Doctors and humanitarian workers inside Gaza, themselves overworked and undernourished, have warned for months of critical lack of food and the spiral cost of the little available due to the restrictions of offensive and paralyzing aid of Israel. They say that their worst fears are taking place.
“We are now faced with a massive health disaster,” Khan Khan Younis told Dr. Ahed Jabr Khalaf, pediatrician and intensive care specialist at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. He said on Wednesday that many other children died in malnutrition that day.
The warnings came while the world’s leading world body, the integrated classification of the food security phase, or IPC, sounded the alarm that the “worst scenario of famine” now took place in the Palestinian enclave under the restrictions of deadly and paralyzing military aid.
A “tilting point”?
International indignation has developed while the scenes show famine spreading through the enclave, dozens dying of malnutrition in recent weeks and people who collapse in dirt. Faced with this assembly pressure, the Israeli soldiers began limited breaks while fighting to allow more supplies – but help officials warned that this was still far from sufficient.
It seems that the crisis has already reached a “tilting point,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International.
“Day after day, there are multiple death reports after famine,” said Konyndyk, an official of the American agency for international development During the Obama and Biden administrations. “This is new, which suggests that the population has now reached a point of vulnerability and deprivation,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday before the IPC report.
“And when you start to see this in small numbers, it tells you that larger figures are coming.”
“As we have seen in the previous famine conditions, where once the figures, mortality, are starting to increase, we have to act quickly and urgently to stem the wave of death due to famine,” said JeaNette Bailey, responsible for the global IRC practice and director of research for nutrition. “If we do not act now, we will see these figures increase exponentially, very quickly.”
The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza said on Wednesday that 154 people had died of famine since the start of the war, including 89 children. In a sign of the way in which the situation has changed, it was only in recent weeks that the ministry has published daily updates of this count.
“We know about all past famines, which data always takes time to catch up in the field,” said Konyndyk, noting the particular difficulties in access to data given Israeli restrictions on access to Gaza.
“The situation has reached a critical inflection point,” said Emily Keats, an assistant international health scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. She said it would only “continue to worsen unless the population is able to safely access adequate foods and health services”.
The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday following the IPC alert according to which the situation in Gaza was “difficult” but said that Hamas had benefited from “trying to feed the perception of a humanitarian crisis”.
‘The impact is permanent’
Be that as it may, several experts and health defenders said that children who grew up in Gaza would now suffer from the health of the hunger crisis for the years to come.
“Their little bodies stop,” said Lanning.
There had been a “peak in the number of children and infants who are admitted to the hospital for malnutrition,” she said.
