Humanitarian doctors and workers within Gaza, with excess of work and subfined, have been warning for months about the critical lack of food and the spiral cost of the little available due to the restrictions of offensive and paralyzing help of Israel. They say their worst fears are going on.
“Now we face a mass health disaster,” Dr. Ahed Jabo Khalaf, a pediatrician and intensive care specialist at Nasser Hospital in Khan Youunis said on the ground. He said Wednesday that several more children had died of malnutrition that day alone.
The warnings occurred as the main body of the world about hunger, the integrated classification of the Food Security phase, or IPC, sounded the alarm that the “worst hunger hunger scenario” was now developing in the Palestinian enclave under the restrictions on military aid and Mortal Aid of Israel.
A ‘turning point’?
International outrage has grown as the scenes show hunger extending through the enclave, with dozens dying due to malnutrition in recent weeks and people collapsing on earth. Given this growing pressure, the Israeli army began limited pauses in the fight to allow more supplies, but help officials have warned that this is still far from being sufficient.
It seems that the crisis may have already reached a “turning point,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, president of Refugees International.
“Day after day, there are multi -death reports for hunger,” said Konyndyk, an official of the United States Agency for International Development During the Obama and Biden administrations. “That is new, and that suggests that the population has now reached a point of vulnerability and deprivation,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday before the IPC report was published.
“And when you start seeing that in small numbers, that tells you that larger numbers come.”
“We have seen this in previous conditions of the famine, where once the numbers, the mortality numbers begin to increase, we have to act quickly and urgently to stop the tide of the deaths due to the starvation,” said Jeanette Bailey, leader of Global IRC practice and director of nutrition research. “If we do not act now, we will see that these numbers increase exponentially, very quickly.”
The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza said Wednesday that 154 people had died for hunger since the war began, including 89 children. In a sign of how the situation has changed, it is only in the last weeks that the Ministry has published daily updates of that count.
“We know for almost all past famines, that the data always take time to achieve reality in the field,” said Konyndyk, pointing out the particular difficulties to access the data given Israeli restrictions in access to Gaza.
“The situation has reached a critical turning point,” said Emily Keats, an international health scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. She said that “it would continue to get worse unless the population can safely access adequate food and health services.”
The Office of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Tuesday after the IPC alert that the situation in Gaza was “difficult”, but said that Hamas had benefited from “trying to feed the perception of a humanitarian crisis.”
‘The impact is permanent’
Anyway, several health experts and defenders said that children who grow in Gaza would now suffer the health impacts of the hunger crisis in the coming years.
“His little bodies are closing,” Lanning said.
There had been an “increase in the number of children and babies who are being admitted to the hospital for malnutrition,” he said.
