Category: 2. World

One in five children in Gaza City is malnourished and cases are increasing every day, the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency (Unrwa) says.

In a statement issued on Thursday, Unrwa Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini cited a colleague telling him: “People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.”

More than 100 international aid organisations and human rights groups have also warned of mass starvation – pressing for governments to take action.

Israel, which controls the entry of all supplies into Gaza, says there is no siege and blames Hamas for any cases of malnutrition.

The UN, however, has warned that the level of aid getting into Gaza is “a trickle” and the hunger crisis in the territory “has never been so dire”.

In his statement on Thursday, Lazzarini said “more than 100 people, the vast majority of them children, have reportedly died of hunger”.

“Most children our teams are seeing are emaciated, weak and at high risk of dying if they don’t get the treatment they urgently need,” he added, pleading for Israel to “allow humanitarian partners to bring unrestricted and uninterrupted humanitarian assistance to Gaza”.

On Wednesday, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said a large proportion of the population of Gaza was “starving”.

“I don’t know what you would call it other than mass starvation – and it’s man-made,” the head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said.

In northern Gaza, Hanaa Almadhoun, 40, said local markets are often without food and other supplies.

“If they do exist then they come at exorbitant prices that no ordinary person can afford,” she told the BBC over WhatsApp.

She said flour was expensive and difficult to secure, and that people have sold “gold and personal belongings” to afford it.

The mother-of-three said “every new day brings a new challenge” as people search for “something edible”.

“With my own eyes, I’ve seen children rummaging through the garbage in search of food scraps,” she added.

During a visit to Israeli troops in Gaza on Wednesday, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog insisted his country was providing humanitarian aid “according to international law”.

But Tahani Shehada, an aid worker in Gaza, said people “are just trying to survive hour-by-hour”.

“Even simple things like cooking [and] taking a shower have become luxuries,” she said.

“I have a baby. He’s eight months old. He doesn’t know what fresh fruit tastes like,” she added.

Israel stopped aid deliveries to Gaza in early March following a two-month ceasefire. The blockade was partially eased after nearly two months, but food, fuel and medicine shortages worsened.

Israel, with the US, established a new aid system run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

According to the UN human rights office, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military while trying to get food aid over the past two months.

It says at least 766 of them have been killed in the vicinity of one of the GHF’s four distribution centres, which are operated by US private security contractors and are located inside Israeli military zones.

Another 288 people have been reported killed near UN and other aid convoys.

Israel has accused Hamas of instigating the chaos near the aid sites. It says its troops have only fired warning shots and that they do not intentionally shoot civilians.

The GHF says the UN is using “false” figures from Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry.

Najah, a 19-year-old widow sheltering in a hospital in Gaza, said she fears she would “get shot” if she travelled to aid distribution site.

“I hope they bring us something to eat and drink. We die of hunger with nothing to eat or drink. We live in tents. We are finished off,” Najah told the BBC.

A doctor working in Gaza with a UK medical charity, Dr Aseel, said Gaza was not close to famine, but already “living it”.

“My husband went once [to an aid distribution point] and twice and then got shot and that was it,” she said.

“If we are to die from hunger, let it be. The path to aid is the path to death.”

Abu Alaa, a market seller in Gaza, said he and his children “go to bed hungry every night”.

“We are not alive. We are dead. We are pleading with the whole world to intervene and save us,” he added.

Walaa Fathi, who is eight months pregnant with her third child, said Gazans are “experiencing a catastrophe and a famine that no one could have imagined”.

“I hope that my baby stays in my womb and I don’t have to give birth in these difficult circumstances,” she told the BBC from Deir al-Balah.

A teenager who went looking for food and a man who endured months of malnutrition are among those who have died in Gaza in the past week.

On Thursday, the Hamas-run health ministry recorded two new deaths due to malnutrition in the past 24 hours, as aid agencies warned Israel’s siege of Gaza was causing “mass starvation” to spread across the territory.

An Israeli government spokesman denied this, saying Hamas was to blame for creating a food shortage and hijacking aid.

