(ProPublica ) – The U.S. government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance concluded this spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza.

The U.S. Agency for International Development delivered its assessment to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the State Department’s refugees bureau made its stance known to top diplomats in late April. Their conclusion was explosive because U.S. law requires the government to cut off weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid. Israel has been largely dependent on American bombs and other weapons in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks.

But Blinken and the administration of President Joe Biden did not accept either finding. Days later, on May 10, Blinken delivered a carefully worded statement to Congress that said, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

Prior to his report, USAID had sent Blinken a detailed 17-page memo on Israel’s conduct. The memo described instances of Israeli interference with aid efforts, including killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.

Lifesaving food was stockpiled less than 30 miles across the border in an Israeli port, including enough flour to feed about 1.5 million Palestinians for five months, according to the memo. But in February the Israeli government had prohibited the transfer of flour, saying its recipient was the United Nations’ Palestinian branch that had been accused of having ties with Hamas.

Separately, the head of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration had also determined that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid and that the Foreign Assistance Act should be triggered to freeze almost $830 million in taxpayer dollars earmarked for weapons and bombs to Israel, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.

The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. The world’s leading independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Local authorities say dozens of children have starved to death — likely a significant undercount. Health care workers are battling a lack of immunizations compounded by a sanitation crisis. Last month, a little boy became Gaza’s first confirmed case of polio in 25 years.

The USAID officials wrote that because of Israel’s behavior, the U.S. should pause additional arms sales to the country. ProPublica obtained a copy of the agency’s April memo along with the list of evidence that the officials cited to back up their findings.

USAID, which is led by longtime diplomat Samantha Power, said the looming famine in Gaza was the result of Israel’s “arbitrary denial, restriction, and impediments of U.S. humanitarian assistance,” according to the memo. It also acknowledged Hamas had played a role in the humanitarian crisis. USAID, which receives overall policy guidance from the secretary of state, is an independent agency responsible for international development and disaster relief. The agency had for months tried and failed to deliver enough food and medicine to a starving and desperate Palestinian population.

It is, USAID concluded, “one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.”

In response to detailed questions for this story, the State Department said that it had pressured the Israelis to increase the flow of aid. “As we made clear in May when [our] report was released, the US had deep concerns during the period since October 7 about action and inaction by Israel that contributed to a lack of sustained delivery of needed humanitarian assistance,” a spokesperson wrote. “Israel subsequently took steps to facilitate increased humanitarian access and aid flow into Gaza.”

Government experts and human rights advocates said while the State Department may have secured a number of important commitments from the Israelis, the level of aid going to Palestinians is as inadequate as when the two determinations were reached. “The implication that the humanitarian situation has markedly improved in Gaza is a farce,” said Scott Paul, an associate director at Oxfam. “The emergence of polio in the last couple months tells you all that you need to know.”

The USAID memo was an indication of a deep rift within the Biden administration on the issue of military aid to Israel. In March, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, sent Blinken a cable arguing that Israel’s war cabinet, which includes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, should be trusted to facilitate aid shipments to the Palestinians.

Lew acknowledged that “other parts of the Israeli government have tried to impede the movement of [humanitarian assistance,]” according to a copy of his cable obtained by ProPublica. But he recommended continuing to provide military assistance because he had “assessed that Israel will not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede U.S. provided or supported” shipments of food and medicine.

Lew said Israeli officials regularly cite “overwhelming negative Israeli public opinion against” allowing aid to the Palestinians, “especially when Hamas seizes portions of it and when hostages remain in Gaza.” The Israeli government did not respond to a request for comment but has said in the past that it follows the laws of war, unlike Hamas.

In the months leading up to that cable, Lew had been told repeatedly about instances of the Israelis blocking humanitarian assistance, according to four U.S. officials familiar with the embassy operations but, like others quoted in this story, not authorized to speak about them. “No other nation has ever provided so much humanitarian assistance to their enemies,” Lew responded to subordinates at the time, according to two of the officials, who said the comments drew widespread consternation.

