Israel must give UN full access to Gaza to halt starvation, allies say

Israel must facilitate immediate and permanent access for the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations to bring “a flood of aid into Gaza,” the foreign ministers of 27 nations said in a joint statement Tuesday, warning that urgent action was needed to halt and reverse a “famine … unfolding before our eyes.”

The statement — from more than 20 European nations, as well as Australia, Canada and Japan — said Israel’s restrictive registration requirements for international aid organizations were blocking some relief agencies from operating and could soon force more of them to leave. It also urged an end to the use of lethal force at aid distribution sites. “Civilians, humanitarians and medical workers must be protected,” the statement said.

The pressure from some of Israel’s key allies came roughly two weeks after the government said it would allow more food trucks into Gaza, amid a sharp rise in malnutrition and starvation deaths across the enclave in July. Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have denied that there is starvation in Gaza and described images of malnourished children as “fake.”

At least 227 people, including 103 children, have died of starvation and malnutrition since the war began, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. But it wasn’t until last month that the effects of Israel’s near-total blockade and the dire sanitary conditions in Gaza began to take lives on a daily basis: 166 of those deaths occurred in the past six weeks, and the trend is continuing to rise. In the 17 days since Israel said it would increase aid flow, on average, at least one more person has died directly from starvation or malnutrition each day than in the 17 days preceding the announcement, according to a review of daily death data supplied by the Gaza Health Ministry.

Israel is permitting more food to enter Gaza, including coordinating airdrops by European and regional countries, and authorizing a controlled supply of private sector goods that has lowered slightly the high cost of some items in the market. But the amount of aid is still too little — and much too late — to immediately turn the tide against widespread hunger among the population, medics and U.N. officials say. That’s in part because of the scale of need in Gaza, but also because Israeli promises to open more routes for their convoys, which would allow safer aid distribution, have so far gone unmet, the World Food Program said.

“A child doesn’t go from healthy to starving in a short amount of time,” said Rosalia Bollen, a spokeswoman for UNICEF. “And in the same way that it takes time to develop, it takes time to undo it,” she said, adding that the aid entering now remains “woefully inadequate to address people’s even most basic needs.”

Israeli authorities have approved the entry of more than 12,500 metric tons of food aid to be distributed inside Gaza through the U.N. system, according to a U.N. database that tracks and monitors aid shipments. But that same data shows that more than 95% of the aid has been intercepted either by hungry civilians or looted by armed gangs before reaching U.N. and other warehouses for distribution. Israel allows the U.N. to use just two crossings to bring aid to Gaza — Kerem Shalom in the south and Zikim in the north.

As a result, the majority of the food being allowed in — which is still less than half what WFP is requesting — is only making it to people who are strong enough to fight for it as convoys, often held up near checkpoints, are swarmed and then stripped. Israeli forces also regularly open fire on crowds of aid seekers, making the effort to access food too dangerous for many, according to medics, and U.N. and aid officials, as well as interviews with more than a dozen Palestinian civilians in search of food.

More than 700 Palestinians have been killed and another 5,888 injured in search of aid since more trucks began to enter July 27, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. They’ve been crushed to death by the airdrops, come under fire from Israeli forces near aid stations and convoys, and, in one instance, were mowed down when a truck carrying food overturned after the driver was shot in the mayhem.

Oday al-Quraan, a volunteer nurse at al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza, was killed Aug. 4 when an aid pallet dropped from a plane landed on his chest in the Zuwayda area, according to his brother Haytham. “One pallet fell and hit Oday, and then too many people rushed over him trying to get the aid,” Haytham said, adding that Oday was the father of two young children. “No one cared that there was a person trapped under the pallet, all they cared about was getting food. People are hungry.”

In Gaza City, 62-year-old Wafaa Hijazi said neither she nor her neighbors had managed to get any aid since it increased at the end of July. “I’m an old woman. I can’t go there, and I won’t risk the lives of my sons or grandchildren,” she said in a phone interview. “People who go to the aid distribution points come back in plastic bags.”

The shooting deaths near aid sites began in May, when the U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) began distributing food packages at a small number of sites in southern and then central Gaza. The routes to the sites, which are guarded by U.S. security contractors, funneled Palestinians through closed military zones in proximity to Israeli troops, who have fired on crowds on a near-daily basis as they gather to wait for the aid.

The Israel Defense Forces has said that it fires warning shots toward crowds surging toward the sites in the hours they are closed, while the GHF has denied that any violence has taken place inside the locations where it distributes aid.

U.S. and Israeli officials had hoped the GHF would supplant the U.N. system, which Israel claims, without evidence, is compromised by Hamas. But the Famine Review Committee, an independent panel of food security experts, said last month that its analysis of the food packages supplied by the GHF “shows that their distribution plan would lead to mass starvation, even if it was able to function without the appalling levels of violence that have been reported.”

“The fact that people continue to risk being shot or caught in stampedes at distribution sites indicates the extremely desperate level of hunger that the population is experiencing,” the committee said.

Hani Yousef Abu Owda, 41, said he was lucky after an Israeli bullet grazed him, injuring his right hand, as he tried to get aid from a GHF site in central Gaza’s Netzarim corridor last week. He said Israeli troops opened fire as a large number of people gathered around 100 yards from the site as they waited for it to open. The man standing next to him was killed instantly when a bullet went straight through his chest.

“I will never go there again,” Abu Owda said. “I swear to God that was the first and last time.”

But as they struggled to find food, Abu Owda’s daughter, Mariana, went to the Zikim crossing in the north, where some of the U.N. convoys enter Gaza. She managed to obtain a bag of flour for the family, he said, but also witnessed the death of a man who was shot in the head while he tried to get his own.

At Gaza’s clinics and hospitals, beds reserved for treating acute malnutrition “are currently fully occupied,” the World Health Organization said. From Jan. 1 to July 31, close to 33,000 children aged 6 months to 2.5 years were admitted for acute malnutrition, averaging more than 150 new cases per day, according to the WHO.

Doctors said they have received some shipments of nutritional supplements needed to treat their patients, but more will be admitted if food isn’t getting to the wider population. Ahmed al-Farra, a pediatrician at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, says that right now, his malnutrition cases are split between otherwise healthy children who are wasting because of a lack of food and those whose starvation is exacerbated by existing health conditions.

“Inside the hospital isn’t the problem, it’s outside,” said Farra, who is running a malnutrition clinic.

“We can treat the children who are here, but outside they have no support, no food, and they deteriorate rapidly,” he said. “Sometimes they show up already dead.”