Ghada Abdulfattah
Fri, December 15, 2023
Kifaya Al Kafarna, a housewife from Gaza City who is currently living with 27 members of her extended family in a school library in Rafah, cannot remember the last time she ate a full meal.
After weeks of struggling to find shelter amid Israeli airstrikes, Ms. Kafarna – like hundreds of thousands of others in Gaza – is facing an even more acute crisis: starvation.
“There is nothing available in the markets: no flour, no water, no food,” Ms. Kafarna says, her voice trembling with exhaustion. “I am glad we have a place to stay, but we can’t find anything to eat.”
“Half the population are starving,” United Nations World Food Program Deputy Chief Carl Skau told reporters in New York on Thursday, after visiting the Gaza Strip. “Nine out of 10 are not eating enough, not eating every day, and don’t know where their next meal is going to come from.”
With the end of the recent humanitarian pause in the fighting between Hamas and Israel, food aid is now only trickling into Gaza, U.N. officials say, and black market prices are soaring.
A World Food Program survey carried out during the cease-fire in late November found that 97% of households in northern Gaza and 83% of households in southern Gaza reported inadequate food consumption – one meal a day or less. It also revealed that 50% of Palestinians in northern Gaza and 33% in southern Gaza faced severe hunger.
These numbers are thought to have climbed further since the Israeli army resumed its operations on Dec. 1. Parents say they are going without food to ensure their children get half a pita bread or a bowl of boiled wheat each day.
Vanishing vegetables
The prices of what little food is left on the market are skyrocketing. Twenty-five-kilogram sacks of flour sell for $120, which is 15 times the normal price; chickens, when they can be found, cost $7 a kilo, more than twice the prewar price; and even za’atar, an affordable dried thyme and sesame mix that was once a breakfast staple in Gaza, has doubled in price.
But the rarest, most sought-after food items are fruit and vegetables.
As an ambulance rushes another bombing victim into the Al-Aqsa Hospital in the southern Gaza district of Deir al-Balah, Mohammad Al Taaban calmly sets out his vegetable stall on the street outside, lining up a few crates of green peppers, tomatoes, and lemons.
The owner of a small greenhouse farm in central Gaza, Mr. Taaban is one of the few who have vegetables for sale. A crowd instantly forms around him; his stock will not last long. In a matter of minutes he has sold out.
“It is remarkable how quickly the vegetables vanish before my eyes,” Mr. Taaban says as customers eagerly sort through bell peppers. “People buy them instantly,” even though prices have risen tenfold since the war began, and few shoppers can afford to buy more than a kilo or so of produce.
Mohammed Al Qazzar walks away with a small bag of sweet peppers and tomatoes, holding it up like a prize. He says his find will be greeted with celebrations back home. It has been a week since the last time they ate vegetables.
Food shortages and hunger in Gaza are affecting all, demolishing any remaining class barriers. Mr. Qazzar’s wealthy neighbors, who once owned their own businesses, now knock on his door regularly, pleading for bread.
“This is not a normal war,” Mr. Qazzar says. “This is a war that starves you, that stresses you, and pressures you to find food, fuel, and water all day.”
That pressure is weakening law and order. “I saw it with my eyes that people in Rafah have started to decide to help themselves directly from the [aid] trucks out of total despair,” the head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, Philippe Lazzarini, said this week. “They eat what they have taken out of the truck on the spot.”
“We have nothing”
The U.N. continues to bring in cans of tuna, high-energy biscuits, and flour through the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt, but officials say distribution of this limited aid is complicated by Israeli government restrictions, Israeli military operations, and makeshift tents pitched in the streets by some of the million or so displaced people crowding into Rafah.
“The needs that we are meeting are really nothing,” Mr. Skau warned. “The humanitarian operation is collapsing.”
“The United Nations cannot support a population of 2.2 million people with humanitarian assistance – it is a Band-Aid,” said Lynn Hastings, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory in a virtual press briefing on Wednesday from Jerusalem. “We need to see the commercial sectors having access to bring things into Gaza. We need the markets to be open for fresh vegetables.”
Meanwhile, limited U.N. flour is being resold by recipients on the black market, and food coupons are in short supply. Kamila Abu Khader wanders the Al-Aqsa Hospital courtyard begging for spare U.N. food coupons to feed her six daughters and four sons.
Having been displaced three times, she says the food shortages and hunger are only getting worse.
Amany Al Silk says the obstacles have been growing more insurmountable each day since she was displaced from her home in the Shujaiyya neighborhood of Gaza City in late October.
