Ramadan begins in Gaza amid mounting starvation
Semafor Signals
Supported by
Insights from the Financial Times, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Los Angeles Times, and Alex de Waal
The News
Huge numbers of Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from worsening hunger as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan gets underway — a period typically celebrated with lavish family feasts following the daily fast.
Food and water shortages have caused the death of at least 25 people in the north of the enclave in recent days, most of them children, Hamas-run authorities said. Nearly 60,000 pregnant women are suffering from malnutrition and dehydration, putting their and their babies’ health at risk.
“Hunger has reached catastrophic levels,” the Financial Times reported Jamie McGoldrick, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territories, as saying.
SIGNALS
Food aid distribution has been disorganized and at times catastrophic
The delivery of food aid to northern Gaza has been disorganized and opaque, to catastrophic effect.
Israel has sent private aid convoys to the north of the enclave — where hunger is especially acute — instead of working with the United Nations on deliveries, and information about them is scarce, the Financial Times reported. The UN’s World Food Programme attempted to send a 14-truck convoy of aid to northern Gaza last week, but was turned away by the Israeli military, the Financial Times reported.
The United States is building a floating pier off Gaza to enable a huge increase in humanitarian supplies – but the dock will take up to 60 days to build. The move follows U.S. efforts to airdrop aid into the enclave — which humanitarian agencies say is insufficient to meet the scale of need. The airdrops too have met with disaster: At least 5 people in Gaza have been killed by airdropped packages, representatives of Gaza’s Al Shifa hospital told CNN, with one journalist on the ground telling the network that packages did not include essential food supplies. “Humanitarian workers always complain that airdrops are good photo opportunities but a lousy way to deliver aid,” the International Crisis Group’s UN director told CNN.
Meanwhile, a group of around 40 Israelis have held protests at two border crossings between Israel and Gaza in an attempt to stop aid from entering the enclave as long as Hamas continues to hold Israeli hostages, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported. “We must strangle them so that they return my brothers,” one protester said.
For the Palestinian diaspora, this year’s Ramadan is ‘overshadowed with grief’
“This Ramadan, I oscillate between a profound sense of loss and sadness and a feeling of urgency and obligation to do anything I can to help my family, to organize, to speak out,” Laila El-Haddad, a U.S.-based Palestinian cookbook author, wrote in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, describing this year’s holiday as being “overshadowed with overwhelming grief.” El-Haddad has lost more than 100 extended family members in Gaza since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks prompted a massive retaliatory operation by Israel. Others in her family live in the southern city of Rafah, where an attack from Israel is believed to be imminent, despite warnings of a “red line” from the Biden administration. Her relatives who have access to limited food are paying hugely inflated prices, she wrote, and are forced to improvise with whatever ingredients are on hand.
The era of famines was once thought to be over – now tens of millions face extreme hunger
A few years ago it looked as though the world may have moved beyond large-scale famines, but today widespread food crises in Africa and the Middle East put millions at risk of extreme hunger.
A decades-long effort to improve world nutrition has stalled, wrote Alex de Waal, the executive director of Tufts University’s World Peace Foundation, in a guest essay for The New York Times, arguing that he “underestimated the cruel resolve of some war leaders to use starvation as a weapon,” while also overestimating the capabilities of largest humanitarian donors to feed those in conflict zones. While Gaza is at the forefront of places where the population risks starvation, an urgent crisis is unfolding around the Red Sea, where more than 90 million people across Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Yemen are “descending toward mass starvation”, de Waal wrote — mostly as a result of war and violence.
Rising food prices and partisan disputes over aid budgets are also to blame for the worsening crisis, de Waal argued. “American leaders should not be bickering over stopping famine,” he wrote. “They should be leading the world in delivering help.”
