GAZA (Agencies) – Gaza health authorities say nearly 200 people, including 96 children, have died of hunger in Gaza, as the starving population battles against the odds to get food from dangerous airdrops and deadly aid hubs run by the GHF.
As Israel’s man-made famine under the ongoing blockade tightened its grip on the enclave, hospitals recorded four more deaths from “famine and malnutrition” on Thursday – two of them children – bringing the total to 197.
Amid the mounting death toll, World Health Organization (WHO) director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned that about 12,000 children younger than five were suffering from acute malnutrition in July – the highest monthly figure ever recorded.
The scenes in Gaza City are “apocalyptic”, said Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim al-Khalili, with hundreds of people scrambling for scraps from aid pallets airdropped among the rubble of destroyed buildings.
“Here the fight is not over food, but for survival,” he said.
Mustafa Tanani, a displaced Palestinian at the scene, said that some of the food had failed to land and was “hanging up high” between the buildings, making it “too risky” to try to reach. “It’s like a battle here. We come from far away and end up with nothing,” he said.
“Everyone is carrying bags of aid, and we don’t even manage to get anything. The planes are dropping aid for nothing. Look where they threw it. Up there, between the buildings. It’s dangerous for us,” he said.
CHILDREN AT RISK
Two children died of hunger in Gaza on Thursday, including a two-year-old girl in the al-Mawasi area, according to Nasser Hospital.
Raising the alarm over chronic child malnutrition, the United Nations said that its partners were able to reach only 8,700 of the 290,000 children under age five who desperately needed food and nutritional supplements.
Amjad Shawa, the head of the NGO Network in Gaza, told Al Jazeera Arabic that at least 200,000 children in the Gaza Strip suffer from severe malnutrition, with many deaths caused by a lack of baby formula and nutritional supplements under Israel’s blockade, in place since March.
Gaza’s Government Media Office said that only 92 aid trucks entered the enclave on Wednesday, far less than the 500-600 that the United Nations estimates are needed daily to meet basic needs.
Most of the aid that did make it in was prevented from reaching its intended recipients due to widespread “looting and robbery”, as a result of “deliberate security chaos” orchestrated by Israel, said the office.
‘ORCHESTRATED KILLING’
As the hunger crisis deepened, Doctors Without Borders, better known by its French-language acronym MSF, called for the closure of the notorious US- and Israeli-backed GHF, which runs deadly aid hubs where more than 1,300 Palestinians have been killed trying to reach food.
The NGO published a report on Thursday featuring testimony from front-line staff that Palestinians were being deliberately targeted at the sites, which they said amounted to “orchestrated killing and dehumanisation”, not humanitarian aid.
MSF operates two healthcare centres – al-Mawasi and al-Attar clinics – in direct proximity to GHF sites in southern Gaza, which received 1,380 casualties within seven weeks, treating 71 children for gunshot wounds, 25 of whom were under the age of 15.
“In MSF’s nearly 54 years of operations, rarely have we seen such levels of systematic violence against unarmed civilians,” said the report.
MSF patient Mohammed Riad Tabasi told Al Jazeera he had seen 36 people killed in the space of 10 minutes at a GHF site. “It was unbearable,” he said. “War is one thing, but this … aid distribution is another. We’ve never been humiliated like this.”
DEADLY STRIKES
As the population battled for survival, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox News his country intended to take military control of all of Gaza.
On Thursday, Israel continued to launch deadly air strikes on residential areas, killing at least 22 people.
In Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum reported that a strike on the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza killed five civilians.
An attack on the municipality of Bani Suheila, east of southern Gaza’s Khan Younis city, killed at least two people, according to a source from Nasser Hospital.
Six others were killed in earlier attacks in the Khan Younis area. One child died while attempting to retrieve airdropped aid there.
In northern Gaza’s Jabalia, at least one person was killed, according to a local medical source.
Palestine’s Wafa news agency reported several deadly attacks in Gaza City, one targeting a tent in the city’s Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood that killed at least six people.
The second attack targeted a separate residential area in the city, killing a woman and injuring others, said Wafa.
“Israel’s military escalation continues without any sign of abating. And civilians are still bearing the brunt of this conflict,” said Abu Azzoum.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 61,258 people.
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