“How are you, Fida?”
“Once alive, she replies this 40 -year -old Palestine.”
They do not stop, this woman will put a handful of rice today on a dish for her six children. The children “are always hungry; here we are all,” explains this mother from Gaza in a message. When hunger squeezes, he fits his children’s stomach with boiled chickpeas that sprinkles with herbs. Two months they have not proven meat or milk. The four -year -old boy asks “a sweet, an egg, a bun, a juice.” His mother only has flour and rice, and even that is being over: “It remains for a week.” The child asks if outside Gaza there is fried chicken; When they will open the border and, if beyond it, the buildings are in ruins, as in that desolation landscape that is the only thing he remembers in the 19 months that the Israeli offensive lasts.
“I am not hungry for lack of resources,” says the woman, who works in an international organization. “I’m hungry because Israel because I am a Palestinian victim of genocide in Gaza.”
More than 70 days have passed since Israel fully closed the border to the entrance of food, water, fuel and medicines. The brief respite that the fire represented that the Benjamin Netanyahu government broke on March 18, is already only a distant memory. From day 2 of that month, not a gram of food has entered Gaza, something that has pushed its inhabitants to hunger abyss.
The Nutrition Reference Index used by the UN alerted on May 12 that, if Israel does not allow the entry of food in Gaza before September, all the Palestinians of the enclave —2,1 million – could then suffer for then “acute food insecurity”, that is, when lacking nutritious food and in sufficient quantity to the point of. Of those two million long Palestinians, half a million are one step closer to the precipice, the index warned. They are those who look directly to the famine.
In Gaza, bread, sugar, oil, vegetables and fruit have become a luxury. Meat and milk have disappeared. The modest vegetables available in the market are sold at astronomical prices: an onion is paid to 10 euros, according to data from the British NGO Christian AID. “We die of hunger,” he says from Gaza City, Jalil Abu Shamaleh, a human rights activist whose family feeds on canned cans and shows his relief because his children are already older. Since March 2, at least 57 children have died of malnutrition in Gaza, according to the World Health Organization.
According to the United Nations Humanitarian Coordination (Ocha in its acronym in English), “a bag of 25 kilos of wheat flour, when it was, sold to 371 euros, 3,000% more compared to the last week of February.” A melon in Gaza costs 44 euros and a kilo of fish, 89, explains from the Nasser hospital in Jan Yunis, in the south, Isabel Grovas, MSF medical coordinator. And not even who has money can afford to pay those prices. Only cash is admitted and in Gaza there is hardly any.
The most vulnerable are already beginning to succumb to malnutrition. After Israel vetoed the entry of food, the cases began to increase, explains Grovas. First, pregnant women; Now, more and more children. From one week to another, the number of malnourished patients rises 30%, explains the cooperating. “Families protect children,” he says, and adults “sacrifice their part to eat their children, who are the last ones who stop doing so.”
The despair in Gaza have also given way to the looting. In a single day in the end of April, there were five assaults on warehouses of humanitarian organizations.
“Share hunger”
Nasser Rabah, author of the poems of imminent publication in Spain The poem made its part (Editions of the East and the Mediterranean), lives in which he has always been his home in the Magazi refugee camp. The house in the center of the Palestinian enclave was partially destroyed by a bombardment that snatched his library. This poet has been eating “only five to seven tablespoons of rice for food.” He has money but “there is nothing to buy.”
“A bread bar has become an impossible object. We have not been flesh for months and, in some places in northern Gaza, they are sacrificing the donkeys to eat them. The poultry have died in the absence of feed and there is no fruit either. The gazaties eat what they have left of rice, pasta and lentil Describe. Meanwhile, adults “share their hunger between them.”
Without gas “since March” and without trees since they burn, they use “the wood of doors and the beds” to cook, explains Rabah. Or plastics, which by burn, emit toxic smoke.
One by one, the “lifeguards” in front of hunger are disappearing through the Israeli block. Clémence Lagouardat, Humanitarian Coordinator of Oxfam in Gaza until April, describes the community kitchens, which a few weeks ago “prepared more than one million hot meals per day; the only daily for most Palestinians of the Strip. Now they serve less than 400,000 a day.” Until last 10, more than 90 of those kitchens had closed in the previous two weeks due to lack of food and fuel for cooking. They were half of those that worked on April 25, according to the UN.
“Every time you see more people queuing before the few still open kitchens. Most are children and it is bleak to see their disappointment when they do not get food or see them run with a cube behind a tank truck with water,” says this cooperating. “And it will go worse,” warns, because the meager food reserves of the strip are running out, as is also “collapsing the production of drinking water.” Israel “has systematically destroyed” infrastructure that provided water suitable for consumption for Gazati. To a point that “cannot be casual.” Dehydration is a factor that aggravates malnutrition.
Wounds that do not heal
(Wck), the NGO of the Hispanic-American chef José Andrés, who, last day 7, announced that he could no longer serve or bread. This organization, explains Isabel Grovas, was the one that provided a dish to the patients of the Nasser hospital. MSF feed now once the children admitted. It also deals with nutritional supplements for pregnant women and malnourished children.
“Ultimately ‘please admits my son in the program [de suplementación nutricional]because we have no food, “emphasizes the medical coordinator, who explains that her organization no longer has iron or folic acid to give the many pregnant women with anemia. Your children could be born” with low weight “or they give birth prematurely, underlines. Serious malnutrition in young children affects their physical and cognitive development, their ability to learn their immune system.
On May 7, MSF in which he denounced that the Israeli blockade also leaves thousands of Gazati who have suffered burns, most, children, without chance of recovery. Large burns need twice as much daily calories and a good protein contribution to heal. On the contrary, when a body enters starvation and their glycogen and fat reserves are completely exhausted, it begins to use its muscle mass as a source of energy. “The bodies of our patients are consuming themselves to close wounds that never heal,” said one of MSF’s surgeons.
Israel not only prevents food entry. It has also destroyed the vast majority of cultivation fields, greenhouses and farms that provided a local production of explain from Ramala (Bank) Hassan Mahareeq of the Palestinian Agricultural Socorro Committee (PARC in its acronym in English). According to its organization, since the beginning of the Israeli offensive in Gaza, 15,697 agricultural hectares have been damaged or destroyed. Before October 2023, there were also 4,000 fishermen in Gaza, says Mahareeq. The few who venture now to the sea do it at the risk of a shot or a projectile of Israeli war ships.
A PARC study points to Israel’s bombings have destroyed in Gaza “everything that was green”, even the trees of the parks. With an objective: “expel the population.” Doing that “uninhabitable” place, says the humanitarian worker. A MSF statement denounced on the 14th: “We are witnessing, in real time, the creation of the necessary conditions for the eradication of Palestinian life in Gaza.”
The Israeli Minister of Defense, Israel Katz, said Saturday that the entry of humanitarian aid in Gaza is “absolutely unnecessary.”
Meanwhile, in front of the Egyptian side of Rafah’s border in Gaza, and in the countries of the region, the United Nations and NGOs have prepared more than 171,000 tons of food, enough to feed the Gazati for three or four months. It only remains for Israel to open the border and allow its delivery.
Gaza’s story is that of an escape without return. 80% of its inhabitants descend from the 750,000 Palestinians expelled or fled from the violent Jewish militias and then, of the army in what is known as Nakba (catastrophe in Arabic), of which 77 years were turned on this Thursday. FIDA is one of them. It was already, like a large part of the Gazatis, a refugee, who claims to live a “perpetual nakba”. Almost sweetly, avoid sending to this newspaper a photo of the handful of rice that their children will eat today: “We do not need compassion, we need justice.”
