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Saturday, July 6, 2024

Israel’s Campaign of Starvation in Gaza Has Palestinians Eating Weeds to Survive

July 6, 2024
Ahmad Abdulrahim, 38, strolled the remains of the markets in Gaza City with 150 Shekels in his pocket, the amount of money he used to feed his family of five for a week before the genocide. Today, that amount can hardly buy a single meal.

The markets, now little more than bombed-out remains, are empty of all basic needs, including vegetables, meat, and fruits. For the majority of people, such luxuries are unavailable except at unimaginable prices. Most vegetables, rare though they are, come from people’s gardens.
All Ahmad could find were cleaning supplies and canned foods. Ahmad told Mondoweiss that due to his children’s long-term dependence on these foods, they’ve started to develop health problems. After a protracted search, Ahmad found some zucchini; he walked faster when he noticed the seller, who had placed them in a small pile on the ground on top of a plastic bag. When he asked about the price, he was surprised to know that one kilogram of zucchini cost 80 Shekels ($20). Before the war, it used to be 3 shekels per kilo (less than a dollar).
Such was the price for most other vegetables that could be found. One kilo of green peppers cost 250 shekels ($66), where it used to be 5 ($1.4). One kilo of cucumber and tomato cost 90-100 shekels ($23-$26), which used to be 2-3 shekels (53-80 cents).
Ahmad said that as he walked back home, disappointed, he was dreading his family’s reaction when they found out that he spent almost half of their money on two cans of beans.
“I’m starting to deal with my kids as adults,” he said. “I’m telling them this is war, and our enemy wants us to starve. I’m telling them that we should be thankful that we have been able to survive so far. I promise them that when this war ends, I will bring them whatever they want.”
The state of starvation in Gaza has not ended. In northern Gaza, it has dramatically increased, but in ways that are different from how it was at the war’s outset. Protracted periods of malnutrition and deprivation from vital nutrients are having a cumulative impact on Gaza’s population, especially for those who most need it, such as children and pregnant women.
“Before this crisis, there was enough food in Gaza to feed the population,” WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said back in March. “Malnutrition was a rare occurrence. Now, people are dying, and many more are sick. Over a million people are expected to face catastrophic hunger unless significantly more food is allowed to enter Gaza.”
Only 0.8% of children under the age of five were suffering from acute malnutrition before the war, the WHO also said. By February, that figure had jumped to 12.4% – 16.5%.
Ever since those numbers were reported, Israel’s genocidal war has only worsened the systematic deprivation of food to the population. But Israeli propaganda would have us believe that there is no famine, and there is no Israeli policy of deliberate starvation. Many Israeli media outlets misleadingly focus on technical definitions of what constitutes a famine and dishonestly misquote passages from the UN’s ICP reports on conditions in Gaza.
The reality on the ground tells an opposite story, one in which the systematic deprivation of Gaza’s population from sources of nutrition is leading to long-term consequences. Gaza health officials and medical workers have already observed it for weeks.
Hussam Abu Safia, Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, told Aljazeera that the specter of famine was once again sweeping northern Gaza, stressing that the lack of availability of foods with diverse nutritional values will have a long-term impact on the population. Since the start of the Israeli army’s second invasion of the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in Gaza City last week, access of residents in northern Gaza to food has only worsened.
Abu Safia said that no basic materials have entered the northern Gaza Strip for weeks, leaving flour as the only available staple. This is far from sufficient to meet the nutritional needs of children, the elderly, and pregnant women, all of whom require fats and proteins, Abu Safia asserted.
“Within 14 days, 214 children have arrived at the hospital showing signs of malnutrition,” Abu Safiya told Al Jazeera well before the second invasion of Shuja’iyya began. “Including over 50 cases of advanced malnutrition and 6 cases in critical condition in the intensive care unit.”
“These children are living solely on fluid replacements, and we do not have any milk or special food for them, which puts their lives at risk,” he said.
Eating Tree Leaves
People in the north of Gaza can tell that this wave of hunger is the worst to visit the strip so far, leaving many wondering about their prospects for survival if these conditions do not change.
Some residents of Gaza City have resorted to using tree leaves, such as mulberry leaves, to prepare dawali, a dish typically comprised of fragrant rice wrapped in grape leaves.
“People are cooking weeds,” Mahmoud Issa, a local journalist and resident of Gaza City, told Mondowiess shortly before the Shuja’iyya invasion. “They cook leaves in water and spices. Even using the water is risky, because there’s no power to run the desalination plants.”
“Solar power is no longer available in Gaza either. Israeli drones have systematically targeted every solar panel on every roof across Gaza. They want people to lose hope and starve,” he continued.
Issa explained that people believe expired canned foods, when made available in Gaza, are making their children sick. This has led some to try to avoid such foods for fear that they would not be able to get treatment for their kids should they fall ill, given that northern Gaza no longer has any health system to speak of.
“Families know there is no way to treat their children if they get poisoned, so they are abandoning canned foods,” he said.
But even though cases of food poisoning due to the consumption of expired food products have been reported in Gaza, reports are also emerging of additional cases of food poisoning from forage eating.
Fruits, vegetables, chicken, meat, and fish are all unavailable in Gaza, Mahmoud explained.
“Three months ago, the Israeli checkpoint in the Kuwaiti Square was closed, and the checkpoint in al-Rasheed Street was closed, too,” he said. “The Israeli army allows the entrance of food trucks from the Erez crossing, but that is not enough for the population in northern Gaza.”
“When the Rafah crossing was working, over 60 trucks used to arrive, including frozen vegetables, meat, chicken, and other necessary food,” he explained. “We could survive then. It was tolerable. But now every crossing is closed, and people have started to starve.”
 
