By Alexander Smith—
NBC News
Five months after Hamas launched multiple attacks on Israel, nearly half of Gaza's buildings are in ruins and at least 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the enclave's Health Ministry, which, along with aid agencies, warned that Some of the most vulnerable children in the territory have begun to die of hunger.
The Israeli army controls parts of the Gaza Strip and has threatened to attack Rafah, the southern city to which 1.5 million Palestinians have fled, unless a ceasefire agreement is reached before next week.
Israel has not achieved its military objectives: destroying Hamas in response to its October 7 attacks, in which 1,200 people died, and rescuing the more than 100 hostages taken that day.
It is not clear whether either is possible.
Abroad, the fallout from the humanitarian tragedy has increased international pressure on Israel.
Even allies like the United States, which gives Israel $3 billion a year in weapons and other military aid, have joined the chorus of demands, at least rhetorically, pushing for more aid to be urgently allowed into the enclave. where Palestinians gather in camps and sleep on the streets.
The United States has also sponsored talks in Egypt to negotiate a ceasefire before the start of Ramadan, the Muslim holy fasting month, which begins Sunday.
This could mean an exchange of hostages and prisoners, a cessation of fighting and a new flow of aid to Gaza.
But major disagreements remain, and there was no sign of a breakthrough on Thursday, when Hamas said its delegation had left the Egyptian capital to consult with its leaders.
Displaced Palestinian children line up to receive food at a donation point in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, on March 6, 2024. Majdi Fathi / NurPhoto via Getty Images
“When children start” to “die from hunger, that should be a warning like no other,” Jens Laerke, spokesman for the United Nations humanitarian office, said in a press release on Tuesday.
“If not now, when is the time to throw in the towel, break the glass and flood Gaza with the help it needs?”
The statistics are devastating.
U.S. and U.N. officials have said the death toll reported by the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Health Ministry is likely to be underestimated.
Aid workers on the ground estimate that thousands more remain buried under the rubble of destroyed buildings.
About 80% of the population, 1.9 million people, have been forced to leave their homes, according to the UN, some as many as half a dozen times due to the Israeli military push south.
Around 60% of Gaza's buildings have been damaged, 45% of them destroyed
– including schools, hospitals, bakeries, mosques and thousands of homes – according to a World Bank study.
Even for the meager levels of Gaza, blocked by Israel and Egypt for 16 years, there is a shortage of everything: water, food, fuel, electricity and medicine.
The United States has sent several aid in recent days, but even if they are successful, they will not solve the problem.
In the face of growing desperation, more than 100 Palestinians were killed last week in a chaotic clash with Israeli troops over an aid convoy.
The lack of drinking water causes diseases such as diarrhea and hepatitis to proliferate.
Lack of food is causing people to starve, according to local doctors and international aid workers.
The Gaza Health Ministry has reported that at least 16 children have died since last week as a result of malnutrition and dehydration.
He has also expressed concern about six babies who he said were being treated for malnutrition at Kamal Adwan Hospital in the city of Beit Lahia.
Some had underlying health problems, like 10-year-old Yazan Kafarneh, who was recorded Monday by an NBC News crew before he died.
Yazan relied on a special diet of fruit and milk, products now unavailable in Gaza, doctors told Reuters.
The images, which showed the emaciated boy covered in blankets and receiving intravenous fluids, were widely shared on social media following his death.
After the UN warned last week that famine in Gaza was “almost inevitable”, Adele Khodr, regional director of the UN children's agency UNICEF, warned on Sunday that “the child deaths we feared are here, as malnutrition ravages the Gaza Strip.”
[Between confusion, despair and hunger, one of the most tragic chapters of the war in Gaza occurs]
The World Health Organization, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and the World Food Program have issued similar warnings.
The people of Gaza have been “totally dehumanized, deprived of their own dignity and human well-being,” said Dalal Iriqat, a Palestinian associate professor of diplomacy at the Arab American University, based in the occupied West Bank.
“Not to mention the fact that they have lost all their property, their homes and, in many cases, their families.”
He shares the view of many Palestinians that the war has nothing to do with Hamas, but rather with what they see as the Israeli government's decades-long thinly veiled desire to expel them from Gaza and repopulate it with Israelis.
Far-right members of the Israeli government coalition
have openly supported the idea of expelling Palestinians from Gaza
, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly denied that is his intention.
Netanyahu, who has not been bowed to international pressure to ease his military assault, continues to insist that the country must eliminate Hamas, which does not recognize the existence of Israel and is a terrorist group banned in the West.
The remaining 134 hostages, some of whom are believed to have died, are a constant and increasing torment not only to their families, but also to the nation and the Jewish diaspora as a whole.
In a report released Tuesday, which many considered long overdue, the UN said there was “clear and convincing” evidence that women and children had been subjected to “sexual violence, including rape” and “sexualized torture,” following the attacks by October 7.
Gaza hostages may continue to suffer the same treatment, the document stated.
Yazan al-Kafarneh lies in a hospital bed at the Al-Awda clinic in Rafah, southern Gaza, on February 29, 2024.AFP - Getty Images
Polls indicate that the majority of Israelis support the war in Gaza.
“What happened on October 7 is still very much in the Israeli mind,” said Nimrod Goren, senior fellow on Israeli affairs at the Middle East Institute, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington.
“Even people who have lost all faith in Netanyahu continue to believe that the military objectives that were set were the correct ones;
It is very different from the situation in which international discourse finds itself.”
Militaryly, Israel controls most of northern Gaza, as well as swaths of the south, according to an analysis by the Institute for the Study of War, a
nonprofit
think tank in Washington.
Israel began a relentless bombing campaign on Gaza hours after the Hamas attack, and on October 27 launched a ground invasion.
Another problem for Israel is that Hamas has not been fully purged from the north, and some locals and analysts see signs that it has been regrouping in pockets outside Israeli control.
Israel claims to have killed up to 10,000 Palestinian group fighters.
Both this figure and the total number of members are not confirmed, making it difficult to understand to what extent the group has actually been weakened.
Israel may be able to root out the militants and their bases.
But harder to kill are the ideas underlying the group: at once highly anti-Semitic and despised in the West, but also considered a bastion of resistance by many Palestinians who feel that all other avenues, peaceful or not, have been thwarted.
“One of the main failures — I think deliberate — is the lack of preparation for the 'day after,'” said Michael Horowitz, head of intelligence at Le Beck International, a security and risk management consultancy.
“There is no one to assume authority in Gaza, not even the beginning of a solution.”