‘Widespread starvation’ – aid agencies warn of deepening humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza

“This is a deliberate policy of collective punishment of the Palestinian people. Israel is using, and continues to use starvation as a weapon of war, and is deliberately blocking aid.

“People are being starved and our staff are standing in the same food lines risking being shot just for a bag of flour,” said Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam policy lead in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Khalidi was speaking to Daily Maverick from Ramallah, in the Occupied West Bank, about the extreme hunger her colleagues and civilians were enduring in Gaza, as the humanitarian catastrophe in the region continues to deepen. Oxfam has about 27 staff on the ground in the Gaza Strip, between Gaza City, Al Mawasi and Dier al Balah.

Read more: No aid supplies left, staff starve in Gaza, Norwegian Refugee Council says

“We’re hearing horror stories… One colleague told me on Saturday that she went to work without food and water, and she had to eat just one single falafel without bread just to keep going. 

“We’ve heard from parents that we’re supporting [who] are boiling tree leaves to feed their children. We’ve heard from other aid workers who burnt their clothes to cook the last scraps of lentils. We’ve heard mothers saying [their] son died from hunger in front of [their] eyes. A mother told us her 11-month-old hasn’t crawled and teethed yet because there’s no baby formula and her own breast milk has dried up from hunger. 

“The list just goes on,” said Khalidi. “On and on and on.”

More than 100 aid organisations and human rights groups, including Oxfam, Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders, said on Wednesday, 23 July, that “mass starvation” was spreading across the Gaza Strip, as a result of Israel’s “restrictions, delays and fragmentation under its total siege” of humanitarian aid. 

“As the Israeli government’s siege starves the people of Gaza, aid workers are now joining the same food lines, risking being shot just to feed their families. With supplies now totally depleted, humanitarian organisations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes,” the groups said.  

The statement, signed by 109 aid agencies, comes after 30 governments, including longtime allies of Israel such as the UK, Canada and France, on Monday condemned the “drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians”. 

“The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths. The Israeli government’s aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability and deprives Gazans of human dignity… It is horrifying that over 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid,” read the statement. 

After a two-month ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas collapsed in March, Israel implemented a total blockade on aid, which pushed Palestinians to the verge of famine.

Read more: ‘Beyond catastrophic’ — conditions worsen in Gaza as Israel continues aid blockade

Since May, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a private US and Israeli-backed group, has managed a new system in which Palestinians go to a few aid distribution hubs at prearranged times for aid. The GHF operates only four sites to feed two million people, and the sites remain open for as little as eight minutes at a time, a visual investigation by The Guardian found. 

More than 800 people have been killed by Israeli forces while seeking to retrieve aid since the GHF began operations, according to the United Nations (UN), which has strongly condemned the aid scheme.

“I believe that we’ve hit a tipping point in Gaza right now, where we’ve gone from a situation of food insecurity and shortages, and isolated cases of malnutrition, to a situation of widespread starvation. And this is partly evidenced by the fact that we’ve seen the number of severely malnourished children in our facilities triple within the last three weeks.”

In their joint statement, the aid organisations said: “The UN-led humanitarian system has not failed, it has been prevented from functioning.

“Humanitarian agencies have the capacity and supplies to respond at scale. But, with access denied, we are blocked from reaching those in need, including our own exhausted and starved teams,” they continued. 

Read more: Israeli fire kills 67 people seeking aid in Gaza, medics say, as hunger worsens

‘Dizziness, headaches, and extremely low energy’

Khalidi said that if border crossings were to open, and UN and other aid groups like Oxfam’s operations could continue at full capacity, “in a matter of hours the situation would be better”. 

“It’s shameful that the international community has allowed for Israel’s impunity to continue with zero consequences… Stop with the statements, because we do not need any more statements: we need action.

“Governments need to impose an immediate and permanent ceasefire, they need to force an opening of all the land crossings, they need to force an end to the siege, they need to return the UN-led humanitarian response – not one that is controlled by military actors… that have turned food into a death trap. 

“We need governments that stand for human rights to prove it, and not let starvation be used as a weapon of war on their watch. We need governments to stop their complicity and to remember that history is watching – and so are the people of Gaza as they still wait for the world to save them,” she said. 

Joseph Belliveau, the executive director of the nonprofit MedGlobal, which delivers emergency medical care in the Gaza Strip, operating 16 medical points, said that many of his staff were increasingly reporting “dizziness, headaches, lack of ability to concentrate and extremely low energy, because they’re not getting enough food”. 

“I’ve never had colleagues working together with me in a humanitarian team that were not able to feed themselves,” he said. 

MedGlobal was among the 109 aid organisations which issued the joint statement. Belliveau said the nonprofit had about 300 staff in Gaza. 

‘Widespread starvation’

MedGlobal runs two of Gaza’s four stabilisation centres for severely acute malnourished children. 

Belliveau told Daily Maverick the organisation had seen “an alarming uptick in the number and the severity of malnourished children” in its stabilisation centres in recent weeks. 

Read more: New Gaza aid plans would increase children’s suffering, Unicef says

He explained that the uptick in the number and severity of malnourished children at MedGlobal’s stabilisation facilities “represents something much more widespread” because those are only the children who reach the centres. 

“You’re just seeing the very tip of the iceberg; the ones who can get to you and bring their children to you in that condition. 

“I believe that we’ve hit a tipping point in Gaza right now, where we’ve gone from a situation of food insecurity and shortages, and isolated cases of malnutrition, to a situation of widespread starvation. And this is partly evidenced by the fact that we’ve seen the number of severely malnourished children in our facilities triple within the last three weeks,” said Belliveau. 

In a statement published on Tuesday, 23 July, MedGlobal said that five acutely malnourished children at their facilities had died within the past three days because they were “so severely malnourished and medical supplies so lacking that our teams could not save them”. 

“I’ve been doing humanitarian work for 25 years and I’ve never seen a situation where malnourished children are reaching the facilities, but then we’re not able to revive them… and that’s partly due to the condition they’re arriving in, but partly because we just don’t have the medical materials,” said Belliveau.

At least 111 Palestinians have died of starvation in Gaza, including 80 children, according to a report from Al Jazeera. Since Hamas’s 7 October assault on Israel in which at least 1,200 people were killed and more than 200 hostages taken, Israel has killed more than 58,000 people, according to Palestinian health authorities.

On Wednesday, the Israeli government said it was not responsible for “famine” in Gaza, according to a report from The Guardian. DM