Famine ‘catastrophically intensifying’ under Israel’s blockade: Hamas
The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas has accused Israel of deliberately seeking to “create famine and a worsening humanitarian catastrophe” in the besieged Gaza Strip.
In a statement released on Monday, Hamas called for the Israeli blockade to be lifted to allow humanitarian aid to flow into the blockaded region “under UN supervision and free from any interference from the [Israeli] occupation”.
The resistance group also rejected a US-Israeli push to launch a new foundation to distribute assistance to Gaza and circumvent the United Nations.
“The only entities authorized to manage and distribute aid are the relevant UN and governmental organizations, not the occupation or its agents,” the group said.
Humanitarian organizations also have rejected any alternative aid distribution efforts, saying the UN is best equipped to handle deliveries of much-needed assistance to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Separately, food security experts said in a stark warning on Monday that the besieged Palestinian strip is at critical risk of famine if Israel doesn’t lift its blockade and stop its military campaign.
Outright famine is the mostly likely scenario unless conditions change, according to findings by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a leading international authority on the severity of hunger crises.
Nearly a half million Palestinians are in “catastrophic” levels of hunger, meaning they face possible starvation, the report said, while another million are at “emergency” levels of hunger.
Commenting on the report, the head of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said any delay in restoring the flow of aid “bringing us closer to famine.”
“If we fail to act, we are failing to uphold the right to food, which is a basic human right,” FAO Director-General QU Dongyu said.
Israel has banned any food, shelter, medicine or other goods from entering the Palestinian territory for the past 10 weeks, even as it carries out waves of airstrikes and a brutal ground military campaign in the besieged region.
Gaza’s population of around 2.3 million people relies almost entirely on outside aid to survive, because Israel’s 19-month-old military campaign has wiped away most capacity to produce food inside the territory.
