Gaza is still facing widespread famine because of Israel’s deliberate starvation of the population:
Israel is blocking all but a trickle of humanitarian aid from entering Gaza, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said, with almost no ready-to-eat food entering what its spokesperson described as “the hungriest place on earth”.
Spokesperson Jens Laerke said only 600 of 900 aid trucks had been authorised to get to Israel’s border with Gaza, and from there a mixture of bureaucratic and security obstacles made it all but impossible to safely carry aid into the region.
“What we have been able to bring in is flour,” he told a regular news conference on Friday. “That’s not ready to eat, right? It needs to be cooked… 100% of the population of Gaza is at risk of famine.”
Permitting a trickle of aid is useless when a flood is needed. Letting only a small amount in after months of total siege is obviously not providing real relief, and it isn’t intended to. The Israeli government allows some token deliveries in so that they can distract attention from their ongoing starvation crimes. They let the people they have been starving to death have a few crumbs and then congratulate themselves on their benevolence.
It is a deeply cynical tactic. It is meant to reduce international pressure on Israel so that their government can continue its genocidal campaign. Finance Minister Smotrich said earlier this month that their government would permit only the “minimum necessary” into Gaza so “that the world does not stop us and accuse us of war crimes.”
The distribution of even this small amount of aid has already been marred by chaos and violence. The so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation backed by the U.S. cannot deliver aid on the scale required by a starving population, and it isn’t meant to do that. Commenting on the shooting of hungry Palestinians, Ahmad Ibsais said, “It was the logical endpoint of a system not designed to nourish the hungry, but to control and contain them.”
Read the rest of the article at Eunomia
Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
