Hundreds of thousands of people’s lives are at risk in north and central Gaza because of a lack of food, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees warned on Thursday.
UNRWA commissioner-general Philippe Lazzarini said the last time the agency was allowed to deliver supplies to the area was more than two weeks ago on January 23.
Other agencies providing humanitarian aid also reported blocks on getting relief into the Palestinian territory, which has been bombarded by Israel since Hamas’s deadly attack on October 7.
“Since the beginning of the year, half of our aid missions requests to the north were denied,” Lazzarini wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
“The @UN has identified deep pockets of starvation and hunger in northern #Gaza where people are believed to be on the verge of famine.
“At least 300,000 people living in the area depend on our assistance for their survival.”
Israel, which has blockaded the coastal territory, ordered people living in north and central Gaza to move south as it goes after those responsible for the October 7 attack.
More than half of Gaza’s estimated 2.4 million population is now crowded in the city of Rafah in the south.
But many remain in Wadi Gaza, in the center, and the north.
Georgios Petropoulos, head of the UN humanitarian agency OCHA in Gaza, said the territory was being turned “into a wasteland of hunger and despair.”
Aid agencies were being blocked, while the few trucks that make it through are mobbed by locals, who in north Gaza were “on the edge of starvation”, he told AFP on Wednesday.
“They congregate by trucks and other vehicles carrying goods sometimes in their thousands, and unload them in minutes,” he added.
World Central Kitchen, a non-profit organization providing food aid, also reported only being able to get to north Gaza “a limited number of times each week.”
They now take two trucks — one transporting meals for hospitals, and the other to deliver food to crowds on the route, it said in a statement.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, on a visit to the region this week, made a new plea for more aid into Gaza.
“Preventing access prevents lifesaving humanitarian aid,” wrote Lazzarini. “With the necessary political will, this can be easily reversed.”
But Israel maintains that Hamas, which runs Gaza, of diverting aid for its own ends to prolong the five-month conflict.
Almost one in 10 of Gazan children under five are now acutely malnourished, overwhelmingly as a result of Israel’s war on the territory’s Hamas rulers, according to initial UN data from arm measurements that show physical wasting.
The food supplies that Gaza depends on have shriveled from their pre-war level, and aid workers have reported visible signs of starvation, especially in areas of northern and central Gaza worst hit by Israel’s war on Hamas since October 7.
Measurements of thousands of young children’s and infants’ arm circumferences showed that 9.6 percent were acutely malnourished, up about 12 times from pre-war levels, according to a note from the UN humanitarian office, OCHA.
In northern Gaza, the rate was 16.2 percent, or one in six.
Food trucks have in recent weeks regularly been mobbed by hungry crowds before they could reach the hospitals they were heading for, according to aid workers.
The charity ActionAid said some Gazans were eating grass.
“Every single person in Gaza is now hungry, and people have just 1.5 to 2 liters of unsafe water per day to meet all their needs,” it said.
The Islamic Relief charity quoted a member of its staff in Gaza as saying: “My children and I haven’t eaten fruit or vegetables for months, and people get killed when they try to meet aid trucks arriving from the UN.”
“We are trying to make bread with dried corn that we previously used as animal feed, as flour is extremely scarce… And we are relatively lucky compared to most people, who don’t have anything at all.”
The international non-profit organization Project HOPE said around 15 percent of the pregnant women it had assessed in its Deir al-Balah clinic in central Gaza last week were malnourished.
It also reported a surge in anemia, or iron deficiency, which can increase premature births and postpartum bleeding.
Dr Santosh Kumar, its medical director, who returned from Gaza last week, said he and his team had limited themselves to one meal a day in solidarity with the Gazans.
“People are starving…” he told Reuters.
“People said to me: ‘Dead people are luckier’.”
LINK: https://ara.tv/rpek5