She now lives with eight other people in a 60-square-foot makeshift tent pitched outside a classroom at a public school in Rafah, without electricity or water, and she spends her days roaming the neighborhood in search of food scraps and kindling.
When she finds nothing to use as fuel, Ms. Silk and her husband burn library books and the odd student notebook to cook meals. They walk miles each day to visit relatives to see if they have any spare food; today they came back with two cans of beans to feed themselves, her five children, her sister-in-law, and a niece. Yet they could not find any kindling to cook or warm them.
“In previous wars there were Israeli airstrikes, sometimes artillery shelling, but not all of this in addition to being forced out of your house and starving,” Ms. Silk says. “We have never seen a war like this.”
“My children keep asking me for dessert, for rice and milk pudding,” she says wearily, head in hand. “We have no milk. We have no rice. We have nothing.”
Related stories
Nidal al-Mughrabi
Updated Fri, December 15, 2023
CAIRO (Reuters) - With Israeli bombs pounding the length of the Gaza Strip, Gazans have been squeezed up against the border with Egypt's Sinai Peninsula at the town of Rafah and say they have practically nowhere left to flee.
Hundreds of thousands have been displaced from their homes and as the bombardment comes closer again many fear the only option to keep them alive is exile to Sinai.
But they don’t want that. They say if that happened, they might never come back.
“There’s no safe place anymore. Now the Israeli ground offensive might expand to here,” said Umm Osama, a 55-year-old woman from Gaza City in the north who has sought shelter in Rafah.
“Where should we go after Rafah?”
Umm Osama and many other displaced Gazans rejected the idea of fleeing across the border, should it become possible.
“We refuse displacement to Sinai and we want to return to our homes, even if they are in ruins,” she said.
She and other Gazans are haunted by the traumatic exile of their forebears: many of Gaza’s residents are descendents of Palestinians forced to flee their homes after the creation of Israel in 1948.
"If they make me choose between living under bombardment or leaving, I’ll stay. I’ll go back even if tanks are there. I’ll go back to Gaza City and will endure anything," said Umm Imad, a 73-year-old woman also sheltering in Rafah.
Facing weeks of Israeli aerial assault, close-range tank fire and the guns of troops on the ground which Israel said is aimed at hunting down Hamas fighters, some 85 percent of 2.3 million Palestinians living in Gaza have been forced towards the south of the besieged enclave.
Israel has told Gaza residents wishing to avoid being caught up in their assault against the Palestinian militant group Hamas that they should head south. Its military bombs southern areas where people have fled.
Northern Gaza was the initial focus of Israel’s assault on the Hamas-controlled territory after the group killed 1,200 Israelis in a brutal Oct. 7 attack and took 240 hostage.
Southern Rafah, strategically important because it holds the only currently functioning crossing into Gaza - one not controlled by Israel, and where aid is being delivered - is the latest area to come under intense bombardment.
'NOWHERE IS SAFE'
Strikes on the al-Shaboura neighbourhood of Rafah levelled an entire street late on Thursday.
On Friday men and boys picked through the rubble and stared blankly at caved in houses and their ruined possessions that could not be retrieved.
The strikes left a heap of rubble and twisted metal dotted with blankets and bags, gouged mattresses and sofas spilling out tufts of cotton and polyester, children’s bicycles and kitchenware.
“Nowhere in Gaza is safe,” said Jehad al-Eid, a resident of the area.
The war between Israel and Hamas, an Iran-backed group, is the deadliest ever fighting in Gaza. Israeli assaults have killed some 19,000 people, most of them women and children, Palestinian officials say.
Palestinians and officials in neighbouring Arab countries alike are nervous at the prospect of a mass, long-term displacement of Gazans.
A mass influx into Egypt is currently unlikely.
The exit of Gaza residents has been slow with the choked border crossing struggling to cope with the entry even of aid trucks, which the United Nations says are not nearly enough to cope with a population that has lacked enough medical supplies for weeks and is beginning to go hungry.
Violence continues to kill people in the south of the strip.
In Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, a father mourned his two sons, aged 17 and 18, whom he said were killed in Israeli shelling yesterday. The tearful father followed their bodies until they were wrapped in shrouds and sent to the morgue.
"They were standing outside the door of the house when a shell hit the neighbours' house, they went to help and a second shell hit them," the father, Majdi Shurrab, said.
Shurrab said the bodies were left on the ground because it was difficult for ambulances to reach them to take them to the hospital. The destruction from air strikes has made travel along roads difficult and there are severe fuel shortages across Gaza.
Rescue workers had to carry Shurrab's sons to hospital by donkey-drawn cart.
(Writing by John Davison; Editing by Sharon Singleton)
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