Aid workers in Gaza say there is already famine in the region, with parents sacrificing leftover food for their children, with an apple costing $8 (£6.30). ) find it almost impossible to find fuel for cooking.
The United Nations agency said Gaza urgently needs more humanitarian aid after the Palestinian Authority reported that more than 24,000 people in the Gaza Strip were killed in Israeli attacks.
The World Food Program, UNICEF and the World Health Organization said in a joint statement that new entry routes into Gaza should be opened and more trucks should be allowed in each day, allowing the movement of aid workers and people seeking aid. Said it was necessary. Get around safely.
Although the UN agency has not directly criticized Israel, it has criticized the opening of too few border crossings, delays in vetting trucks and supplies entering Gaza, and continued fighting to prevent aid supplies from entering Gaza. He said that it was hindering the provision of services.
Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza began after the militant group attacked southern Israel on October 7, killing 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and causing widespread damage across the territory. , most of Gaza's 2.3 million people were forced to flee. Many people were forced to move five, six or seven times in search of safety, losing most of their belongings and money.
In Rafah and Khan Younis in southern Gaza, tents and makeshift shelters have filled nearly all available land, with families crammed into UN-run shelters in apartments and schools, or sleeping on hospital floors. are doing.
“We have no food, no water, no heat. We are dying from the cold,” said Mohammad Kahir, who took refuge in Rafah from northern Gaza.
Hussein Awda, 37, fled northern Gaza after his home was destroyed and many of his relatives were killed at the beginning of the war.
“It's terrible. We only eat one meal a day, bread made from flour and salt. If we could buy canned beans on the black market, we might get them. Otherwise, we I'm hungry,'' said Aouda, who lives with her family in a former vocational school in Khan Younis, which is now home to 35,000 displaced people.
“More aid should be coming in, but we haven't seen anything except some very expensive fruit. There's nothing on the market. We don't know when food will come out again, so we eat.'' I'm trying to reduce the amount.”
Doctors in Gaza said children weakened by lack of food died of hypothermia, and several newborns whose mothers were undernourished did not survive more than a few days.
“We don't have numbers, but we can say that children are dying not only as a direct result of the fighting, but also as a result of the humanitarian situation on the ground,” said Tess Ingram, a spokeswoman for the United Nations children's organization. Told. Fund at Rapha.
Many displaced people have no money left after three months of war and cannot afford even the essentials to make flatbread. The price of a 25 kg bag of flour was $50, six times higher than before the war, and the price of salt had increased by 1,800%. The only fuel available is wood cut from living trees, but it is difficult to burn and expensive.
Continued fighting has made aid services' access to northern Gaza even more difficult, where 300,000 people still live in ruins.
Aid officials say they suspect there are “pockets of hunger” in northern Gaza, but lack of data on child malnutrition and infant mortality make it difficult to meet formal criteria for declaring famine. Said to mean it hasn't been. Images posted on social media on Monday showed hundreds of people rushing onto food trucks.
“There's been very little help up there and a lot of people who couldn't or didn't want to leave their homes have been there since day one,” one official told the Guardian.
The United Nations said Sunday that less than a quarter of an aid convoy reached its northern destination in January as Israeli authorities denied most access.
Israel claims supplies are “piling up” in Gaza and blames the United Nations and other groups for aid delivery problems.
U.N. officials said warehouses were nearly empty over the weekend, although logistical challenges in moving aid across Gaza sometimes caused backlogs.
experts in Integrated food security stage classification The Initiative (IPC), which measures hunger risk around the world for the United Nations, NGOs and governments, estimates that at least one in four households in Gaza will experience “extreme food insecurity, hunger or depleted coping capacity” within three weeks. I predict that you will face it.
The report, released three weeks ago, concluded that the Gaza Strip “has the highest proportion of people facing the highest levels of severe food insecurity of any region or country classified.” ing.
The Palestinian Authority said on Monday that 132 bodies of people killed in Israeli attacks had been transferred to Gaza hospitals in the past day, raising the death toll since the start of the war to 24,100.
Health ministry officials, who do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in their tally, say two-thirds of those killed in the war were women and children.
The Israeli military said on Monday that its troops and aircraft targeted Khan Yunis, the focus of ground attacks, and militant groups in northern Gaza, where Israeli forces continue to expand their control.
Hamas's government press office said two hospitals, a girls' school and “dozens” of homes were damaged.
Bodies were piled up on donkey carts at al-Aqsa Hospital in central Gaza on Sunday.
Hisham Abu Swe, who was waiting outside the emergency ward where his wife was being treated, said his family thought they were safe as civilians.
“We were sitting peacefully when the missile hit,” he said.
The Israeli military has blamed Hamas for the high civilian death toll, saying it deliberately operates out of civilian facilities and uses Gaza residents as human shields. There is. Hamas denies the charges.
