Famine as a weapon: food trickle choked to just 4% needed in Gaza

Muhammad Amin

Israel’s starvation blockade against northern Gaza’s 400 000 residents has choked off vital food supplies, strangling the trickle into Gaza to just 4% of the food needed to sustain its population, aid agencies say.

Not one of the more substantial World Food Programme parcels usually distributed has made it into Gaza this month. These parcels, which contain pasta, rice, oil and canned meat, have been a lifeline for many families throughout the 374-day genocide.

The death toll Monday has reached 42 289 murdered, with 98 684 wounded and over 11 000 missing.

“If we cannot get more aid into and across Gaza, we won’t be able to deliver food parcels to more than a million Palestinians in Gaza. People have run out of ways to cope, food systems have collapsed, and the risk of famine is real,” the WFP said in a statement Monday.

In southern and central Gaza, the situation is at breaking point. No food distributions are happening, and bakeries are struggling to secure wheat flour, which puts them at risk of shutting down any day, the organisation warned.

As winter approaches, Gazans are exposed without adequate shelter, no fuel and very little aid.

Majed Bamya, the deputy permanent observer of Palestine to the UN, has denounced in a post on X Israel’s nine-day siege of northern Gaza as “a genocide within the genocide”.

Osama Hamdan, Hamas’ representative in Lebanon, told Al Jazeera Israel had “prevented the entry of food supplies to the north for 10 days”, and described Israel’s military actions in the Jabalia refugee camp as “a crime against humanity”.

Scenes of horror’ and the ‘smell of death’ are just some of the phrases used to define the situation in Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza, as Israeli troops lay siege to the city of over 100,000 people.

Al Jazeera says the camp’s inhabitants are, “literally living our last moments,” adding that “enemy tanks are less than 700 meters away from us. The artillery is shelling us and the quad-copters are controlling the movement of people and firing at us.”

“Jabalia is straight out of a horror movie with it being completely surrounded with quad-copters shooting at people, war jets hovering above, bombs still ongoing, tank shelling,” Palestinian policy analyst Mariam Barghouthi wrote on X.

Gaza policy analyst Saeed Ziad said the camp was home to 150,000 starving people and that more than 1,000 homes have been blown up.

“No siege has been imposed like the one currently being imposed on Jabalia, and no genocide has been carried out like the one being carried out there,” Ziad wrote.

Mustafa Barghouti, head of the Palestinian National Initiative  said the Israeli army was forcing Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza to walk in front of army vehicles as human shields, Mustafa Barghouti, the chief of the Palestinian National Initiative, said on X.

Middle East Eye supported his claim that Israeli troops in Jabalia were burning houses and bombing them with tank and artillery fire.

“The Israeli army is committing terrible massacres in Jabalia refugee camp and many areas in North Gaza,” Bargouthi said.