In the northern Gaza Strip, Palestinians are experiencing a combination of bankruptcy, spate of Israeli attacks and severe hunger, with residents reporting that they are facing acute shortages of vegetables, fruit, and meat, surviving only on bread.
According to independent UN investigators, the Israeli military has used starvation of the population as a weapon of war and a policy that amounts to collective punishment of civilians.
For approximately a year along, the Israeli occupation has maintained a rigorous blockade on the Gaza Strip, drastically curtailing the flow of vital foodstuffs and medical supplies, especially to the north.
This has recently led five out of six bakeries in the northern Gaza Strip to shut down its doors in the face of the starved people, resulting from a relentless Israeli blockade on the entry of fuel and raw materials needed to produce bread.
Kamel Ajjour, an owner of a bakery in northern Gaza, has appealed to the international organizations, including the UN, to immediately intervene to prevent the outbreak of famine in northern Gaza and for the swift delivery of fuel and essential materials to sustain bread production in the enclave.
“Our bakery is the only one still functioning in the area and is likely to close within a week if Israel continues to block the entry of fuel and essential supplies,” he told Anadolu Agency on Sunday.
He added that no fuel has been delivered to the bakeries in northern Gaza for more than 10 days, warning of a severe crisis if his bakery also halted its operations in northern Gaza.
“The supply of critical ingredients such as flour, sugar, and yeast has been significantly reduced for nearly a month,” he said.
The famine crisis has taken more souls from the children generation in northern Gaza. Dozens of children, including infants, died of malnutrition; residents were being forced to eat grass and tree leaves as the crisis peaked in March.
Moreover, Israeli forces repeatedly killed aid-seeking people in northern Gaza, attacking their clearly marked humanitarian vehicles with no reasons despite that the humanitairian officers provided coordinates with the Israeli military before conducting aid operations.
The UN has long warned that famine is looming in Gaza, with 1.1 million people – about half of the population – facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity.
A report by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a UN-backed initiative, found month at that time that the entire population of Gaza, estimated to be around 2.3 million, is enduring “acute” food insecurity, while half the population suffers from a greater level of food insecurity classified as “catastrophic”.
The UN’s Ocha also estimated that Israeli authorities have denied 30 percent of humanitarian aid missions to northern Gaza since the beginning of March.
Oxfam also warned that as Israel continues to choke aid flows into the Gaza enclave, civilians in northern Gaza were consuming less than 12% of the recommended daily 2,100 calories needed.
This means that they were surviving on only less than one can of fava beans, an average of 245 calories per day, according to Oxfam which also revealed that the total food deliveries allowed into Gaza for the entire 2.2 million population amounted to an average of just 41% of the daily calories needed per person in March and months later.
“Israel is making deliberate choices to starve civilians. Imagine what it is like, not only to be trying to survive on 245 calories day in, day out, but also having to watch your children or elderly relatives do the same,” said Amitabh Behar, Oxfam’s executive director.
The gradually deteriorating state of famine in the north of Gaza and the numbers of children’s malnutrition being in the rise could all provide convincing evidence to the list of crimes presented to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Israel faces allegations of genocide.
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