“That put people over the edge,” one of the officials told ProPublica. “He’d be a great spokesperson for the Israeli government.”

A second official said Lew had access to the same information as USAID leaders in Washington, in addition to evidence collected by the local State Department diplomats working in Jerusalem. “But his instincts are to defend Israel,” said a third official.

“Ambassador Lew has been at the forefront of the United States’ work to increase the flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, as well as diplomatic efforts to reach a ceasefire agreement that would secure the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict,” the State Department spokesperson wrote.

The question of whether Israel was impeding humanitarian aid has garnered widespread attention. Before Blinken’s statement to Congress, Reuters reported concerns from USAID about the death toll in Gaza, which now stands at about 42,000, and that some officials inside the State Department, including the refugees bureau, had warned him that the Israelis’ assurances were not credible. The existence of USAID’s memo, Lew’s cable and their broad conclusions were also previously reported.

But the full accounting of USAID’s evidence, the determination of the refugees bureau in April and the statements from experts at the embassy — along with Lew’s decision to undermine them — reveal new aspects of the striking split within the Biden administration and how the highest-ranking American diplomats have justified his policy of continuing to flood Israel with arms over the objections of their own experts.

Stacy Gilbert, a former senior civil military adviser in the refugees bureau who had been working on drafts of Blinken’s report to Congress, resigned over the language in the final version. “There is abundant evidence showing Israel is responsible for blocking aid,” she wrote in a statement shortly after leaving, which The Washington Post and other outlets reported on. “To deny this is absurd and shameful.

“That report and its flagrant untruths will haunt us.”

The State Department’s headquarters in Washington did not always welcome that kind of information from U.S. experts on the ground, according to a person familiar with the embassy operations. That was especially true when experts reported the small number of aid trucks being allowed in.

“A lot of times they would not accept it because it was lower than what the Israelis said,” the person told ProPublica. “The sentiment from Washington was, ‘We want to see the aid increasing because Israel told us it would.’”

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining” the Israel Defense Forces’ “operational capabilities during the ongoing war.”

The U.S. gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year as a baseline and significantly more during wartime — money the Israelis use to buy American-made bombs and equipment. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other partners can use that money.

One of them is the Foreign Assistance Act. The humanitarian aid portion of the law is known as 620I, which dates back to Turkey’s embargo of Armenia during the 1990s. That part of the law has never been widely implemented. But this year, advocacy groups and some Democrats in Congress brought it out of obscurity and called for Biden to use 620I to pressure the Israelis to allow aid freely into Gaza.

In response, the Biden administration announced a policy called the National Security Memorandum, or NSM-20, to require the State Department to vet Israel’s assurances about whether it was blocking aid and then report its findings to lawmakers. If Blinken determined the Israelis were not facilitating aid and were instead arbitrarily restricting it, then the government would be required by the law to halt military assistance.

Blinken submitted the agency’s official position on May 10, siding with Lew, which meant that the military support would continue.

“Blinken, Soup Nazi,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / IbisPaint / Clip2Comic, 2024

In a statement that same day, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., criticized the administration for choosing “to disregard the requirements of NSM-20.”

“Whether or not Israel is at this moment complying with international standards with respect to facilitating humanitarian assistance to desperate, starving citizens may be debatable,” Van Hollen said. “What is undeniable — for those who don’t look the other way — is that it has repeatedly violated those standards over the last 7 months.”

As of early March, at least 930 trucks full of food, medicine and other supplies were stuck in Egypt awaiting approval from the Israelis, according to USAID’s memo.

The officials wrote that the Israeli government frequently blocks aid by imposing bureaucratic delays. The Israelis took weeks or months to respond to humanitarian groups that had submitted specific items to be approved for passage past government checkpoints. Israel would then often deny those submissions outright or accept them some days but not others. The Israeli government “doesn’t provide justification, issues blanket rejections, or cites arbitrary factors for the denial of certain items,” the memo said.

