New Famine Alert For Gaza Where Families Go Days Without Food: UN

UNITED NATIONS, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 25th Jun, 2024) The besieged Gaza Strip remains on famine alert after food security experts warned Tuesday that more than one in five households “go entire days without eating”.

According to a latest UN-partnered report on hunger levels, 96 per cent of the population – some 2.15 million people - face acute food insecurity at “crisis” level or higher. That is level three of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) index.

Included in this number are almost half a million people enduring “catastrophic” conditions (IPC 5), the IPC report noted, underscoring the “high risk” of famine across the whole Gaza Strip “as long as conflict continues and humanitarian access is restricted”.

At the same time, the update pointed to “a slight improvement” in the food security situation in Gaza’s northern governorates where potential famine was feared by the end of May.

“The improvement shows the difference that greater access can make,” said the UN World Food Programme (WFP) in response to the IPC findings. “Increased food deliveries to the north and nutrition services have helped to reduce the very worst levels of hunger, leaving a still desperate situation.”

There were “no safe centimetres left” in Gaza where the laws of war continued to be disregarded at the expense of the shattered enclave’s people and humanitarian organizations, a UN aid worker said Tuesday.

Speaking to journalists in Geneva after her second deployment to Gaza, Yasmina Guerda from the UN aid coordination office (OCHA) said that delivering aid there had become an exasperating “daily puzzle” that had left malnourished children without the lifesaving help they need.

“A direct observation on the ground every day is that there are no safe centimetres left in Gaza. There is nowhere you can be and be certain that there isn’t going to be an attack on you that night,” she said.

After nearly nine months of intense Israeli bombardment and ground operations sparked by Hamas-led attacks and hostage-taking on October 7, basic needs are greater than ever for Gazans forced to flee their homes at a moment’s notice, in line with repeated orders to evacuate issued by the Israeli military.

“You have 10 to 15 minutes to leave your building because it’s going to be bombed. Your kids are sleeping in the room next door,” Guerda said.

“You have to make split-second decisions to decide what to pack, what’s essential and how do you define what’s essential? Birth certificates, IDs, baby formula… It’s a story I heard time and again by people who fled Gaza City, Jabalia, Khan Younis, Deir Al-Balah and now of course Rafah.”

More than 35 displaced people were killed when an Israeli airstrike hit an UNRWA-run school in Nuseirat, Central Gaza.

Recalling the Israeli military operation two weeks ago to release four Israeli hostages being held in Nuseirat in central Gaza that left hundreds killed and injured according to the local health authorities, the UN humanitarian officer insisted that the neighbourhood’s residents received no such warning.

“They were just trying to have a meal with whatever they had secured that day when the bombing started and lasted for two full hours and tank shells and gunshots. We were working a couple of kilometres away and the walls, the doors, the windows of our building were shaking. We didn’t know what was happening, we found out after.”

After the attack, Ms Guerda described going to the field hospital and finding children who had lost limbs “staring in the void, too shellshocked to produce a sound or a tear. For those who survived the bombing of their neighbourhood by getting away on time, it’s only the beginning of the nightmare.”

Getting humanitarian relief to these survivors and the more than one million uprooted from Rafah in southern Gaza in a matter of 10 to 14 days – remains extremely difficult, in particular since the Israeli military operation shut the key border crossing there in early May, the OCHA officer continued.

“Delivering aid in Gaza is a daily puzzle across the board, you know if all, the daily fighting, the insufficiency of absolutely everything you need, the regular attacks on our storage facilities, the pile of administrative impediments, bad internet, weak phone networks, destroyed roads, you name it.

“We spend hours waiting at checkpoints, coordinating, compromising a way through.”

Meanwhile, the head of UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said on Tuesday that every day in Gaza, 10 children lost one or both legs, amid ongoing Israeli bombardment.

Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of UNRWA, also condemned an overnight attack on one of the agency’s schools in Gaza City that reportedly killed around 12 people and injured 22 more.

The strike brought the total number of UN premises “hit or damaged or targeted since the beginning of the war” to 190, which was more than half of UNRWA’s premises in the Gaza Strip, he said.

In a related development, a top UN rights expert expressed concern at the recent “violent crackdown” on anti-war campus protesters in the United States where demonstrators called for a ceasefire and for a review of their institutions’ links with Israel.

“What’s alarming is the unequal treatment of those expressing themselves,” said Farida Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on the right to education.

“Pro-Palestinian protesters, including Jewish students confront disproportionately harsh responses, allegedly for antisemitic views with criticism of the State of Israel conflated with antisemitism,” Ms. Shaheed, a Pakistani socialiogist, told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva Monday.