Khaled Elgindy
As hopes for a Gaza cease-fire continue to fade, the threat of a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah is now greater than at any time since October 7.
Following the release of a Hezbollah video shot by surveillance drones over various targets in northern Israel, Israeli officials warned of “an all-out war” in which Hezbollah will be destroyed and Lebanon would be sent “back to the Stone Age.” Not to be outdone, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah is threatening a war with “no restraint and no rules and no ceilings.”
Such a war would be catastrophic for Lebanese and Israeli civilians alike, and risks drawing Iran into wider conflict that engulfs the entire region. It would also instantly unravel what had been one of the Biden administration’s few achievements since October 7—preventing a full-blown regional war.
Even as the Israel-Lebanon front heats up, however, the most serious threats to de-escalation in Lebanon and to prospects for a Gaza cease-fire come from the Biden administration itself.
One need only look at realities in Gaza, where nearly nine months of war have cost the lives of more than 37,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them women and children, and reduced most of Gaza to rubble. Despite putting forward a comprehensive cease-fire plan, which now has the backing of the United Nations Security Council, the Biden administration has done little to alter the basic cost-benefit calculations of either side—particularly Israel’s.
Despite the massive death and destruction inflicted on Gaza, Hamas’ command and control remains intact while Israel still has no signal achievement by which to claim victory. Moreover, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as is widely understood, has a personal interest in prolonging the war for as long as possible in order to maintain his grip on power (and hence also avoid going to jail).
Despite the administration’s assertions that only Hamas stands in the way of a cease-fire, even Netanyahu has dropped the pretense, noting that “we are committed to continue the war after the pause in order to achieve the goal of destroying Hamas. I will not give up on this.” For its part, Hamas has little incentive to go along with a cease-fire deal that does not actually lead to an end of the war. And despite Biden’s pledge to hold Israel to its commitments, the administration’s record over the last several months hardly inspires confidence.
Instead of attempting to change the incentive structure of both sides, the Biden administration has consistently worked to absorb, deflect, or otherwise offset any potential costs or consequences that Israel could incur by continuing the war, thereby prolonging it. Despite serious and growing differences between the U.S. and Israel over both its conduct and goals of the war, the administration has continued to provide nearly unrestricted military, political, and diplomatic support for Israel’s military campaign at virtually every stage—regardless of the costs for Palestinians and even when it has strongly disagreed with those actions.
The list of examples is as long as it is disturbing—from the administration’s endless, and largely unheeded, pleas for Israel to do more to limit civilian casualties, scale back its “indiscriminate” bombing, allow more humanitarian aid to Gaza’s starved population, and lay out a clear post-war endgame for Gaza, to the President’s supposed “red line” in Rafah, which Netanyahu has blown through as effortlessly as he did previous ultimatums by the administration.
With the exception of holding up a single shipment of the 2,000 and 500-pound bombs that had already killed thousands of innocents and annihilated most of Gaza’s infrastructure, Biden has kept the weapons flowing, despite the administration’s own assessment that U.S. weapons were likely used by Israel in violation of international humanitarian law.
Not only has Netanyahu avoided paying a price for his defiance of the U.S., the administration has continued to reward him and his far-right government with virtually unrestricted military, political, and diplomatic support. Even when Netanyahu publicly accused the administration of holding back weapons, the White House rushed to clarify that apart from the one shipment there was no disruption in the flow of weapons.