Israeli officials told State Department attorneys that the Israeli government has “scaled up its security check capacity and asserted that it imposes no limits on the number of trucks that can be inspected and enter Gaza,” according to a separate memo sent to Blinken and obtained by ProPublica. Those officials blamed most of the holdups on the humanitarian groups for not having enough capacity to get food and medicine in. USAID and State Department experts who work directly with those groups say that is not true.

In separate emails obtained by ProPublica, aid officials identified items in trucks that were banned by the Israelis, including emergency shelter gear, solar lamps, cooking stoves and desalination kits, because they were deemed “dual use,” which means Hamas could co-opt the materials. Some of the trucks that were turned away had also been carrying American-funded items like hygiene kits, the emails show.

In its memo to Blinken, USAID also cited numerous publicly reported incidents in which aid facilities and workers were hit by Israeli airstrikes even sometimes after they had shared their locations with the IDF and received approval, a process known as “deconfliction.” The Israeli government has maintained that most of those incidents were mistakes.

USAID found the Israelis often promised to take adequate measures to prevent such incidents but frequently failed to follow through. On Nov. 18, for instance, a convoy of aid workers was trying to evacuate along a route assigned to them by the IDF. The convoy was denied permission to cross a military checkpoint — despite previous IDF authorization.

Then, while en route back to their facility, the IDF opened fire on the aid workers, killing two of them.

Inside the State Department and ahead of Blinken’s report to Congress, some of the agency’s highest-ranking officials had a separate exchange about whether Israel was blocking humanitarian aid. ProPublica obtained an email thread documenting the episode.

On April 17, a Department of Defense official reached out to Mira Resnick, a deputy assistant secretary at the State Department who has been described as the agency’s driving force behind arms sales to Israel and other partners this year. The official alerted Resnick to the fact that there was about $827 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars sitting in limbo.

Resnick turned to the Counselor of the State Department and said, “We need to be able to move the rest of the” financing so that Israel could pay off bills for past weapons purchases. The financing she referenced came from American tax dollars.

The counselor, one of the highest posts at the agency, agreed with Resnick. “I think we need to move these funds,” he wrote.

But there was a hurdle, according to the agency’s top attorney: All the relevant bureaus inside the State Department would need to sign off on and agree that Israel was not preventing humanitarian aid shipments. “The principal thing we would need to see is that no bureau currently assesses that the restriction in 620i is triggered,” Richard Visek, the agency’s acting legal adviser, wrote.

The bureaus started to fall in line. The Middle East and human rights divisions agreed and determined the law hadn’t been triggered, “in light of Netanyahu’s commitments and the steps Israel has announced so far,” while noting that they still have “significant concerns about Israeli actions.”

By April 25, all had signed off but one. The Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration was the holdout. That was notable because the bureau had among the most firsthand knowledge of the situation after months of working closely with USAID and humanitarian groups to try to get food and medicine to the Palestinians.

“While we agree there have been positive steps on some commitments related to humanitarian assistance, we continue to assess that the facts on the ground indicate U.S. humanitarian assistance is being restricted,” an official in the bureau wrote to the group.

It was a potentially explosive stance to take. One of Resnick’s subordinates in the arms transfer bureau replied and asked for clarification: “Is PRM saying 620I has been triggered for Israel?”

Yes, replied Julieta Valls Noyes, its assistant secretary, that was indeed the bureau’s view. In her email, she cited a meeting from the previous day between Blinken’s deputy secretary and other top aides in the administration. All the bureaus on the email thread had provided talking points to the deputy secretary, including one that said Israel had “failed to meet most of its commitments to the president.” (None of these officials responded to a request for comment.)

But, after a series of in-person conversations, Valls Noyes backed down, according to a person familiar with the episode. When asked during a staff meeting later why she had punted on the issue, Valls Noyes replied, “There will be other opportunities,” the person said.

