Famine Is Devouring the People of Gaza

The people of Gaza have been subjected to one of the most monstrous policies of collective punishment in recent memory.

The 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.”

There is an alarming lack of a sense of urgency in Washington in response to this crisis. The administration is quick enough to rush more weapons to Israel, but there is no comparable effort to stave off a famine that the Israeli government is causing. They will declare a fake emergency to avoid Congressional oversight, but they won’t do much of anything to respond to a truly dire humanitarian emergency. None of this is surprising given the administration’s overall poor handling of this conflict, but it is infuriating all the same.

There has been some good reporting on famine conditions in Gaza, including both of these reports, but there has been far too little of it and far less the one would expect when we are talking about one of the worst man-made catastrophes in decades. Compared with the deluge of coverage of the military campaign itself, the coverage of the ensuing humanitarian crisis has been more like a trickle. There has also been some poor and inadequate reporting that fails to identify the siege as the principal cause of the humanitarian disaster.

The Israeli government has pledged to continue the war, and their leadership sees the war lasting through all of this year. If the people of Gaza remain cut off from adequate supplies of food, water, fuel, and medicine for the duration, the loss of life will be staggering. This does not have to happen, but it will if there is no pressure put on their government to end the war and the siege.

Famine is already devouring the people of Gaza. We know what is causing it, and we know what has to happen to avert the worst outcome. If the outside world waits for famine to be declared officially, it will be too late to prevent mass starvation. The people of Gaza can’t wait.