For weeks now, when a Gazan is asked on WhatsApp what he ate the day before, there is no need to specify whether it was for breakfast, lunch or dinner because, in the best of cases, it was his only meal of the day.
At the worst are half a million people whom the United Nations already places in the most serious of the five phases in which food crises are classified, that is, at high risk of dying from starvation.
More than 80% of the people in the world in this phase – considered “catastrophic” – are currently struggling in Gaza.
Especially in the north, where the lack of flour is leading some families to prepare pita bread with the ground feed that the animals gave and the UN World Food Program (WFP) has stopped introducing humanitarian aid, after after a hungry mob attacked the trucks last week.
“In Gaza, there is simply not enough food for everyone.
When destiny wants and I get it, it is once a day.
Other days, I can't find it, or it's too expensive and I can't afford it," summarizes Tamer Ashraf, 20, who, like many hundreds of thousands of others, escaped from northern Gaza to the city of Khan Yunis and then, again by order of the Israeli army, to Rafah, where more than half of the 2.3 million Gazans await a new and announced forced displacement in the face of the invasion of the area.
All of Gaza is hungry today, to a greater or lesser extent.
64% eat only once a day and 95% ration portions or give less to adults so that children do not lack, according to United Nations data.
In the north, the estimated hundreds of thousands of people remaining meet at least one of three indicators signaling famine and are on track for the other two, according to the Famine Review Committee, the international team of food experts. food security and nutrition that analyzes the data.
Nutrition checks at shelters and health centers there reveal that 15.6% of babies under two years of age are severely malnourished.
Before the war, practically none.
3% of them suffer from the most severe type of malnutrition: they will perish if they do not receive urgent help.
The data is captured in images that can be seen daily on television and social networks: the fights over a ration when food is distributed, the queues of adults and children extending the plate or any plastic container, the looting of humanitarian aid, the prices prohibitive on the black market, happiness for those who can afford to eat
shawarma
(meat sandwich)
for the first time in more than four months of war...
The WFP describes its last two delivery attempts, which led to its suspension, as follows: “On Sunday [February 18], on the way to Gaza City, the convoy was surrounded by a crowd of hungry people near the military checkpoint in Wadi Gaza.
First dodging numerous attempts by people to climb aboard the trucks, then being shot at as they entered the city, the team was able to distribute a small amount of food along the way.
On Monday, a second convoy to the north faced complete chaos and violence due to the breakdown of law and order.
Several trucks were looted between Khan Yunis and Deir al Balah [in the center and south] and a driver was attacked.
The flour remaining in the trucks was spontaneously distributed in Gaza City amid great tension and anger.”
The agency speaks of “unprecedented levels of desperation.”
Aid has barely arrived in recent days and the police of the Hamas Government, which maintains control in Rafah, refuses to escort the trucks that transport it because Israel bombs the agents, the head of the UN agency explained on the 9th. for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, in a meeting with journalists at the headquarters in Jerusalem.
Internally displaced Palestinian children queue with their containers waiting to receive food provided by Arab and Palestinian donors in the city of Deir Al Balah, southern Gaza Strip, on February 24, 2024. MOHAMMED SABER (EFE)
“Very little help arrives here and there is very little food available,” Yahia Sarray, the mayor of the capital of Gaza, says in WhatsApp messages.
“People are hungry and can't find basic things, especially for children and babies.
Many only eat one small meal a day.
They go looking everywhere for anything they can eat.
Sometimes they risk their lives by going to very dangerous places in the hope of getting something edible.
What we need most is bread and flour,” she summarizes.
Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International, an American NGO dedicated to supporting displaced people, refugees and stateless people, warned this Tuesday in a video conference that “nothing can prevent a famine in Gaza” without a change in trajectory.
“If an unhindered humanitarian operation is not allowed throughout Gaza, there will be one.
And it will not be because of natural phenomena, but because of the way in which this war is being carried out and the persistent and intentional denials of humanitarian access, mainly by Israel [...] which has only allowed one in five requests for movement in the north".
Using food as a weapon
In October, shortly after the start of the war, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” of Gaza from food, water, electricity and fuel.
“We fight human animals, so we will behave as such,” he said.
Under pressure from his allies, he allowed the entry from Egypt (it is not his border, but he
de facto
requires his green light) of some humanitarian aid.