Congress has only amplified Netanyahu’s political impunity with its bipartisan invitation for him to deliver a joint address to Congress this month, a move many Israelis, including former prime minister Ehud Barak, have decried as a “terrible mistake.”
In announcing his cease-fire plan, which the U.S. slyly sought to couch as an Israeli proposal, Biden made it a point to declare Hamas no longer had the ability to carry out another October 7 and that it was “time for this war to end,” thus offering Netanyahu a victory narrative and a ledge from which to climb down from his impossible perch of “total victory” and destroying Hamas—an offer the Israeli premier has pointedly declined, in large part because he understands there is no price to pay for doing so.
Among other things, this has put the Biden administration in the awkward position of continuing to provide material support for a war that, for all intents and purposes, it no longer supports politically. This fundamental contradiction lies at the core of the repeated cease-fire failures in Gaza as well as the escalation on the Israeli-Lebanese front.
The same muddled message to Israel—“We’d rather you didn’t, but we’ll still back you up when you do”—which may be the closest thing we’ve seen yet to a Biden Doctrine—is now being extended to Lebanon. The administration has warned Israel against an all-out invasion of Lebanon or “small regional war,” which risks drawing Iran into an even wider and more catastrophic regional conflict, and has intensified its diplomatic efforts to forestall such an outcome.
As Israel and Hezbollah have inched ever closer toward blown-blown war, however, the administration has shifted its messaging, assuring Israeli leaders that the U.S. will continue to back Israel militarily even in the event of a full-scale war while at the same time warning Hezbollah that U.S. cannot prevent Israel from mounting a full-scale invasion.
What better way to undercut U.S. diplomacy than by reinforcing Netanyahu’s preference for military solutions over diplomatic ones.
This basic contradiction stems from the administration’s belief that differences or difficulties in the U.S.-Israel relationship serve as motivation for Hezbollah, Hamas, and other members of the “axis of resistance” to continue and expand the fighting, and thus that the best deterrent is to eliminate any public daylight between the United States and Israel. As the past nine months (if not several decades) have shown, however, precisely the opposite is true—the provision of virtually restricted weapons and diplomatic support reduces the costs of continued military action for Israel and encourages reckless behavior, such as we have seen throughout the Gaza war.
As Israel’s chief political enabler and weapons supplier, the United States absolutely has the ability—even a responsibility—to constrain Israel from taking actions that directly harm broader U.S. interests, as both an attack on Lebanon and the lack of a cease-fire in Gaza both do.
But for reasons of both domestic politics and the president’s own deeply held personal views, the Biden administration has chosen not to use its substantial leverage.
The Biden administration no doubt understands that the surest way to prevent a further escalation in Lebanon is to end the horrific war in Gaza, though it has failed to grasp its own role in fueling both of these. For the U.S. to bring about an end to the Gaza war and prevent an equally disastrous regional war, this will have to change, including most notably by withholding the political and military support Israel’s far-right government needs to sustain the war in Gaza or expanding it to Lebanon.
As long as the U.S. persists in absorbing or deflecting Israel’s costs for maintaining the war, not only will the horrors in Gaza continue but may only be a matter of time before extending the devastation to Lebanon as well.

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