According to the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa), one out of every five children in Gaza City is malnourished, and the number of instances is increasing by the day. In a statement made on Thursday, Unrwa Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini quoted a colleague as saying, “People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.” More than 100 international humanitarian agencies and human rights groups have also issued warnings of widespread hunger, urging governments to intervene. Israel, which controls all supplies entering Gaza, denies there is a siege and blames Hamas for any malnutrition instances. The UN, on the other hand, has warned that aid entering Gaza is “a trickle” and that the territory’s hunger crisis “has never been so dire”.
On Thursday, Lazzarini stated that “more than 100 people, the vast majority of whom are children, have reportedly died of hunger.” “Most children our teams are seeing are emaciated, weak and at high risk of dying if they don’t get the treatment they urgently need,” he stated. He asked Israel to “allow humanitarian partners to bring unrestricted and uninterrupted humanitarian assistance to Gaza” . According to Lazzarini, Unrwa workers are “increasingly fainting from hunger while at work,” and when caretakers do not have enough to eat, the entire humanitarian system collapses. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), a considerable part of Gaza’s population is “starving” on Wednesday.
“I don’t know what you would call it other than mass starvation – and it’s man-made,” the head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said.
Hanaa Almadhoun, 40, from northern Gaza, claims that local marketplaces are frequently depleted of food and other commodities. “If they exist, they are at exorbitant prices that no ordinary person can afford,” she told the BBC via WhatsApp. She claimed that flour was expensive and difficult to obtain, and that many had traded “gold and personal belongings” to buy it. The mother of three stated that “every new day brings a new challenge” as individuals hunt for “something edible”. “With my own eyes, I’ve seen children rummaging through the garbage in search of food scraps,” she told me.
During a visit to Israeli troops in Gaza on Wednesday, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog insisted that his country was providing humanitarian aid “according to international law”. But Tahani Shehada, an aid worker in Gaza, stated that Palestinians “are just trying to survive hour by hour.” “Even simple things like cooking [and] taking a shower have become luxuries,” she told me. “I’ve got a baby. He’s 8 months old. “He has no idea what fresh fruit tastes like,” she explained.
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