The UK Times reports on worsening famine conditions in Gaza. Those in northern Gaza are at greatest risk:
Barely any aid has reached the people in the north of Gaza, who are separated from the rest of the population by the fighting. Phone signals are cut off and large swathes of Gaza City, with its once-bustling beachfront restaurants, are destroyed.
No one knows how many people remain in the north, but charities estimate that it could be in the hundreds of thousands. They have nothing.
According to the report, food is so scarce that people are reduced to eating whatever they can find, even if it has spoiled. What little food that does exist is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of people. Nursing mothers cannot produce milk for their babies. In just under three months, a population of more than two million people has been driven to the brink by the deliberate Israeli use of starvation as a weapon. The people of Gaza have been subjected to one of the most monstrous policies of collective punishment in recent memory. There is good reason to fear that a large percentage of the population will perish if conditions remain like this or worsen.
The New York Times also published a report this weekend on starvation in Gaza:
Arif Husain, chief economist at the World Food Program, said the humanitarian disaster in Gaza was among the worst he had ever seen. The territory appears to meet at least the first criteria of a famine, with 20 percent of the population facing an extreme lack of food, he said.
“I’ve been doing this for about 20 years,” Mr. Husain said. “I’ve been to pretty much any conflict, whether Yemen, whether it was South Sudan, northeast Nigeria, Ethiopia, you name it. And I have never seen anything like this, both in terms of its scale, its magnitude, but also at the pace that this has unfolded.”
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
