Images of starving children bring home gravity of Gaza’s famine
Israel blames Hamas for looting, but aid agencies say Israeli checks eat distribution time and lorries are mobbed by increasingly desperate and hungry crowds.
For months, the warnings of famine in Gaza came and went. In the war’s morass of claim and counterclaim, it was hard to tell when occasional hunger became intense.
In the past week, though, graphic images have made the onset of starvation impossible to ignore.
In one photograph, the emaciated corpse of 12-year-old Abdeljawad al-Ghalban – little more than a collection of stick-like bones – lay on a mortuary trolley. He had had cerebral palsy, and his family had been unable to get hold of the treatment he needed.
“He needed a specific kind of milk and food,” his father, Abdelhamid, said. “He was already sick, but the malnutrition made his condition worse.”
Not all the children affected by hunger were sick already. On Thursday, The Times featured a photograph of two-year-old Yazan Abu Foul, clearly wasting away.
“Yazan doesn’t suffer from any diseases,” his father, Mahmoud, told The Times yesterday (Friday). “His condition is purely from hunger. Over the past months, I noticed his weight dropping more and more. I took him to several doctors. They all told me the same thing: this is famine.”
The United Nations says it is finding it particularly difficult to supply specialist foods needed for sick and already malnourished children. But it says the general situation has been rapidly getting worse for all of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents for months, since Israel imposed an aid blockade in March.
That was lifted in May, and a new organisation, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a US-backed startup, was sent in to be the lead aid provider. But neither it nor the UN agencies have managed to restore aid deliveries to their former levels and, with much of the Gaza Strip levelled by the war, the population are completely dependent on that aid.
A joint statement on Wednesday by 100 aid agencies including Christian Aid, Medicins Sans Frontieres and Mercy Corps said: “As the Israeli government’s siege starves the people of Gaza, aid workers are now joining the same food lines, risking being shot just to feed their families.
“With supplies now totally depleted, humanitarian organisations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes.”
Israel strongly rejects the accusation that it is responsible, accusing Hamas of looting aid and saying that the UN warehouses are full of supplies if only they would deliver them.
“It is time for them to pick it up and stop blaming Israel for the bottlenecks which are occurring,” David Mercer, the Israeli government spokesman, said in reply.
Although aid supplies have fluctuated during the war, and the situation improved immensely during the ceasefire earlier this year, delivery has become increasingly difficult since the blockade.
UN agencies say that the confusion over how much aid is getting in is exacerbated by disinformation and the inability to monitor a violent and changing situation. International journalists are unable to report at first hand because they are banned by the Israeli authorities from entering Gaza.
The agencies say the fact that their warehouses are full is exactly the point they are making. The obstacle is getting aid through an Israeli-controlled war zone to the people who need it.
They deny that Hamas is responsible for taking aid, although there are certainly cases of local gangsters trying to loot it. The main problems, the agencies say, are the delays caused by the Israeli inspection process and the fact that convoys are mobbed the minute they hit the road – an inevitable consequence of the desperation among the population.
Antoine Renard, head of World Food Programme (WFP) operations in Gaza, said: “We have always been flagging that we have no systematic diversion by Hamas.”
He drew attention to the delays that affected a WFP convoy last Sunday. He said it took 20 hours for 19 lorries to reach the warehouse on the Gaza side of the border crossing, load up, and begin delivery. More than eight hours of that was the time it took the Israeli military to inspect the lorries, a regular part of the process, though nothing untoward was found. Another six to seven hours was the time spent waiting for Israeli approvals to travel.
The UN estimates that between 500 and 600 lorries a day are needed to supply enough food for all of Gaza’s residents. The issue is not only with such delays. Both UN and GHF distributors face chaotic and dangerous supply routes, which are regularly overwhelmed by the people trying to reach distribution points.
WFP lorries are mobbed as they hit the road, which is often little more than a smashed-up track. Convoys have to take routes determined in advance by the Israeli military, and which residents are well aware of.
When they reach GHF distribution points, residents are told to queue on specific routes, and those who stray risk being shot by Israeli forces who are still conducting military operations throughout the strip, and guarding the aid sites.
In part, this is a result of the blockade in March and the shift of aid distribution by Israel away from the UN towards, primarily, the GHF.
The UN system focuses on distributing aid to kitchens and bakeries run by aid agencies. When aid stopped getting into Gaza, that system collapsed.
The few kitchens and bakeries that remain cannot find fuel and are frequently burning waste for their ovens instead. Much aid is now distributed directly to families.
This means every aid distribution operation becomes a steeplechase among the desperate as the fittest compete to evade shooting, race to the aid points and grapple with each other for such food parcels as they arrive.
In this Darwinian process, the sick, the elderly and lone women with children to care for are left behind.
The GHF defends its provision of aid, and after a difficult start it has indeed handed out tens of millions of food packages. But unlike the UN, which provides large boxes of raw ingredients – flour, pasta, lentils and tomato paste – designed to feed a family for a month, the GHF distributes meals that it says will keep a family of five going for three or four days. Then the family’s young men, if they have them, have to risk their lives going back for more aid.
Renard described an environment in which, when aid deliveries resumed in May, the chaos had reached a tipping point.
Beforehand, however poor conditions were, residents believed the agencies would be able to supply food eventually. Now, that belief has gone, a vicious circle in which the harder it is to deliver food, the more desperate people storm the routes and the convoys, making the process even harder.
Things can change, and may have already started to do so as this week’s grim photographs began to emerge. Israeli inspections have eased in recent days. On Wednesday, 150 UN lorries were able to get through, 93 for the World Food Programme alone – a sign of what is possible, though nowhere near enough.
Food supplied by the agencies does sometimes end up on the local market, and the prices tell a story. During the ceasefire, a 1kg bag of flour cost $US1.50. That had gone up to $US100 by last weekend. By the end of the week it was down to $US15 or $US20.
The question remains whether this marginal improvement will save Yazan and other children. Scores have died already this month.
Dr Ahmed Al-Farra, a paediatrician, said as he treated Sila Barbakh, a girl of 11 months who weighs seven and a half pounds (3.4kg), that she was basically healthy.
“This is primary malnutrition,” he said. “She has lost subcutaneous tissue, lost muscle mass. She needs vitamins. She needs supplementation. But if she gets good nutrition, she will survive.”
The Times
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