In an oped in the New York Times on Feb. 29 Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children, Megan K. Stack writes:
People in Gaza are hungry because the U.S. government — Israel’s pre-eminent military aid provider and political defender — has failed to use its considerable leverage to force Israel to let Gaza eat.
Ms. Stack provides details of starvation in Gaza:
The threat of starvation is believed to be most intense in the bomb-scarred remains of northern Gaza, where by January, nutrition screenings found that more than 15 percent of children ages 6 months to 23 months were acutely malnourished, a condition rarely seen in Gaza before the current war.
“Such a decline in a population’s nutritional status in three months is unprecedented globally,” UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the U.N. World Food Program said in reporting the latest grim statistics last week.
Ms. Stack quotes a pediatrician at Kamal Adwan Hospital, who said this month he was seeing a number of deaths among children, especially newborns. “Signs of weakness and paleness are apparent on newborns because the mother is malnourished,” he said.
Ms. Stack presents the statistic that “at least two people out of every 10,000 die every day from starvation. They measure the circumference of children’s upper arms to document the peril of their weight loss,” and she comments:
These children are not suffering from drought or crop failure or some other natural disaster. Their hunger is a man-made catastrophe. The Israeli government has slowed and even prevented food aid from entering the besieged Gaza Strip.
Even when trucks do get through, Israeli bombardment and, more recently, the growing desperation of hungry mobs have turned food distribution into an arduous and sometimes deadly endeavor.
Ms. Stack quotes the executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program: “This is a population that is starving to death.” Then Ms. Stack explains:
We should not pretend these deaths were inevitable. All of this we already knew: Palestinian residents of Gaza have been reduced to eating grass. They drink fetid water. Grains meant for animal feed are pulverized into makeshift flour, but even that lowly sustenance has been running out.
“It is a harsh death,” Ms. Stack says. “Muscles weaken and shrink. The immune system falters, and infections take hold. Vital organs break down. The weakest die first — babies, the elderly, the sick.”
Ms. Stack reports:
Israeli officials have claimed there is no shortage of food in Gaza and denied that they were responsible for people going hungry, accusing Hamas of pilfering aid bound for civilians and saying the United Nations failed to distribute food.
However, “aid organizations trying to move supplies into Gaza” blame Israel “for creating byzantine delays at crossings and for failing to ensure safe passage in Gaza. It is accused of opening fire on U.N. aid vehicles returning from delivering aid and on crowds waiting for food.”
Ms. Stack explains further:
The World Food Program suspended food deliveries to northern Gaza last week because looters and desperate crowds were attacking the trucks.
Jordanian and French military planes dropped food and other supplies into central Gaza on Monday, but some of the boxes fell into the sea, forcing people to scramble into the water to retrieve them.
Ms. Stack reports the words of a Palestinian writer “who has family members in Gaza and has spoken to relatives who haven’t had fruit, vegetables or meat in three months.”
They are trying to survive by hunting for canned food and foraging for wild plants like sorrel and mallow. A few miles away, meanwhile, Israeli protesters have physically blocked aid trucks from entering the Gaza Strip.
Ms. Stack calls the situation an “ominous absurdity:”
A freighter with food bound for Gaza, enough to feed more than one million people, languished for weeks at the Israeli port of Ashdod because Israeli customs authorities refused to process the food. The United States paid for 90,000 metric tons of flour on the freighter, and President Biden thanked Israel for letting it pass — except that Israel had done the opposite.
Israel eventually said it would allow the American flour to be distributed by the World Food Program, but it is not clear whether that has happened.
Ms. Stack speaks of the Biden administration’s “moral responsibility”:
Just when the spiraling humanitarian crisis should have been made a priority, the Biden administration opted instead to showily withhold funding to UNRWA.
Mr. Biden’s decision came after Israel shared intelligence that a dozen UNRWA staff members played a role in the Hamas rampage of Oct. 7, which left roughly 1,200 people dead in Israel and some 240 more taken as hostages to the Gaza Strip.
These were, unquestionably, serious allegations, and UNRWA took them seriously, firing most of the implicated staff members even before investigating. The U.N. has begun two investigations into the allegations.
Ms. Stack criticizes the response from the Biden administration and at least 15 other governments that suspended support to UNRWA as “dangerously disproportionate”:
Even if the allegations turn out to be true — and they may well be — this scandal touches only about 0.1 percent of UNRWA’s roughly 13,000 Gaza staff members.
There is no tipping point at which the crimes of a handful of people justify kneecapping the main food source while famine looms.
Ms Stack says that when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found it “plausible” that Israel had committed genocidal acts in Gaza, the judges warned of the urgent need for aid to relieve “catastrophic conditions.” On Monday the UNRWA commissioner general said that “compared with January, only half as much aid is getting in.”
“After the I.C.J. resolution, people expected that aid would enter in bigger quantities,” said the director general of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights. “But what is happening is the opposite.”
---------------------—
UPDATE: In an email published Feb. 29, Megan K. Stack, the author of Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children excerpted above, writes about the difficulty of getting the details she needed for her story:
I reached out to activists in Gaza who posted social media content on starvation, but didn’t hear back. People in Gaza were like distant shadows, moving half-seen behind a blind of electricity cuts and telecommunications blackouts and bombs. They were out hunting for food, phones unreachable. They’d turn their phones on at some point, see a message from me, and reply — then disappear again before I could ask a follow-up question.
Ms. Stack says: “The people of Gaza are caught in a Catch-22”:
Their best hope for help is to let others know what’s happening. But the Israeli bombardment has killed many of the journalists who could tell the stories, cut off communications, and turned daily life into a battle for survival. Escorted trips with the Israeli army notwithstanding, outside journalists have not been allowed into Gaza.