Amnesty International have collected testimony from starved Palestinians that paint a devastating picture of Israel’s manufactured famine. In their latest report, the rights group wrote that the latest testimony they’ve collected is consistent with their findings throughout Israel’s genocide. They wrote:
the deadly combination of hunger and disease is not an unfortunate byproduct of Israel’s military operations. It is the intended outcome of plans and policies that Israel has designed and implemented, over the past 22 months, to deliberately inflict on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction – which is part and parcel of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
As the Canary has reported previously, expert after expert have designated Israel’s actions as genocidal. The evidence is extensive and well-documented. Even then, Amnesty International’s language is a stark departure from their reporting on other conflicts.
Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns at Amnesty International, Erika Guevara-Rosas, said:
As Israeli authorities escalate their attacks on Gaza City and threaten to launch a full-scale ground invasion, the testimonies we have collected are far more than accounts of suffering, they are a searing indictment of an international system that has granted Israel a license to torment Palestinians with near-total impunity for decades.
Amnesty International takes Israel to task
Guevara-Rosas condemned Israel’s blockade, and singled out performative air drops for criticism:
To even begin reversing the devastating consequences of Israel’s inhumane policies and actions, which have made mass starvation a grim reality in Gaza, there must be an immediate, unconditional lifting of the blockade and a sustained ceasefire.
The impact of Israel’s blockade and its ongoing genocide on civilians, particularly on children, people with disabilities, those with chronic illnesses, older people and pregnant and breastfeeding women is catastrophic and cannot be undone by simply increasing the number of aid trucks or restoring performative, ineffective and dangerous airdrops of aid.
Several aid groups have singled out these “dangerous airdrops” as a “grotesque distraction” that won’t actually feed anyone at the level that is needed. Philippe Lazzarini, head of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said:
Driving aid through is much easier, more effective, faster, cheaper & safer. It’s more dignified for the people of Gaza.
However, Israel has demonstrated that it is not interested in feeding Palestinians, much less in a dignified manner. The air drops satisfy the incredibly low standards of Western leaders, whilst also restricting aid for Palestinians. And, the scarcity of food means that what little aid is allowed to trickle in is dispersed extremely chaotically. NPR’s Aya Batrawy reported that pieces of bread are dropped down into the dirt for children to gather. One Palestinian onlooker tells her:
Is this how to bring aid to people who are hungry and tormented? The food is all sand. This isn’t how to bring aid to people. This is how to humiliate them.
As Guevara-Rosas concluded:
While millions around the world continue to take to the streets in protest and world leaders engage in rhetorical posturing, Israel’s deliberate and systematic campaign of starvation continues to inflict unbearable suffering on an entire population.
Designation of famine
Starvation is not something that can happen suddenly. While world leaders have rested on their rhetoric, the situation in Gaza remains between unchanged, and incomprehensibly worse. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system determines whether the famine of threshold has been reached. Less than a month ago, they released an alert which read that:
The worst-case scenario of Famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip. Conflict and displacement have intensified, and access to food and other essential items and services has plummeted to unprecedented levels.
Mounting evidence shows that widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths. Latest data indicates that Famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.
The IPC also found that the food distributed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was inadequate:
most of the food items are not ready-to-eat and require water and fuel to cook, which are largely unavailable.
Israel’s continued insistence that established and experienced aid organisations are blocked from delivering aid is yet another genocidal choice. This is a man-made famine which Israel is choosing to unleash on Palestinians.
Destruction of agriculture
Amnesty International also identify Israel purposely razing the agricultural capabilities that previously existed. They found that:
widespread scarcity of fresh and nutritious food is a result of both Israel’s suffocating blockade and its systematic destruction of food production sources, including large swathes of agricultural land, poultry and other livestock farms, during military operations, through shelling, bombardment or destruction by manually laid explosive.
And, an assessment carried out by the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT), and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO):
found that 86% of Gaza’s permanent crop fields significantly declined in health and density, as a result of conflict-related activities, including razing, bombing, shelling and heavy machinery.
Human cost
Whilst these statistics provide a broad view of Israel’s starvation of Palestinians, the numbers do not portray the human cost that Palestinians have to suffer through. Amnesty International interviewed a number of people facing Israel’s starvation policies. S, a nurse displaced from Jabalia, cares for her two year old and seven month old. Amnesty report that:
She fled to save her children’s lives; it was a choice between displacement and death. She said that hunger became palpable by late April, compelling her to save the meagre food portions for her children while she remained hungry. Her supply of breastmilk began to be severely reduced at the end of April, and with no access to breast pumps and extremely limited access to maternal supplements, she stressed the physical and emotional pain of trying for hours to breastfeed her infant but “milk would just not come out.”
Her children cry themselves to sleep, faint with hunger. Her husband was injured while trying to get aid; her son would fall to the ground, weak with hunger. She told Amnesty:
I feel like I failed as a mother; your children’s hunger makes you feel like you are a bad mother.
And, the researchers found that the situation was equally dire no matter where they went:
Amnesty International’s interviews with displaced Palestinians across three IDP encampments in Gaza City revealed that the dire situation is uniform across the population. None of them had consumed any eggs, fish, meat, tomatoes, or cucumbers for at least a month; most had not had any such food for several months.
Amnesty says the world must stop patting Israel on the shoulder
Amnesty also identify that older people and the increasingly growing number of disabled people are further impacted by starvation. Abu Alaa, 62, described how his family have been surviving on small pieces of bread that they receive just once a week. Nahed, 66, saw people:
carrying bags of flour stained with the blood of those who had just been shot; even people I knew were almost unrecognizable. The experience of hunger and war has changed Gaza completely; it has changed our values.
Aziza, 75, told researchers that she wished to die:
I feel like I have become a burden on my family. When we were displaced, they had to push me on a wheelchair. With toilet queues extremely long in the camp where we stay, I need adult diapers, which are extremely expensive. I need medication for diabetes, blood pressure and a heart condition, and have had to take medicine which has expired. I always feel like these young children, they are the ones who deserve to live, my grandchildren. I feel like I’m a burden on them, on my son.
The lack of nutritious food is especially difficult to manage for people with diabetes. And what few medical professionals remain in Gaza found that starvation was overshadowing:
other health emergencies, particularly the alarming rise in infectious and waterborne diseases, meningitis, and Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS). He added that a severe shortage of antibiotics and the extreme load on his hospital, which is only partially functioning, have compounded what he described as an “invisible catastrophe.”
This doctor told Amnesty that people who were able to manage chronic conditions before the genocide, are struggling to survive, never mind find treatment. The lack of nutrition means that older people and disabled people, along with everyone else, are struggling to heal:
Wounds are taking significantly longer to heal, forcing moderately injured individuals to endure prolonged hospital stays because their bodies are too weak due to the lack of adequate food.
Guevara-Rosas concluded:
The world cannot continue to pat Israel on the shoulder for trickling in aid and viewing these cosmetic measures as a sufficient response to its calculated destruction of the life of Palestinians in Gaza
Featured image via the Canary
This post was originally published on Canary.