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“Until safe conditions are available,” with these words, the World Food Program announced, in a tweet on its official account on the “X” platform on Tuesday, February 20, 2024, the suspension of the entry of humanitarian aid into the besieged northern Gaza Strip, only 3 days after the resumption of humanitarian aid. Attempts to enter it.
This was preceded by a complete cessation of all types of aid for a period of 3 weeks after the Israeli occupation army bombed an aid truck on the coastal road southwest of Gaza City, before it entered the besieged area.
The World Food Program's statement intersects with statements on the same day by UNICEF, in which it said that death threatens 600,000 children in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, who live without food or medicine and in extremely dangerous conditions in the city's camps.
Between the north and the south, dark features are being drawn for the fate of hundreds of thousands who are threatened by the threat of famine, and are suffering from hunger and a lack of food supplies in the Gaza Strip, which has been subjected to Israeli aggression since last October 7.
How did the famine start?
48 hours after the start of the Israeli aggression on Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant announced his decision to prevent the entry of “food, water and fuel into the Gaza Strip.” This decision constituted the actual moment in which the occupation began imposing its starvation siege on the Gaza Strip.
Israel closed all crossings with the Gaza Strip, which 600 trucks entered daily through the Kerem Shalom crossing, and the humanitarian aid that flowed to the Egyptian Arish airport remained withheld for a full 15 days, before a US-Egyptian-Israeli agreement was reached to enter it in quantities that did not meet 1% of the Strip’s needs. In normal situation.
The Israeli army began its ground invasion into the northern Gaza Strip on October 31, 2023, days after allowing the regulated entry of aid, restricting it to Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip.
The occupation began by separating the governorates of Gaza and North Gaza from the Central Governorate by cutting off Salah al-Din Street, and advancing towards the coastal Rashid Street to the west to impose the siege on Gaza City and the cities of the northern Gaza Strip, which faced a similar ground advance.
International organizations hastened to withdraw from the northern Gaza Strip, leaving more than a million citizens under the control of the Israeli war machine.
Food supplies began to gradually run out as the north was besieged from its four corners, the entry of any kind of aid continued to be prevented, and residential neighborhoods, markets, stores, and bakeries were systematically destroyed. Citizens faced great difficulties in replacing the missing supplies.
In the first weeks, the northern Gaza Strip exhausted the food supplies of its homes and shops, and citizens resorted to searching in destroyed or empty houses for canned food or frozen goods. Some residents tell of how they were forced to open the doors of shops that had been abandoned by their owners in search of what would satisfy their hunger. Their families, after their food supplies ran out.
Signs of famine began to appear on the remaining residents of the northern Gaza Strip with the Israeli insistence on preventing the entry of any food aid, in light of waves of violent aerial bombardment, and fierce ground confrontations with the resistance.
In the south of the Gaza Strip and the central region, living conditions remained relatively better than in the north, with limited numbers of aid trucks entering, but the influx of hundreds of thousands of displaced people from the north of the Strip put pressure on these areas’ stocks of food supplies, and raised the need for larger quantities of aid. Humanity that remained intact.
The sector has become two sectors
Early last December, the occupation launched its ground operation to invade the city of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, causing the displacement of hundreds of thousands of its residents, primarily towards the city of Rafah, and the central camp areas in smaller numbers, and the Gaza Strip turned into 3 population blocs; They are: Rafah, the Central District, and the North.
Three full months after the aggression, the north of the Gaza Strip continued to be separated from its center and south, and with the battles reaching the heart of the city of Khan Yunis, Rafah continued to be connected to the central region via the coastal road, which was subject to raids and bombing by land, sea and air.
The northern Gaza Strip is still under an applied siege, inhabited, according to varying estimates, by approximately 700,000 citizens, who have been completely deprived of any food support or access to humanitarian aid, which has been completely cut off according to the World Food Program statement, as mentioned above.
As for the southern Gaza Strip, humanitarian aid trucks continue to enter intermittently, which contributes to providing canned goods and flour in quantities that do not meet the needs of more than a million citizens living in Rafah and the Central Governorate.
Sniper traps in the north
The statements of the UN rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, who accused Israel of “using hunger as a weapon to harm and kill civilians in Gaza,” confirm what was stated in a report by Human Rights Watch last December in which it said that the Israeli government “is using... Starving civilians is a method of warfare in the Gaza Strip, which constitutes a war crime.”
The report came at the time to constitute human rights proof of the new type of siege that Israel began to impose on the Gaza Strip. The observer notes the continuation and worsening of famine in the north, where the occupation is adopting new measures, including:
Closing the paths leading to the south of the Gaza Strip, imposing a strict siege on the residents of the north, and preventing them from moving south.
The occupation army is no longer concerned with displacing the population of the North to the South, as much as it has begun to impose silent extermination through starvation, and bringing those remaining in the North to the stage of death from starvation, as a clear method of revenge.
The siege on the northern Gaza Strip took a new pattern, not only preventing the entry of humanitarian aid, but also turning the small number of trucks allowed to arrive into sniping traps and assassinating citizens, who were gathering waiting for the trucks to arrive and receive aid.
The occupation resorted to targeting and bombing the same aid trucks on their way to the besieged north, which resulted in decisions to stop sending aid to the north, as announced by the World Food Programme.
Journalists in Gaza City documented dozens of video clips showing citizens being targeted by gunfire from tanks, Quadcopter drones, and even naval boats, resulting in martyrs and wounded in order to obtain a bag of flour or a box of canned food.
Starvation tactics in the south
In the center and south of the Gaza Strip, Israeli siege tactics took new patterns. Of which:
The first agreement to enter aid through the Rafah crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, after it was inspected at the Al-Auja “Nitsana” border crossing between Egypt and Israel, which resulted in the entry of limited quantities of aid that constituted a small percentage of the Strip’s needs.
A new agreement was made last December to bring aid into the Gaza Strip through Kerem Shalom, after it entered from Egypt into Israel through the Al-Auja crossing, a step that the United Nations said aims to accelerate the pace of aid entering the Gaza Strip, and increase its quantities by including incoming aid. From Jordan to the agreement, but it did not make any significant difference. Rather, it gave the occupation absolute control over the entry of aid into the southern Gaza Strip.
The Israeli authorities are fully complicit in preventing aid from ever entering the Gaza Strip, by allowing settlers this February to demonstrate in front of the roads leading to the Kerem Shalom and Al-Auja “Nitsana” crossings, preventing the passage of trucks and blocking their way.
Residents of the northern Gaza Strip resorted to a painstaking search for any food that could be eaten, and they reached the point of grinding livestock and poultry feed to eat it, and searching in agricultural lands for the leaves that the land grew.
In the south and center of the Gaza Strip, residents face extreme difficulty in providing food, as a result of the scarcity of food and the high prices of what is available, in light of extremely poor living and economic conditions.
While Israel continues to use hunger as a weapon of war against the people of Gaza, the number of deaths has begun to rise as a result of drought or malnutrition, and the widespread spread of intestinal diseases. As a result of drinking contaminated water, etc.
Source: Al Jazeera