Thanks to the meager humanitarian aid that arrived through the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt, some residents of the Gaza Strip have been partially saved from hunger and complete abandonment these days. But this flow of food has come to a standstill again, as the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) confirmed this Friday. Without fuel for the vehicles distributing the food, and with communications interrupted since Thursday for the same reason, the United Nations agency has admitted that it is unable to deliver supplies that were already only enough to survive 7 % of the strip’s 2.3 million residents. Without this food, even those who survive the sustained bombing of Israel’s ground invasion could be counted, warned UNRWA Commissioner General Philippe Lazzarini.
“If the fuel doesn’t arrive, people will die. I don’t know exactly when. But that will happen sooner rather than later,” he said. The UN World Food Program (WFP) had warned of exactly the same thing in a statement the day before: “The imminent possibility of [que los gazatíes] to starve.”
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Earlier this week, the last WFP bakery in Gaza was forced to close its doors due to a lack of electricity and fuel for production. Bread is the basis of the diet of Gazans, which was already very inadequate before the war, mainly due to the blockade imposed by Israel over the last 16 years after the fundamentalist movement Hamas came to power in 2007. The 130 establishments of this type, According to the United Nations, which the United Nations has worked with, this staple food is “scarce or non-existent” in Gaza. In the Palestinian territories, which have been under complete blockade since Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, those who are lucky are eating “canned food or something else”; those lacking “raw onions or eggplant,” the UN agency warned.
“The trucks arrive very, very rarely and the conditions are extremely harsh,” he confirms to EL PAÍS from the Jan Yunis Alaa Hamuda refugee camp. This Palestinian academic, who barely manages to answer a few questions in a few minutes while internet connection is temporarily restored, is originally from Beit Lahia, in the north of the Palestinian enclave. He is now taking refuge in a UNRWA center, the Khan Yunis Training School, the most overcrowded of all, which housed more than 22,000 displaced people in early November.
No medicine or food
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Professor Hamuda explains that in the south of Gaza the fundamental problem is “ [la falta de] Water.” He then describes how the situation north of the dry Gaza River, the area that Israel was supposed to leave, is even worse: “There is famine there. There is no medicine or food of any kind. Humanitarian aid is not arriving at all .Every truck that crosses the valley [río] Gaza can be bombed.” After this answer, the connection is disconnected again.
“As winter approaches, shelters are unsafe and overcrowded, and clean water is lacking, civilians are at imminent risk of starvation,” WFP Executive Director Cindy McCain said in the organization’s statement. “There is no way to meet current needs with a single operational border crossing. The only hope is to open another safe passage for humanitarian access that allows life-saving food to be brought into Gaza,” McCain added, referring to the remaining border crossings that connect the Gaza Strip from Israel’s Palestinian territory separate and everyone has been closed since October 7th.
On November 10, Gaza’s Ministry of Health announced that it would stop counting daily deaths because it was unknown how many more Gazans had died each day from bombings or in the Israeli ground offensive; How many were buried under the rubble and how many were injured. The last update came this Friday: more than 12,000 dead, including 5,000 children. Also that day, Palestinian agency Wafa, quoted by Portal, reported an Israeli attack that left several displaced Palestinians dead – nine, according to Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera – right next to the Rafah border crossing.
Amid successive warnings about the threat of famine facing Gazans, a government source quoted by the Haaretz newspaper assured that the Israeli War Cabinet had given in to a request from the United States: to allow the import of two trucks of fuel per day into Gaza , as long as they know that this fuel – 60,000 liters per day – does not end up in the hands of Hamas. Earlier this week, UNRWA increased the daily amount needed in the Palestinian enclave for basic humanitarian operations such as food distribution to 160,000 liters.
According to the United Nations Humanitarian Coordination (OCHA), this Friday is actually the third day in a row that no aid trucks have entered the Gaza Strip. The last to do so on Tuesday through the Rafah border crossing – the only one not fully controlled by Israel – could only be unloaded. UNRWA no longer had the fuel to deliver its contents to civilians housed in the organization’s 154 facilities: 813,000 of Gaza’s roughly 1.5 million displaced by the war. Along with hunger comes thirst, as the scholar Hamuda points out. Videos circulating on social networks in recent days show Gazan children collecting water from the Gaza Strip’s first autumn rains in buckets to drink.
Since Israel accepted the entry of the first vehicles carrying essential goods on October 21 – two weeks after the outbreak of war in response to the Hamas attack that left 1,200 people dead and 240 kidnapped – 1,129 trucks had entered the Palestinian territory. Only 447 transported food, the WFP regrets. Before this conflict, an average of 500 vehicles of this type entered the Strip every day.
Malnutrition, lack of water and hygiene have already caused numerous cases of infectious diseases, warned Richard Peeperkorn, WHO representative in the occupied Palestinian territories. This person has increased the number of acute respiratory infections to 70,000 and diarrhea to over 44,000. Both pathologies are particularly common in children under five years of age. According to OCHA data, more than 300,000 minors in the Gaza Strip have not yet reached this age.
The “next phase”
But starvation does not remain the most immediate threat to the 2.3 million people crammed into the just over 365 square kilometer Gaza Strip, most of them in the territory’s south. Israeli bombings continue in both the north and the south, where many Gazans have fled in search of safety. His army’s ground offensive isn’t working either. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced on Thursday that his forces had completed the capture of the western part of Gaza City and would begin the “next phase” of their ground operation.
As with the actual death toll, little is known about the fate of health workers, patients and displaced people who remain at Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. On Wednesday, Israeli forces attacked this health center, the largest in the Palestinian enclave, including with heavy artillery. On Friday evening, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) reported in a statement “incessant bombings and fighting” in the area near its headquarters. “Thousands of civilians trapped in hospitals and other locations in the Gaza Strip,” including 137 NGO workers and their families, “are at risk of dying in the coming days, if not hours,” the medical organization warned.
Before the attack on the hospital, the Israeli army had claimed for weeks that the Hamas headquarters was hiding underground in its facilities. Although the Israeli military has banned international journalists from entering Gaza to cover the war, it has recently given permission to some reporters – such as a New York Times correspondent – to enter Gaza as part of a military unit. None of these experts have provided conclusive evidence that Al Shifa was anything other than a hospital. The rules that form the core of international humanitarian law – the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their 1997 Additional Protocols – provide enhanced protection for health facilities and make attacks on them a war crime.
The Israeli army also reported that day the discovery of the body of 19-year-old soldier Noa Marciano, who was kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 in a building near Al Shifa. The day before, his troops had reportedly recovered the body of another Israeli hostage, 65-year-old Yehudit Weiss, also nearby. Israeli forces have also claimed to have destroyed key Islamic Jihad facilities and found bombs and weapons hidden in children’s schools in Gaza.
Al Shifa was not the only Palestinian hospital to wake up surrounded: also Ibn Sina, the main health center in Jenin, in the north of the occupied West Bank. The siege, which lasted several hours, came after five Palestinians were killed by drone gunfire in the city’s refugee camp, according to Al Jazeera. Israel claims that these men are “Hamas terrorists” and that its forces surrounded Jenin Hospital because other fundamentalists were using it to “hide.”
In another West Bank city, Hebron in the south, two more Palestinians were killed by military gunfire. The Israeli version says they opened fire on the soldiers, who also responded with live ammunition. The Palestinian Health Ministry reduced the death toll in Jenin to three and increased the number of injured to 15, four of them in serious condition. According to official Palestinian figures, the Israeli army has killed around 200 people in the West Bank since October 7th.
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