Israel’s 21-monthlong war in Gaza has killed more than 60,000 Palestinians, mostly civilian women and children. Israel’s monthslong blockade of virtually all humanitarian aid into Gaza, has resulted in severe shortages of basic food and medical supplies. A United Nations-affiliated organization that tracks food security worldwide, issued a dire alert on July 29 confirming that a “worst-case” famine scenario is now unfolding across the Gaza Strip. Every day there are new reports of Palestinians dying of starvation and malnutrition.
Reacting to growing international pressure on Israel to end its policy of starving Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on July 27 a halt in military operations 10 hours a day in parts of Gaza to allow a trickle of humanitarian aid to be delivered, but he continued to deny anyone in Gaza was starving. Soon after, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates began to airdrop supplies. However, the United Nations World Food Program responded by declaring the supplies now coming into Gaza were entirely inadequate to address the crisis.
During a July 28 press conference in Scotland, President Trump acknowledged for the first time the reality of Gaza’s starvation crisis. Meanwhile, two Israeli human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, have accused their government of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Middle East and North Africa editor with Drop Site News, who discusses his recent reports on the starvation crisis in Gaza.
SHARIFF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Israel has restricted food into Gaza for many, many years and ramped it up at the beginning of the war on Oct. 7, 2023. And so we’ve seen malnutrition and hunger grow over the past 21 months. But what has happened recently, starting on March 2, Israel imposed a full spectrum blockade, allowing in no food, no fuel, no medicine, no humanitarian aid whatsoever into Gaza.
In late May, May 27, they began allowing in meager amounts of aid, something like 60 to 70 trucks a day. This is a place where humanitarian experts say at least 500 to 600 trucks a day are needed at a minimum, and they let it into a new system that was overseen by a U.S. and Israeli-backed group called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, as well as some trucks that went in by the UN.
And what’s happening right now is that we’ve reached a tipping point because of this complete siege and lack of food, there’s simply nothing to eat, and people now are beginning to starve to death. Just on Sunday, the World Health Organization said there’s been 63 malnutrition related deaths and starvation deaths in Gaza this month alone, including 24 children under the age of five. Compare that to 11 deaths from the 6 months prior.
So we’ve reached a tipping point that was entirely preventable, that was predicted by food experts and famine experts, and that is the result of a deliberate policy. People talk about this being a humanitarian crisis. It is not. This is a policy of starvation with the intention of ethnic cleansing. The stated aims by different Israeli ministers, including the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And the people who now are trying to get these meager rations, the little aid that is there, are forced to travel to mostly the deep south of Gaza to militarized zones where they are shot and shelled and attacked on a daily basis. It is really a low for humanity.
And some people talk about, “Well, there’s other places in the world where there is hunger and famine.” And that’s true in Sudan, South Sudan, Haiti. These are places where groups say there’s the highest level of concern outside of Gaza, and these places are all suffering terribly.
But Gaza is exceptional for two reasons. Firstly, the percentage of the population affected in these places. So for example, in Sudan and South Sudan and Yemen, where starvation is present something like 50 to 60 percent of the population’s at risk. In Gaza, the share is a 100 percent. The risk of famine is total. This is highly unusual historically, and it’s because you have a trapped population that is subject to a deliberate policy of starvation.
And also in these other places like Sudan and South Sudan, there’s a civil war, Haiti’s in anarchy and so on. The difference again here is that the famine is a result of a deliberate policy by a rich, well-armed state. Food supplies are being deliberately withheld. There’s 900 trucks waiting to get into Gaza that can’t get in. Water desalination plants and other facilities are being intentionally bombed, so people are parched and dehydrated. There’s no fuel for cooking. All the agriculture has been systematically destroyed.
So the death by starvation in Gaza that is happening now is not the unintended consequence of some obscure, amorphous crisis. It’s the result of deliberate policy that was predicted and it’s happening right now live-streamed famine before our eyes.
SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you, Sharif. What is it going to take, do you think, for the United States to reverse course here? The entire world is well aware of Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s role in this horrendous loss of life and the ethnic cleansing campaign that Trump himself basically stoked with his idea he was going to drive out the Palestinian population of Gaza and create a Middle East Riviera with expensive condos in Gaza. It’s hard to imagine how the United States can repair its image to the world as part of this genocide.
SHARIFF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Yeah, I think this will have repercussions for generations to come. What does it take? It would take a phone call from President Trump to stop this and to allow any aid. If we look at history as any teacher, Israel is the proxy of the United States, not the other way around. Every time Israel has been forced to end the war, it’s been because the United States has forced it to do so, not because Israel wanted it to end.
We saw the day before President Trump was inaugurated, it took one visit by (U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East) Steve Witcoff to Jerusalem to force Netanyahu to sign a ceasefire, and we saw the longest ceasefire that we’ve seen so far since the beginning of the war take hold on Jan. 19. Israel violated it multiple times, then imposed the siege on March 2, and then resumed this genocidal assault on March 18 and Trump allowed that to happen. But that’s all it took.
For more information, follow Sharif Abdel Kouddous’s stories at Dropsite News.
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