Some days less than a hundred trucks enter, compared to 500 before the war, when farms and industries also functioned.
In recent weeks, moreover, ultranationalist groups try daily (and sometimes succeed) to stop them.
The Israeli army has bombed food warehouses, mills and bakeries (15 of the almost 100 are in operation).
Eight UN rapporteurs accused Israel on the 16th of “destroying Gaza's food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian population.”
Two days before, 15 NGOs - such as Action Against Hunger, ActionAid, Plan International or Save the Children - recalled that resolution 2417 of the United Nations Security Council condemns the use of hunger in civilians as a war strategy.
Humanitarian aid has been basically limited for weeks to the south, where the vast majority of the population is concentrated, hundreds of thousands of them in normal or improvised tents.
They are mainly bottles of water, flour, baby milk, chickpeas, rice, cooking oil, sugar, canned meat...
In the market you buy fresh or packaged products, some of them stored before the war.
They are few and the need is great, so now they cost up to 10 times more.
A kilo of potatoes costs 14 shekels (3.5 euros, seven times more) and a bag of flour costs 500 shekels (10 times more).
On the streets of Rafah, chocolates that were previously available for one or two shekels are now priced at 12 or 13. “Sometimes we buy the cheapest thing on the market because prices have risen extremely exaggeratedly.
A kilo of sugar can cost 20 times more.
Others of us eat what we receive from humanitarian aid.
We eat once or twice a day to save money because there is not always food in the market and prices change every day,” says Asma, a young woman from the capital displaced in Rafah.
The work of international organizations and NGOs is concentrated in Rafah, so the situation is less tragic, although 5% of children under two years of age have shown acute malnutrition in examinations, according to UN data.
Marina Pomares returned on February 13 after working for a month in Rafah as medical coordinator of the Doctors Without Borders Spain project.
She says that she did not see “alarming” malnutrition figures, because it was the area with the most access to food, but she did see mothers unable to breastfeed their children, due to not being able to produce milk.
She also had to provide emergency nutritional solutions to vulnerable groups, such as children under five years of age, pregnant and lactating women.
“They present a very similar pattern: lack of food.
They tend to consume a lot of legumes, carbohydrates, flour, non-perishable foods… What they lack most is protein,” she says.
Meat, for example, is a luxury in Gaza after October 7, the day the Hamas attack triggered the Israeli invasion that has killed some 30,000 people, mostly women and minors, and turned good part of the buildings in rubble.
Palestinians carry bags of flour they took from a humanitarian aid truck near an Israeli checkpoint, in Gaza City, February 19, 2024. Kosay Al Nemer (REUTERS)
The Government of Israel claims that Hamas steals up to 60% of humanitarian aid (something the United Nations is not aware of) and blames distribution problems.
“The bottleneck is not on our side,” said the military coordinator for Gaza, Moshe Tetro.
Repetition of the idea in the Israeli media – along with the popularity of the narrative that civilians are also to blame in one way or another for the October 7 attack – has fueled a mood in favor of further limiting aid, in leaves to force Hamas to hand over the hostages it captured that day.
In its latest poll, published last Tuesday, the Israel Institute for Democracy think tank asked: “Do you support or oppose Israel allowing the delivery of humanitarian aid to the residents of Gaza, with the delivery of food and medicine to international organizations not linked to Hamas or UNRWA?
68% of the Jewish population declared themselves against it, including 31% of those who define themselves as left-wing.
Konyndyk, who headed the humanitarian division of USAID, the development cooperation agency of the United States Government, insists on one idea: we do not have to reinvent the wheel to avoid famine.
“The way to do it is known and has been applied in other places: an immense flow of food,” both in the humanitarian field and in the most important, commercial field.
“And they are both blocked right now in Gaza,” he laments.
The main problem, he emphasizes, is that “it is completely impossible to provide an adequate response in the current circumstances and will continue to be so without a ceasefire.”
And he remembers two elements.
One, the data are not showing the excess mortality typical of a famine, but the fate of a large majority of people who do not go to hospitals is unknown, especially in the north.
Another is that in a famine the majority do not die from hunger, but from diseases, and today in Gaza only five of the 35 hospitals function and 70% of the children suffer from diarrhea.
“If there was a cholera outbreak right now, it would spread like wildfire,” he concludes.
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