Desperation seems to be the rule of the day inside Gaza. The Gaza Health Ministry said today that 111 people, including 80 children, have died in recent days from starvation, including 10 in the previous 24 hours.
The UN World Food Program said that Gaza’s hunger crisis has reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation,” Ross Smith, the agency’s director for emergencies, told reporters on July 21 that nearly 100,000 women and children are suffering from severe acute malnutrition, and a third of Gaza’s population are going without food for multiple days in a row, reported AP.
MedGlobal, a charity working in Gaza, said five children,including infants as young as 3 months, had died from starvation in the previous three days. “This is a deliberate and human-made disaster,” said Joseph Belliveau, its executive director. “Those children died because there is not enough food in Gaza and not enough medicines, including IV fluids and therapeutic formula, to revive them.”
The charity said food is in such short supply that its own staff members suffer dizziness and headaches.
The UN human rights office yesterday put the death toll of those seeking aid to 1,054, with 766 of whom being killed while heading to sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The others were killed when gunfire erupted around UN convoys or aid sites.
The Israeli response to warnings that starvation conditions now prevail in Gaza is in effect saying: “Famine? What famine? We don’t see any famine.”
“We have not identified starvation at this current point in time, but we understand that action is required to stabilize the humanitarian situation,” a senior Israeli official said yesterday, reported the {Times of Israel. He added that there may be difficulties with accessibility to food in some areas, which he said was an issue that needs to be solved. The determination came following a “deep assessment” of the humanitarian situation in Gaza held by COGAT, he said.
COGAT boasts that about 4,500 trucks of aid have entered Gaza in the last two months but admits that amounts to only 71 trucks per day, far below the 500 per day that have often been identified throughout the conflict as necessary to meet the minimum needs of the population.