The financing appears to have ultimately gone through.

Less than two weeks later, Blinken delivered his report to Congress.

The Israeli strikes came a day after a Houthi drone strike, which may amount to a war crime, on a Tel Aviv residential neighborhood that killed one civilian and wounded four others. The Israeli airstrikes, which killed at least six civilians and reportedly injured at least 80 others, hit more than two dozen oil storage tanks and two shipping cranes in Hodeidah port in northwest Yemen, as well as a power plant in Hodeidah’s Salif district. The attacks appeared to cause disproportionate harm to civilians and civilian objects. Serious violations of the laws of war committed willfully, that is deliberately or recklessly, are war crimes.

“The Israeli attacks on Hodeidah in response to the Houthis’ strike on Tel Aviv could have a lasting impact on millions of Yemenis in Houthi-controlled territories,” said Niku Jafarnia, Yemen and Bahrain researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Yemenis are already enduring widespread hunger after a decade-long conflict. These attacks will only exacerbate their suffering.” 

Human Rights Watch interviewed 11 people about the Hodeidah attack, including a Houthi official in Yemen’s oil industry and four United Nations agency staff with knowledge of the port. Human Rights Watch also analyzed satellite imagery of the targeted locations and photographs of potential weapons remnants collected by the nongovernmental organization Mwatana for Human Rights. Human Rights Watch sent its preliminary findings to Israeli authorities on July 31 and to the Houthis on August 7. Neither has replied.

The Israeli attacks killed Ahmed Abdullah Musa Jilan, Salah Abdullah Muqbil al-Sarari, Abdul Bari Muhammad Yusuf Ezzi, Nabil Nasher Abdo Abdullah, Abu Bakr Hussein Abdullah Faqih, and Idris Dawood Hassan Ahmed, all Yemen Petroleum Company employees. The Houthi drone strike on Tel Aviv killed 50-year-old Yevgeny Ferder in an apartment building. 

An Israel Defense Forces spokesperson, Daniel Hagari, said that the Houthi drone was an “Iranian-made Samad-3” unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The Samad-3’s guidance and targeting capabilities are unclear, and the Houthi’s target was uncertain, making it difficult to determine whether the strike hit its intended target. The Houthis did not indicate that it was attacking a military objective, but stated that they had struck an “important target,” possibly a reference to the US Embassy branch office in the vicinity.

The Houthi attack, which deliberately or indiscriminately harmed civilians and civilian objects, may amount to a war crime. In recent months, the Houthis have indiscriminately launched numerous missiles at the Israeli port towns of Eilat and Haifa. 

Human Rights Watch found that Israeli forces damaged or destroyed at least 29 of the 41 oil storage tanks at Hodeidah port, as well as the only two cranes used for loading and unloading supplies from ships. The airstrikes also destroyed oil tanks connected to the Hodeidah power plant, causing the power plant to stop operating for 12 hours.  

A remnant that Mwatana for Human Rights collected at the site bore the markings of Woodward, a US manufacturing company, and matches remnants collected in other contexts of the GBU-39 series bomb made by the US company Boeing. The GBU-39, known as the “small diameter bomb,” is a guided, airdropped munition. 

Human Rights Watch also wrote to Woodward and Boeing on August 14 but did not receive a response

The Hodeidah port is critical for delivering food and other necessities to the Yemeni population, who depend on imports. About 70 percent of Yemen’s commercial imports and 80 percent of its humanitarian assistance passes through Hodeidah port, which UN Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative Auke Lootsma said was “absolutely crucial to commercial and humanitarian activities.” Rosemary DiCarlo, under-secretary-general for the UN Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, described the port as a “lifeline for millions of people” that should be “open and operating.” 

