After four months of a near-total Israeli siege, Gaza’s few remaining hospitals now have wards for the growing number of malnourished children whose tiny bodies are just the width of their bones.
Doctors are famished to the point that they have dizzy spells as they make their rounds, medics say, and the journalists documenting their caseloads are often too weak to even walk to the clinics.
Nearly 1 in 3 people are going multiple days without eating, according to the United Nations, and hospitals are reporting rising deaths from malnutrition and starvation.
Israel has imposed severe restrictions on the amount of food and other aid entering the enclave. At times, it allowed more trucks to enter, including during a six-week ceasefire earlier this year.
But on March 2, Israel reimposed its blockade, lifting it only partially in May after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “pictures of mass starvation” could cost his country the support of the United States and other allies.
In a briefing with reporters on Wednesday, an Israeli military official said there was a “lack of food security inside Gaza,” but blamed a failure to distribute aid on the U.N.
The U.N. says Israeli authorities are the “sole decision-makers” on who, and how much, aid enters Gaza, as well as the type of supplies that are allowed in.
Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, said that colleagues had begun receiving “SOS messages from staff who are hungry themselves, who are exhausted themselves.”
Gaza’s ability to make its own food has been almost entirely destroyed as Israeli military operations have wiped out farmlands and factories.
In a statement this week, a group of journalists from the Agence France-Presse news agency warned that the Israeli blockade and subsequent hunger crisis had made conditions for their Palestinian colleagues in Gaza “untenable.”
“Since AFP was founded in August 1944, some of our journalists were killed in conflict, others were wounded or made prisoner, but there is no record of us ever having had to watch our colleagues starving to death.”
