The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, has called on Israel to lift its blockade on aid into Gaza as the humanitarian crisis in the coastal enclave worsens daily.
“Not a drop of water, not a grain of wheat,” has entered Gaza since March 2nd, when Israel reimposed a blockade, Unrwa spokeswoman Juliette Touma told the BBC.
In an email to The Irish Times, she said supplies received during the two-month ceasefire that began in mid-January were running out quickly. “It’s been two months of a siege. Gaza is a place that is highly dependent on imports from outside. Every day, Gaza needs 500-600 trucks of supplies (commercial and humanitarian),” she said.
Unrwa is not the only provider of aid to Gaza without provisions. On April 25th, the World Food Programme delivered the last of its food stocks in the strip to kitchens that prepared hot meals and supplied bakeries with flour. In a US public radio interview, WFP director Cindy McCain said:“There’s nothing left. There’s no place to go for food any more.”
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She added: “Food is not political. And to make food political is something that is unconscionable.”
Aid officials reject Israel’s claim that the blockade is necessary because Hamas, the militant group that governs Gaza, steals aid.
In its annual report, Amnesty International wrote, “Israel’s relentless military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip intensified the long-standing humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s 18-year unlawful blockade of Gaza.”
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation has said that before the Israel-Hamas war agriculture made up “approximately 10 per cent of Gaza’s economy, with more than 560,000 people relying entirely or partially on cropping, herding, or fishing for their livelihoods”.
The UN reports the war has devastated farmland and grazing areas, and destroyed the fishing fleet, making Gazans totally dependent on supplies from outside and vulnerable to malnutrition.
Malnutrition negatively affects children’s lives from pregnancy and through life. This month’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification analysis, a tool used by NGOs to assess and improve food security, warned, “Since January, about 10,000 cases of acute malnutrition among children have been identified, including 1,600 cases of severe acute malnutrition.”
The British medical journal the Lancet published a study on February 8th showing life expectancy in Gaza fell steeply during the first year of the war, which began on October 7th, 2023, after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel.
The authors found the war had “generated life expectancy loss of more than 30 years during the first 12 months of the war, nearly halving pre-war levels”, which were in the mid-70s for both men and women.
Israel’s government press office did not respond to The Irish Times’s request for comment on the impacts of the blockade.
