As Israel Rejects UN Ceasefire, 3,000 Palestinian Children in S. Gaza in Danger of Starving before their Parents’ Eyes
Juan Cole 06/12/2024
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The children of Gaza do not care. They do not care about US Secretary of State Tony Blinken’s posturing on the UN Security Council demand for an immediate ceasefire. They do not care that Hamas says it accepts the resolution. They do not care that Israel’s far right extremist government rejects it.
Their severe lack of interest in geopolitics is only matched by their hunger for actual concrete food aid. And if they do not get it, they will take revenge on the adults by dying. Some 3,000 likely candidates for starvation have been identified by UNESCO.
The only thing that can stop them from dropping dead, their little bodies emaciated, is a ceasefire. The leader of Israel’s fascist government, the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, rejects such a ceasefire.
Listen to Janez Lenarčič, Commissioner for Crisis Management on the European Commission’s Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations:
- The vast majority of the population of the Gaza strip is fully dependent on humanitarian aid. Despite all the efforts of humanitarian actors over the past eight months, often at great risk to themselves, the amount of aid allowed into Gaza has fallen to unacceptably low levels. A ceasefire is desperately needed to deliver life-saving aid to those in need and to secure the release of the hostages. The vital work of the United Nations agency staff, which has been under attack in this crisis as rarely before in history, needs to be protected and facilitated.
UNICEF Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa Adele Khodr concurs: “Horrific images continue to emerge from Gaza of children dying before their families’ eyes due to the continued lack of food, nutrition supplies, and the destruction of healthcare services.”
Malnourished children are at special risk of sickening from disease or polluted water, and the Strip is only getting 25% the amount of potable water it received before Oct. 7.
The World Food Program, headed by Cindy McCain, said that her organization’s warehouses had been hit by the Israeli military despite the WFP providing the Israelis with their coordinates.
She implied that the use of the American military’s pier in the botched Israeli hostage rescue that left 274 Palestinians dead and may have killed 3 other Israeli hostages has caused the WFP to cease trying to distribute aid from the pier because her organization is afraid it will come under attack. She reiterated that her organization’s field workers had seen clear signs of famine in North Gaza, rejecting Israeli government attacks on her and refuting Tel Aviv’s propaganda that there is plenty of food.
The Israeli assault in mid-May on Rafah, to which it had expelled over a million Palestinians, cut off crucial food supplies to some 3,800 children in southern Gaza, about 75% of whom are now in danger of starving to death. Severe malnutrition among minors has sky-rocketed in southern Gaza, according to aid NGOs on the ground, who are forwarding their concerns urgently to UNESCO.
Emergency aid stations have been set up to stabilize the health of these malnourished children, but only two are still able to carry out their mission.
Khodr warned, “Unless treatment can be quickly resumed for these 3,000 children, they are at immediate and serious risk of becoming critically ill, acquiring life-threatening complications, and joining the growing list of boys and girls who have been killed by this senseless, man-made deprivation.”
UNICEF explains, “Treating a child for acute malnutrition typically takes six to eight weeks of uninterrupted care and requires special therapeutic food, safe water, and other medical support.”
At a joint Egyptian-Jordanian conference on the Dead Sea, Martin Griffiths, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs & Emergency Relief Coordinator, underlined the pressing need for an immediate ceasefire: “There was a unanimous horror at the vast toll of death, injury[,] destruction, displacement, serial displacement, trauma and deprivation suffered by the people of Gaza in just nine months, as well as the horrendous toll on humanitarian, and including United Nations, workers, of course, from UNRWA in particular, which exceeded the death toll across the whole world in the past 12 years combined.”
How to avert further catastrophes? He said that the working group in which he participated “stressed the need for these immediate measures to facilitate the delivery of aid: number one, a functioning mechanism for operational coordination and notification; number two, full access for basic equipment for safety and security of humanitarian staff; number three, passable roads and clearance of explosive ordnance; number four, unimpeded passage to distribute aid and access communities across Gaza; and finally, sufficient and predictable flows of fuel and prioritized aid, if you wouldn’t mind.”
If you want to know what the humanitarian situation inside Gaza is, just reverse engineer all his demands.