellia Subeh talked to The Times who stated that her breasts no longer produce milk for her baby son. “My other sons keep saying, ‘Mum, I’m dizzy, I have a headache,” said the mother of five, sitting outside a shelter she built on the mud from scraps of plastic and wood. Subeh and her children left their home in northern Gaza weeks ago on the instructions of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). They said this is a safe area. Perhaps it is safe from the bombs that have destroyed Gaza’s cities and towns but not from hunger, diseases, or thirst that will kill just the same as a bullet will. “This place is like a desert, all sand,” Subeh said. “We are so tired.” The Palestinian death toll in the Gaza Strip after nearly three months of war stands at 21,672, with more than 55,000 wounded, the territory’s health ministry said on Saturday.
A 13-year-old, Muhammad al-Yaziji, told The Times, “I feel that this burden is very heavy for us. We became like beggars. We were not like that.”
In an interview with the New Yorker, Arif Hussain, the chief economist at the United Nations World Food Program explains that according to a consensus-based analysis by Integrated Phase Classification, the entire population of 2.2 million people is in a food-security crisis or a worse situation implying a famine is coming because the conditions are “catastrophic”.
Human Rights Watch drew from Israeli officials’ statements, interviews with people in the territory about the lack of food, and evidence of bombardment that has destroyed infrastructure and resources to accuse Israel in a December report of starvation as a war crime.
