UN warns new famine alert for Gaza as families left without food for days

Anjali Sharma

GG News Bureau
UNITED NATIONS, 26th June. UN food security experts warned on Tuesday that more than one in 5 households in Gaza “go entire days without eating” in a report to the Human Rights Council.

According to the latest UN IPC 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’s level three of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification index.

The IPC update noted that in this number are almost half a million people enduring “catastrophic” conditions (IPC level five).

It underscored the “high risk” of famine across the whole Gaza Strip “as long as conflict continues and humanitarian access is restricted”.

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

Yasmina Guerda from the UN aid coordination office said that delivering aid there has become an exasperating “daily puzzle” that has 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.

“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,” Ms. Guerda said.

“You have to make split-second decisions to decide what to pack, what’s essential. 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.”

She recalled 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.

Yasmina Guerda 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.”

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.”

She said that getting humanitarian relief to these survivors and the more than one million people 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.

“Delivering aid in Gaza is a daily puzzle across the board,” she said.

She pointed out to “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.”

Head of UNRWA said on Tuesday that every day in Gaza, 10 children lose one or both legs amid ongoing Israeli bombardment.

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

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

Farida Shaheed, Special Rapporteur on the right to education expressed concern at the recent “violent crackdown” on anti-war campus protesters in the United States, where demonstrators have 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,” she said.

“Pro-Palestinian protesters, including Jewish students, confront disproportionately harsh responses, allegedly for antisemitic views with criticism of the State of Israel conflated with antisemitism,” she added.

The independent expert noted that all governments “must prohibit incitement to violence, hostility or discrimination” while insisting that the expression of critical political opinions was not grounds for the restriction of freedom of expression.