Israel Is Starving Gaza

Haaretz Editorial

https://archive.ph/jyUah

Gaza is starving, and Israel is responsible. According to the Gaza Health Ministry,111 people have died from malnutrition since the war began, most of them children. Alarmingly, 43 of those deaths occurred just in the past week.

The United Nations reports that the share of children suffering from severe malnutrition has jumped from 2.4 percent in February to 8.8 percent in the first two weeks of July. These figures have been backed by more and more reports by foreign and Palestinian doctors, journalists and international organizations of children and adults dying of hunger.

Spokespeople for the Israel Defense Forces and the government are trying to blur the reality, but even Israel's official numbers confirm the hunger in Gaza. The IDF claimed this week that 71 trucks carrying food have entered Gaza every day over the past month.

That means each of those trucks is supposed to deliver enough food to feed 30,000 people a day. You don't need to be familiar with the logistics of food delivery or the laws of war to know that this is tantamount to starvation.

The famine also emerges from figures provided by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was supposed to solve the food shortage in the Strip. The GHF says that it has distributed 85 million meals since it began operations two months ago.

However, a simple calculation shows that during that period, Gazans would have needed 353 million meals to stave off hunger. And that does not even take into account the problems of food distribution and access for the most needy, as well as the impossibility of extracting the nutritional value of the meals in the absence of cooking gas and under the conditions of displacement.

The famine that has been created is another facet of Israel's cruel inhumanity towards the people of Gaza. It constitutes a war crime and a crime against humanity and is a clear violation of the orders issued a year and a half ago by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

The famine does not contribute anything to the war effort against Hamas. Its gunmen will be the last to suffer hunger in Gaza. Before that, it will be children, women and Israeli hostages still captive there who starve.

The onus for Gaza's starvation lies with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it is also shared by Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir, who both issues and enforces illegal orders.

Zamir should demand that the government allow the IDF to open all of Gaza's border crossings immediately, to allow unrestricted entry of food, medical supplies and aid workers to address the rapidly worsening humanitarian crisis.

He must also order the IDF to cooperate fully with the United Nations and other international aid organizations to facilitate the swift and secure delivery of assistance to Gaza's population.

Every day we wait, more children lose their lives.