A famine in Gaza can still be “avoided” if Israel allows humanitarian organizations to send more aid there, defended this Sunday the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini.
According to the United Nations, 2.2 million people, the vast majority of Gaza's population, are at risk of famine in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory besieged by Israel.
The…
A famine in Gaza can still be “avoided” if Israel allows humanitarian organizations to send more aid there, defended this Sunday the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini.
According to the United Nations, 2.2 million people, the vast majority of Gaza's population, are at risk of famine in the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian territory besieged by Israel.
This serious shortage could lead to an “explosion” in child mortality in the north of the territory, where one in six children under the age of two suffers from acute malnutrition.
“It is a man-made disaster […] “The world has vowed never to allow hunger again,” Lazzarini wrote in X.
According to him, “famine can still be avoided if there is real political will to provide access and protection to meaningful assistance.”
Advertisement – Scroll to continue
In recent days, Palestinians living in Gaza told AFP they had been forced to eat leaves and fodder or even kill draft animals for food.
Before the war, around 500 trucks carrying food drove into the Gaza Strip every day. But since October 7, when the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamasa began after that group's militiamen attacked Israeli territory, this number rarely exceeds 200, despite the urgent needs of those living on the outskirts.
The situation in the north is very worrying and there is “chaos and violence,” according to the World Food Program (WFP), which on Tuesday stopped distributing its aid there due to the fighting and hungry people who are raiding the trucks to loot them.
Advertisement – Scroll to continue
gl/emd/cyj/jvb/eg