A UN agency official said that about 3,400 people, all civilians, work at the port. The official said on July 30 that he had not “seen a single new vessel entering the port since the attack, which is an alarming indication” for humanitarian aid provision. Other Yemeni ports lack the same capacity to manage imports, and the damage and destruction of the oil tanks, loading cranes, and broader damage to the port’s facilities would take significant funding and time to rebuild. 

The Houthi oil industry official said that the early evening strikes were carried out “while dozens of civilians were there, including staff who run these tanks, and truck drivers who were there to take oil to transport to other governorates.” 

Human Rights Watch analysis of satellite imagery found that the oil tanks burned for at least three days, posing environmental concerns. Musaed Aklan, an environmental expert at the Sana’a Center, a Yemeni research group, said that “the toxic fumes resulting from the burning of thousands of tons of fuel … undoubtedly pose a serious risk to public health.” He said that oil leaks from the tanks into surrounding areas “risk contaminating nearby water sources, soil, beaches, and marine habitats.”

Hagari, the Israeli military spokesperson, described the target of attack as “Al Hudaydah Port, used by the Houthis as the main supply route for the transfer of Iranian weapons from Iran to Yemen.” He said the Israeli air force “struck dual-use infrastructure used for terrorist activities, including energy infrastructure. Israel’s necessary and proportionate strikes were carried out in order to stop the Houthi’s terror attacks.” The Israeli government has not provided information to substantiate these claims.

Under UN Security Council Resolution 2534 (2020), the UN Mission to Support the Hodeidah Agreement is mandated to oversee Hodeidah city and port to ensure that no military personnel or material are present. An official for a UN agency that monitors the port said that the agency had never found evidence of a Houthi military presence in the port. He said that another UN agency that inspects vessels before they enter the port had not found any weapons. Two UN officials who operate in Hodeidah noted that Houthi authorities provide prior approval for UN access and accompany UN officials on inspections.

The oil industry official said that the oil tanks at the port are not owned by the Houthis but “by Yemeni businessmen who import the oil and resell it to fuel stations and other institutions.” Aid organizations also own some of the oil and use it for their operations. A WFP official said that the organization lost 780,000 liters of fuel in the attack, which it was using to “support hospital generators” and water and sanitation infrastructure across Yemen. The remaining oil is used for various other public purposes, said the oil industry official and Mwatana. Two UN agency officials said that the oil at the port was imported from the United Arab Emirates.

The Israeli airstrikes also struck the main power plant in Hodeidah. Two people knowledgeable about Hodeidah said that the power plant was the city’s main source of electricity, providing electricity to hospitals, schools, businesses, and homes. The climate in Hodeidah governorate is among the hottest in Yemen, making electricity critical for fans, air conditioning, and refrigeration.

The applicable laws of war prohibit deliberate, indiscriminate, or disproportionate attacks on civilians and civilian objects. An attack not directed at a specific military objective is indiscriminate. An attack is disproportionate if the expected civilian loss is excessive compared to the anticipated military gain of the attack. When used by an armed force or non-state armed group, port facilities, oil storage tanks, and electrical power plants can be valid military objectives. 

No information has been made public indicating that weapons or military supplies were being stored at or delivered to the port, or that the oil and electricity, monitored under Resolution 2534, were being diverted to the Houthi military, which would make the Israeli attack unlawfully indiscriminate. However, even if the attack were against valid military objectives, the harm to the civilian population likely made the attack disproportionate. In addition to the reported civilian casualties, the damage to the port facilities would appear to inflict excessive immediate and longer-term harm for large swaths of the Yemeni population who rely on the Hodeidah port for survival.

Israel’s allies, including the United States and the United Kingdom, should suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel so long as its forces commit systematic and widespread laws-of-war violations, including in Gaza and in Lebanon, with impunity. Governments that continue to provide arms to the Israeli government risk complicity in war crimes. 

The UN Panel of Experts on Yemen has also previously found that Iran is likely supplying weapons to the Houthis. Iran should not provide missiles to the Houthis so long as the Houthis continue to use them in unlawful attacks.

