Half a Million People in Gaza face Starvation, as 1 in 6 Children are Wasting Away
Juan Cole 02/29/2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that Israel only allowed half as many aid trucks into Gaza in February as had been in January.
The Gaza Ministry of Health said that two infants died on Tuesday at the Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza of dehydration and malnutrition. They were 2 of 6 known child deaths from hunger that day. Those are only the cases we are hearing about because the deaths happened at barely functioning hospital. About 150,000 Palestinians are still in the north, though most were forced south by the Israeli army. No aid trucks are going north because the Israelis routinely fire on aid missions. Those Palestinians trying to survive up there suffer from lack of food and potable water because the Israeli military strategy has been to reduce everything to rubble, including bakeries. This policy of bombing everything in sight is not necessary to fight the Hamas guerrilla movement, and therefore it must be a deliberate attack on civilian lives.
Israel continues to bomb Gaza heavily every day, though US television news refuses to report it or show the footage.
On Tuesday, “76 Palestinians were killed, and 110 Palestinians were injured.” Just to give the flavor of these deaths, on the day before Monday, “26 February, at about 19:00, eight Palestinians including three children were reportedly killed, and others were injured, when a house in the vicinity of Kuwait Hospital, in central Rafah, was hit.”
Israeli military personnel have admitted that they use artificial intelligence for targeting and are trying to hit midlevel Hamas commanders. Presumably the Israelis believed that house near the (former) Kuwait Hospital in Rafah was the residence of or was being visited by a Hamas platoon leader, so the AI revved up the attack. Under normal rules of engagement in normal countries you can’t blow up a house and kill eight people, including three children, to get at one enemy fighter. Neither the Israeli leadership, many of them outright fascists, nor Mr. Biden and his cabinet, however, care.
But denial of food and potable water are going to kill 4 times as many people as the bombs have, if the current Israeli policies set by fascist Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir and others of his ilk continue.
Al Jazeera Video: “Gaza food crisis: Threat of famine for 576,000 Palestinians.”
The director of OCHA Coordination Division Ramesh Rajasingham, urged “the lifting of restrictions on fishing activity, access to farmland and the entry of agricultural products.” He cautioned that in the absence of such actions, “widespread famine in Gaza is almost inevitable.”
500,000 people in Gaza (and remember half are children) are “facing catastrophic conditions characterized by lack of food, starvation and exhaustion of coping capacities.”
UN Officials accuse Israeli military authorities of deliberately firing on aid trucks, and of placing bureaucratic obstacles in the way of food and aid deliveries. Israel won’t issue a list of permitted items for entry, so aid organizations just have to guess what will be allowed in. If Israeli soldiers inspect a truck at the Rafah crossing and find even one item they consider prohibited, the whole truck is sent back to Egypt. (Egypt does not actually control the Rafah crossing, Israel does).
Rajasingham says that 1 in 6 children in Gaza are suffering from severe malnutrition and “wasting.”
Facing unrest from angry protesters at home, Jordan coordinated a limited air drop of food by Egyptian, Emirati and French planes on Tuesday. Some of the aid is dropped on land by parachute. Some apparently is being dropped without parachutes right into the sea, requiring pilots to fly lower and risk being targeted by the Israeli air force.
Jordanian newspaper al-Dustur reported, “Video footage taken on Monday showed a group of parachutes falling into the sea near the city of Deir al-Bahl in the middle of the Gaza Strip, and men went out in small boats through the turbulent waters to retrieve aid, under the watch of a crowd of hundreds who rushed to get the supplies as soon as they reached the beach.”
Such desperate measures cannot, however, replace the 500 trucks a day of aid that went into Gaza before October 7. Moreover, there is a danger of people being shot by Israeli troops as they rush the supplies, which are falling haphazardly along the coast.