Is there famine in Gaza? Let’s not wait to find out

By Marc Champion

Is there famine in Gaza? The Israeli authority for the strip says no; the Hamas-run health ministry says about 10 people are dying of malnutrition every 24 hours. Warring parties can rarely be taken at their word, and without access for independent journalists, little can be confirmed first hand. Even so, we know more than enough to act.

On Tuesday, 111 signatories from international aid organizations issued a statement warning that “mass starvation” was now spreading in Gaza. The previous day, 29 countries, including France and the UK, jointly condemned Israel’s “drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians.”

We know that the number of aid distribution points in Gaza has reduced to four — three in the south and one in the north — from about 400, as Israel seeks to control the flow. Israel also acknowledges that aid deliveries have plummeted since its new system took effect, with only the question of who to blame in dispute. But the “who” and the “why” don’t matter when it comes to the “what,” which is the impact this man-made hell is having.

It is self-evident that having so few aid points for 2 million people means that large numbers of civilians are forced to travel long distances in a war zone. They are being targeted en route. Israel says Hamas is responsible, hoping to collapse a system that was created to prevent the group from seizing and selling aid to finance their war effort. Palestinians say Israel Defense Force snipers are doing the shooting as part of a larger plan to make Gaza uninhabitable and force them out. The IDF acknowledges it has fired warning shots at crowds, but it’s near impossible to prove what happened because even victims may not see the sniper who shot them.

Again, who commits such monstrous acts is largely irrelevant to their impact on aid distribution and hunger. Clearly, Gaza’s civilian population is desperate enough to keep trying, despite the dangers involved.

Mandy Blackman, a nurse from the British frontline charity UK-Med told the BBC that one of the 30 patients who passed through her field hospital after such an incident was a five-months-pregnant woman, shot in the abdomen while trying to get food. A male patient was beaten with bricks to rob him of the package he’d just managed to collect.

UN officials say more than 1,000 people have now been killed trying to reach the distribution points run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is backed by the US and Israel. These numbers also are hard to prove without independent media present, and now even the flow of information from local sources may be drying up. This week, the French news agency AFP issued a press release to say their Gaza freelancers could no longer continue reporting news, because they were too weak for lack of food and water.

Meanwhile, Rieke Hayes, an Irish physiotherapist working with the International Red Cross in Gaza, posted a blog on the ICRC website describing the change in her work since she arrived in March. Back then, she’d get roped in to treat mainly shrapnel wounds. Now she says it’s bullets, and the day-to-day numbers she cites are shocking. “One morning, we had 179 dead and wounded brought to the field hospital. Another day, we had 50. Another day after that, 184 — 99% of whom had gunshot wounds. A few days later, we received over 240 patients within a few hours,” she wrote.

There are, of course, many other accounts, but these two struck me. The AFP notice because this is an organization with a reputation for covering wars even when others don’t. The agency has lost journalists to conflict, but it never before had to worry about losing one to starvation. And Hayes’s blog was striking because it was so matter of fact. At no point does she claim to know who is doing the shooting or accuse anyone of anything. She just tells what she saw.

Read down the social media comment sections on such accounts, and you quickly find several ideas in common. For pro-Palestinians, there is a disgust that anyone is debating anything, because a genocide is underway. Pro-Israel accounts ask: What about the hostages? Why not call on Hamas to release them and lay down their arms, instead of complaining about the IDF? Or, how can you cite Palestinians and international aid workers as evidence of anything? They’re either Hamas terrorists themselves or Hamas sympathizers, they write.

People do, of course, lie, especially in times of war and even to themselves. Polls show that as many as 90% of Palestinians don’t believe Hamas fighters were responsible for the atrocities committed on Oct. 7, 2023. Those denying hunger in Gaza or calling Israel’s current escalation of the war justifiable self-defense are lying to themselves, too.

Hamas is a terrorist organization that has been using Palestinian civilians as pawns in a deadly game since day one. Israeli cabinet ministers are increasingly open about how they see Gaza’s future — annexed, run by Israeli security forces, and resettled by Jewish Israelis. Palestinians, they say, should “voluntarily” leave what the IDF is turning into a foodless, waterless wasteland so that settlers can build Donald Trump’s beachfront paradise in peace.

This, if allowed to succeed, must be called by its name, which is ethnic cleansing. Right now, though, the only priorities for US and Arab mediators should be to silence the guns in Gaza, get food and medical aid in, and bring the hostages out. Nothing else should be allowed to stand in the way.