Israel's Starvation Blockade On Gaza Has Reached The Level Of Famine.

Some New Horrific Details On The Genocide In Gaza.

Recently, the IPC, the top global watchdog for food insecurity, put out a report which found that, “Famine is currently occurring in Gaza Governorate and projected to expand to Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis governorates by the end of September”.

The report noted, “Increasing reports of malnutrition-related deaths suggest that the most vulnerable in society are beginning to succumb. This trend is expected to increase amongst vulnerable groups such as children, the elderly, and people with chronic diseases, before spreading to the wider population”.

It also noted that this was a “man-made” famine caused by Israel, writing, “As this Famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed. The time for debate and hesitation has passed; starvation is present and is rapidly spreading. There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that an immediate, at-scale response is needed. Any further delay—even by days—will result in a totally unacceptable escalation of Famine-related mortality.”

It went on to state, “If an immediate and sustained ceasefire is not implemented to allow humanitarian aid to reach everyone in the Gaza Strip, and if essential food supplies, and basic health, nutrition, and WASH services are not restored immediately, avoidable deaths will increase exponentially”.

The report found that 32 percent of Gaza’s population has reached the famine phase, defined as “Households have an extreme lack of food and/or are unable to meet other basic needs even after full employment of coping strategies. Starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident,” and 58 percent have reached the Emergency phase, defined as “Households either: have large food consumption gaps that are reflected in very high acute malnutrition and excess mortality; or are able to mitigate large food consumption gaps but only by employing emergency livelihood strategies and asset liquidation”.

Horrific testimony of Israel’s man-made famine in Gaza has recently been collected by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and the human rights organization Amnesty International.

Israel's Starving Babies

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has recently put out an extensive report on Israel’s man-made famine in Gaza, titled “Starvation Is Everywhere': Virtual Tours of Gaza Clinics Expose the Scale of the Horror”

The article wrote, “For this article, we conducted four such tours, in different places, and conducted separate conversations with another 12 doctors, 10 of them volunteers from the United States and Britain, who are currently in the Gaza Strip or were there recently. What we saw there left no room for doubt about the scale of the horror.”

The article noted that after viewing a video tour of the Nasser Hospital in Gaza, “We saw children whose bodies were blighted by hunger, with bones jutting out. Their hair had turned yellow or fallen out, their faces were wrinkled, and their abdomens bloated. Their bodies were limp; many had marks on their skin. Some looked totally apathetic”.

Out of 27 starving children, the outlet confirmed that “seventeen youngsters had deteriorated into a state of severe malnutrition without preexisting health conditions” while, “10 suffered from previous illnesses”, which “were a result of the catastrophic living conditions in the Strip during the last 22 months or they had become aggravated acutely because of hunger”.

The article stated that, “Anyone who claims that the images of starvation in the Gaza Strip are a result of acute genetic or other diseases, and not due to a grave shortage of food, are lying”.

Dr. Travis Melin, an anesthesiologist from the United States who is currently working as a volunteer in Nasser Hospital, said to the paper, “The starvation is everywhere – it's everyone. When I put someone to sleep for surgery, this is very apparent as they are naked and asleep. It is easy to count ribs from across the room; you can see a clear pelvic bone, peripheral blood vessels are very visible, as is the small amount of muscle left, as there is no longer fat obscuring these structures. I was in Gaza also a year ago, and all the people I met now were dramatically thinner, almost unrecognizable. We are now very late in this process”.

The article documents three cases of children’s mothers showing their children (named Bayan, Asil and Sadin) starving from the blockade, looking healthy in pictures before the genocide began, writing “Bayan looks like a healthy child, wearing a shirt bearing the image of a flying unicorn; Asil, with abundant hair, is seen sleeping; and Sadin is a pretty, healthy girl who's holding a wreath of red flowers.”

Dr. Waqas Ali, an American doctor from Texas currently working in Gaza, told the paper, “It's very evident when you look at them, they look emaciated and you could see pretty much their joints being the thickest part of their legs. Very thin. There's just skin, there's no fat. Patients, when you're talking to them, they start asking for food. There needs to be an influx of food to catch up [with] the shortage.”

Another American doctor from Texas, Dr. Nour Sharaf, currently working in Gaza, told the paper, “A lot of the people that I treated were very malnourished, I didn't need the labs to prove it to me, I could sense it just by touching the patients. A lot of the children that I was treating, they looked so malnourished that they looked many years younger than they actually are. So a 15-year-old child to me would look like they were like 10 or 11. That's not normal.”

A third American doctor working in Gaza, Dr. Irfan Ali, told the paper, “We did surgery on a baby yesterday, only 15 or 16 months old. It was an injury from shrapnel. He did not lose much blood from the injury. The surprising thing is that that kid, who's supposedly a healthy kid – his hemoglobin was only 6.1, and the normal hemoglobin at least is around 12. And there's only one reason for that kid to have a hemoglobin of 6. It's due to extreme malnutrition.”

He went on to say, “What I have seen in the operating room is that these starving kids have no reserves at all. These guys decompensate so quickly that you can't even imagine. You bring someone into the operating room, and otherwise they look okay. And then as soon as you start, they either lose their oxygen numbers to a very low [level] or their blood pressure drops down very low. And I think the reason is severe acute malnutrition.”.

A representative of an international health centre told the paper, “I arrived a little more than a month ago, I was surprised because of the amount of malnutrition. People were super skinny. Everyone you see was very very skinny. The scarcity of food was affecting everyone.”

