Famine is becoming an increasingly tangible reality for a Palestinian population exhausted by five months of war.
At least 20 people died of malnutrition and dehydration, the health ministry of the Gaza Strip, controlled by Hamas, said on Wednesday March 6.
Employees of the World Health Organization (WHO) have visited hospitals in the north of the besieged enclave in recent days, a first since October.
They observed "severe levels of malnutrition, children dying of hunger, significant shortages of fuel, food and medical equipment, hospital buildings destroyed", according to WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
According to the UN, famine, which corresponds to a state of extreme food deprivation, characterized by levels of starvation, death and acute malnutrition, is "almost inevitable" for Gaza's 2.2 million inhabitants.
In the enclave, 90% of children aged 6 to 23 months, as well as pregnant and breastfeeding women, face serious food shortages, says an alliance of NGOs led by Unicef and the Global Nutrition Cluster.
These organizations blame a blocking of the entry of humanitarian aid by Israel, which is fighting Hamas in the Gaza Strip, after the deadly attack of October 7 which marked the outbreak of the war.
According to Jean-Raphaël Poitou, Middle East manager of the NGO Action Against Hunger, the Palestinians simply have "nothing left to eat" in the north of Gaza and if the volume of humanitarian aid continues to be as low, the number of deaths could “increase much more significantly” in the coming weeks.
France 24: Should we be talking about an ongoing famine in Gaza or a risk of famine
?
Jean-Raphaël Poitou:
We are in a situation where we are starting to see people, especially children, dying of malnutrition.
So we can actually talk about famine or at least an extremely advanced risk of famine.
To determine whether a famine is occurring, the UN relies on the Integrated Food Security Classification Framework (IPC).
It is a report written by the World Food Program (WFP) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) with the support of all actors working on food security.
In December, these organizations had already warned of extremely advanced risks in several areas of Gaza.
On a scale which has five levels, we were then at level three [crisis level].
Since humanitarian aid is still insufficient, it is clear that three months later all these people have moved to levels four or five [disaster and famine], representing the maximum alert threshold.
The situation is particularly dramatic for children because they have an immune system that is not yet well developed.
Their body cannot therefore fight as that of an adult would in the event of deficiencies.
Furthermore, we must take into account all the phenomena which accelerate this process of severe malnutrition: the absence of drinking water, degraded sanitary conditions, respiratory problems which represent around 300,000 cases, and completely destroyed access to care.
For children, malnutrition has long-term consequences, particularly on the brain.
This is why we prioritize those who are under five years old because their brain is not yet well developed.
Northern Gaza is one of the areas most affected by malnutrition problems. What do the Gazouis still find to eat
?
They have nothing left to eat.
When we talk to our employees on site, they explain to us that Gazans will eat anything like grass or leaves.
Dozens of UN missions have tried to enter the North, but according to the latest figures I have, out of 77 requests, only 20% were accepted by the Israeli army.
In Rafah [in the south of the Gaza Strip] food is overpriced.
Humanitarian aid trucks are also not coming in significantly.
There has been no improvement at this level.
The attacks on aid trucks show that people are in complete desperation to find food to survive.
Also read: What we know about Israeli shooting on an aid convoy in Gaza and the deadly stampede
This is what makes our work extremely complicated on the ground.
We cannot put our teams in danger and therefore we must work on much smaller scales with communities that we know well.
Our distributions generally include chickpeas, oil or even flour because bread is a staple food.
We also distributed vegetables when there were still crops available in the fields.
When we talk about famine, the collective imagination often retains the terrible images of these emaciated children in Somalia in the early 1990s. Is this something that we could see in Gaza?
These are indeed images that we are not used to seeing in a context like the Middle East, but this is already what is happening at the moment in Gaza and which we risk seeing more and more.
Without a ceasefire, we cannot deliver significant aid and we cannot organize distributions.
However, we have solutions and protocols to treat extreme cases of malnutrition, particularly foods based on peanuts, which are very rich in calories.
This allows children to replenish themselves and stop the process of malnutrition.
We still need to be able to access these populations.
In the meantime, if we do nothing, people will starve and the number of victims will start to increase much more significantly.
Also read “They lack everything”: returning from Gaza, doctors deplore a “desperate situation”
Last weekend, the Americans airdropped food rations. Could this be a solution to compensate for the few trucks entering the enclave
?
For our part, we consider that this is not the method that should be used.
From experience, we know that airdrops can then be monopolized by small groups and that this encourages crime.
Furthermore, there is a second problem: the weakest people will not have access to this aid because it will be the strongest who will be able to recover it.
This is why we do not encourage this type of practice at all.
We really need to work at the diplomatic level to open other access for humanitarian aid and ensure its proper distribution.
The UN criteria for defining a famine
- at least 20% of households face food shortages.
- at least 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition.
- at least two people in 10,000 die of hunger every day or at least four children under five in 10,000 die daily from starvation or a related disease.
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