With the UN warning that humanitarian conditions in Gaza are breaking down at an “accelerating” pace, and the World Health Organization saying that at least 10% of Gazans are acutely malnourished, the BBC has been speaking to people in the territory about loved ones they’ve lost in the past week.

Nineteen-year-old Abdullah Omar Jendeia was killed on Sunday, 20 July, when he went out to find food, says his sister Nadreen.

They had been staying in their mother’s damaged house in al-Sabra in central Gaza.

“He was impatient to go and fetch some food that day,” Nadreen says.

“I told him, ‘Just eat the few lentils we have left,’ but he refused.”

She says that at 16:00 (13:00 GMT) Abdullah left the house to walk more than 5km (3.1 miles) north to an aid truck that comes weekly, to get a few kilogrammes of flour to feed the family. He was with two of his brothers and some in-laws.

At about 23:00 that night, one of the brothers, Mahmoud, called Nadreen to tell her that while they were waiting by the aid truck Israeli soldiers had suddenly opened fire on them.

They were in the Netzarim Corridor – a military zone cutting off the north of the Gaza Strip from the south.

Mahmoud told Nadreen that Abdullah had been killed and he and the other brother had been injured.

“He was a joy to be around, kind-hearted and fun at the same time,” she says, recalling afternoon walks she and Abdullah used to take on the beach in Gaza when they were younger.

“He loved football and sport.”

She says Abdullah used to work with local grocers, helping to carry fruit and vegetables for them and “had dreams of opening a new business after the war”.

In response, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it was operating to dismantle Hamas’s military capabilities and took feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm.

It said that it could “better address your query if you were able to provide coordinates” for the location of the incident.

Gaza’s Hamas-run civil defence agency said Israeli fire had killed a total of 93 people and wounded dozens more across Gaza on that day, mainly near aid points.

Speaking about one specific incident in northern Gaza, the Israeli military said troops fired warning shots at a crowd “to remove an immediate threat” but disputed the numbers killed.

Ahmed Alhasant, 41, died on Tuesday, 22 July.

His brother, Yehia Alhasant, says “malnutrition killed him – day after day, he was getting more and more poorly”.

Yehia says his brother started to become unwell after Israel imposed a blockade of aid into Gaza in March. Since May, Israel has been allowing some aid into the territory, but aid groups say this is nowhere near enough.

For three months, Ahmed, who was also diabetic, was not able to get enough food or drink, relying on bits of bread and occasionally canned food, says Yehia.

As a result, his weight plummeted from 80kg (12 stone 8lbs ) to 35kg and his health rapidly deteriorated, Yehia says.

“His speech was slurred and sometimes we could hardly understand him,” Yehia says.

Ahmed’s cousin, Refaat Alhasant, says the family took him to hospital, but “they would tell us ‘he needs food not medicines’. So we took him back home.”

Yehia says Ahmed, who used to install television satellites and was a football fan, “passed away peacefully” at his home in the city of Deir al-Balah in the centre of Gaza.

“He had a strong personality and was one of the kindest people you could ever meet,” Yehia added.

Mohamed Kullab, 29, was killed in an air strike on 22 July, according to his brother-in-law.

Amar Ragaida says Mohamed had been resting in his tent in a camp for displaced Palestinians in the al-Qadesiya area of western Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, when an air strike hit the area between 17:00 and 18:00 local time.

“He was on his own. We heard that he was killed a few hours after the bombing when some people called his sister and informed her about his death,” says Amar.

Amar says he spoke to Mohamed the day before he died – they bumped into each other while looking for aid.

“He told me, ‘don’t go on your own, I will try and get you some flour’. The next day, he was dead.”

Mohamed leaves behind a sister and a younger brother who completely depended on him, says Amar.

“Kullab was a respectful young guy, who was full of life. He wouldn’t engage himself in any unnecessary issues and everyone around him loved him,” he says.

In response, the IDF issued a similar statement to that given for Abdullah, saying it took “feasible precautions to mitigate civilian harm” and that it would need co-ordinates of the location where he died to look into his case any further.