Dr. Victoria Rose, a plastic surgeon from Britain who volunteered in Gaza last May, told the paper, “In May, the famine had a huge effect on wound healing. We saw a huge number of simple wound infections just exacerbating at rates that we couldn't control. Children were unable to heal because they're not getting the essential nutrients and vitamins they need. All our colleagues lost about 5 to 10 kilos. I didn't meet anyone that hadn't lost a significant amount of weight since the last time I saw them. The children themselves look a lot younger than their Western counterparts. A child that you would think was 5 or 6 – you'd find out that they were 8 or 9”.

Another British doctor, Dr. Tomo Potokar, who worked in Gaza until June of this year, said, “You see it on every level. You see it physically, you see it psychologically. You see it in the wounds that fail to heal. You see it in people's tiredness. They're giving up because they're just so worn out”.

Horrific Testimony From The Famine.

The human rights organization Amnesty International has also recently published harrowing testimony from Gaza, which it notes shows that “Israel is carrying out a deliberate campaign of starvation in the occupied Gaza Strip, systematically destroying the health, well-being and social fabric of Palestinian life”.

One Palestinian nurse displaced from Jabalia told the organization that, “hunger became palpable by late April, compelling her to save the meagre food portions for her children while she remained hungry. Her supply of breastmilk began to be severely reduced at the end of April, and with no access to breast pumps and extremely limited access to maternal supplements, she stressed the physical and emotional pain of trying for hours to breastfeed her infant but ‘milk would just not come out.’ The family’s daily meal, when available, consists of one shared plate of lentils or eggplants with water, with her prioritizing her toddler. Her children fall asleep ‘weeping out of sheer hunger.’ Infant formula, scarce across Gaza, costing around 270 shekels ($79) for a three-day supply, is unaffordable. Her seven-month-old daughter is the weight of a four-month-old. Even at this exorbitant price, families described shortages of infant formula at the market.”

The report noted that, “When the community kitchen in the camp, their sole source of food, stopped providing food for three straight days, she could only give her children water. Her husband was injured while seeking aid near the Zikim crossing, leading her to beg him not to go again. Her son, weakened by hunger, would ‘walk and fall.’”

She was quoted in the report saying, “I feel like I failed as a mother; your children’s hunger makes you feel like you are a bad mother.”

The report went on to write, “Hadeel, 28, a four-months pregnant mother of two, described her fear for her fetus as she barely feels its movement or heartbeat inside her. She feels guilt for her pregnancy, knowing that she cannot feed herself: ‘I fear miscarriage, but I also think about my baby: I panic just thinking about the potential impact of my own hunger on the baby’s health, its weight, whether it will have [birth defects], and even if the baby is born healthy, what life awaits it, amidst displacement, bombs, tents’”.

It noted, “She dreads giving birth under these conditions, recalling the comprehensive prenatal care, vitamins, and medical tests that United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) provided during her previous pregnancies, which are now completely absent. Hadeel’s children constantly ask for food, a place to play, and school. Several other women interviewed by Amnesty International for this and previous investigations explained that they took the decision not to conceive, even though they had desperately wanted a child, as a result of the conditions of life and the bombardments in Gaza.”

Speaking to displaced Palestinians in refugee concentration camps in Gaza city, the report noted that, “None of them had consumed any eggs, fish, meat, tomatoes, or cucumbers for at least a month; most had not had any such food for several months. This widespread scarcity of fresh and nutritious food is a result of both Israel’s suffocating blockade and its systematic destruction of food production sources, including large swathes of agricultural land, poultry and other livestock farms, during military operations, through shelling, bombardment or destruction by manually laid explosive.”

The report then wrote, “Abu Alaa, a 62-year-old displaced man from Jabalia refugee camp, shared his experience of receiving lentil soup from the community kitchen as his only meal for a whole day. He said that bread is distributed only one day a week, forcing the family to ration it and that he has not tasted anything sweet, even fruit, in months. ‘I can tolerate the hunger, but children cannot,’ he said. Abu Alaa longs for UNRWA to resume aid distribution, which he trusts for its equitable and fair system based on family size. He described the dangers of the current scramble for aid: ‘In the past we used to support each other, especially those in need. Even during the beginning of this war, now people are just led by the individual instinct to survive’”.

An emergency doctor at Al Shifa hospital interviewed in the report, “highlighted how people at greater risk– infants, children with pre-existing conditions, older persons, and those living with disabilities – are disproportionately affected by the combined effects of lack of food, medication, clean water, and hygiene. These shortages are compounded by the constant state of fear and distress”.

The report noted that, “The doctor stressed that many patients would be leading ‘reasonable lives’ were it not for the ‘combination of starvation, destruction and depletion of the healthcare system, unsanitary conditions, and multiple displacements under inhumane conditions.’”

For example, the doctor noted that, “The lack of specific nutritious foods is causing easily preventable health complications. A teenage kidney transplant patient, for instance, suffered a relapse due to polluted water and inadequate food. Diabetics, who could manage their condition with strict diets, now face severe challenges due to unavailable nutrient-rich foods, including vegetables, fish, chicken and beans, and medical supply shortages”.

Furthermore, the doctor noted that the blockade is also preventing life-saving medicine from entering Gaza, with Amnesty International writing, “The doctor said that extreme mass starvation has overshadowed other health emergencies, particularly the alarming rise in infectious and waterborne diseases, meningitis, and Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS). He added that a severe shortage of antibiotics and the extreme load on his hospital, which is only partially functioning, have compounded what he described as an ‘invisible catastrophe,’ explaining that the spread of disease, or people struggling with chronic conditions that they use to treat before, often go unseen because there is this ‘preoccupation with only the amount of food that enters, without looking at the full picture.’”

Israel’s man-made famine in Gaza is just another horrific aspect of its mass Holocaust in Gaza.

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