The Gaza Strip remains at high risk of famine as the Israeli war on the besieged enclave persists and access to aid is restricted, with international organizations warning that the Gazans endure subhuman conditions.
More than 495,000 people across the besieged Palestinian territory are facing “catastrophic food insecurity,” according to the United Nation’s hunger monitoring system, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).
That is down from a forecast of 1.1 million in the previous update three months ago, but is still more than one-fifth of Gaza’s population, the IPC said on Tuesday.
Households suffer an extreme lack of food, leading to acute malnutrition in young children, an imminent risk of starvation, and deaths, it reported.
More than 20 percent of people reported going entire days and nights without eating. Overall, about 96 percent of the population will continue to face high levels of acute food insecurity until September.
Citing the IPC’s report, the Mercy Corps aid group said that people in Gaza are “enduring subhuman conditions” with a third of the population picking through trash to survive in the oppressive summer heat.
The new IPC acute food security report released today projects that 96% of Gaza’s population—2.15 million people—face high levels of acute food insecurity.
The people of Gaza cannot endure these hardships any longer. #CeasefireNOW
Read our statement: https://t.co/cebjtwEuYH
— Mercy Corps (@mercycorps) June 25, 2024
“The fact that the entire population of Gaza is at emergency levels of hunger with nearly 500,000 people starving should come as no surprise, as the world has been watching Gaza’s humanitarian crisis worsen for nine months,” Mercy Corps’ Vice President of Global Policy and Advocacy, Kate Phillips-Barrasso, said.
“People are enduring subhuman conditions, resorting to desperate measures like boiling weeds, eating animal feed, and exchanging clothes for money to stave off hunger and keep their children alive,” Barrasso added.
Continuous Bombardment
Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation went ahead with massacres, with the Health Ministry in Gaza putting the death toll of the brutal aggression against the besieged territory at 37,718 and the number of wounded people at 86,377 since the war started on October 7.
In one attack, Israeli artillery strikes hit a residential apartment in the Nuseirat refugee camp, killing at least five people.
Another attack in the town of Khuza’a in eastern Khan Younis killed two more people, according to Palestinian sources.
Elsewhere in Gaza, Israeli occupation forces shelled and hit several areas of theCity, killing and wounding an unknown number of people, according to Wafa news agency.
The attacks targeted the neighborhoods of Zeitoun, Sabra, Daraj and Tal Al-Hawa.
Earlier on Wednesday, at least 15 people have been killed in Beit Lahia after the bombardment of the Abu Awad family home sheltering about 40 people, as well as civil infrastructure and nearby houses.
Two more victims were just pulled out from the rubble of the Abu Awwad family home in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, which was levelled to the ground by an Israeli airstrike last night. pic.twitter.com/E9GdhVrNvO
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) June 26, 2024
Gaza’s Civil Defense said the level of destruction left behind after the Israeli bombardment of the Beit Lahia city in northern Gaza “defies imagination”.
Source: Palestinian media and Al-Jazeera