“The Israeli airstrikes on critical infrastructure in Hodeidah could have a profoundly devastating impact on many Yemeni lives over the longer term,” Jafarnia said. “Both the Israelis and the Houthis should immediately halt all unlawful attacks affecting civilians and their lives.”

Via Human Rights Watch

—–

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Israeli Strikes damage Fuel Depot at Hodeida

The New Humanitarian quotes Diana Harrara, a 33-year-old mother of three in Gaza: “No word better describes what we’re experiencing than ‘famine.’ Firstly, we have nothing to eat but flour and canned food which we can only obtain as aid. This aid is inconsistent – either small in quantity or infrequent. And even when we do get it, we end up leaving the food behind when rushing from one shelter to the next.”

In the past week, Israel again gave expulsion orders to thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.

The severe food shortages in Gaza are caused by Israeli bombing of farms and gardens and its restrictions on the number of aid trucks permitted in, as well as the chaos and destruction wrought on the networks of food delivery activists. Last week Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich ignited a firestorm when he maintained that it would be morally and legally justified to starve all 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza to death.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported this week that since early May, the quantity of aid shipments that entered Gaza through the Kerem Shalom Crossing and were collected by relief organizations plummeted by more than 80%, declining

]]> https://www.juancole.com/2024/07/starvation-deliberate-sudan.html Wed, 31 Jul 2024 04:02:08 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=219768 By Priti Gulati Cox and Stan Cox

( Tomdispatch.com ) – For months, we’ve all been able to stay reasonably informed about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. But there’s another horrific war that’s gotten so little coverage you could be excused for not knowing anything about it. What we have in mind is the seemingly never-ending, utterly devastating war in Sudan. Think of it as the missing war. And if we don’t start paying a lot more attention to it soon — as in right now — it’s going to be too late.

After 15 months of fighting in that country between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), experts in food insecurity estimate that almost 26 million people (no, that is not a misprint!), or more than half of Sudan’s population, could suffer from malnutrition by September. Eight and a half million of those human beings could face acute malnutrition. Worse yet, if the war continues on its present path, millions will die of hunger and disease in just the coming months (and few people in our world may even notice).

By now, those warring armies have driven Sudan to the brink of all-out famine, partly by displacing more than a fifth of the population from their homes, livelihoods, and farms, while preventing the delivery of food to the places most in need. And you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, with their foreign-policy eyes focused on Gaza and Ukraine, our country’s government and others around the world have paid remarkably little attention to the growing crisis in Sudan, making at best only half-hearted (quarter-hearted?) gestures toward helping negotiate a cease-fire between the SAF and RSF, while contributing only a small fraction of the aid Sudan needs to head off a famine of historic magnitude.

From Emergency to Catastrophe

In late June, the U.N.-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) system, which monitors regions at risk of starvation, reported “a stark and rapid deterioration of the food security situation” in Sudan. It noted that the number of people suffering hunger severe enough to qualify, in IPC terms, as Phase 3 (“Crisis”) or Phase 4 (“Emergency”) has ballooned 45% since the end of last year. In December 2023, no Sudanese had yet made it to Phase 5 (“Catastrophe”), a condition characteristic of famines. Now, more than three-quarters of a million people are in that final phase of starving to death. Indeed, if the conflict continues to escalate, large parts of Sudan may spiral into full-blown famine, a state that exists, according to the IPC, when at least 20% of an area’s population is suffering Phase-5 hunger.

Until recently, the worst conflict and hunger were concentrated in western Sudan and around Khartoum, the country’s capital. Now, however, they’ve spread to the east and south as well. Worse yet, the war in Sudan has by now displaced an astounding 10 million people from their homes, more than four million of them children — a figure that looks like but isn’t a misprint. Many have had to move multiple times and two million Sudanese have taken refuge in neighboring countries. Worse yet, with so many people forced off their land and away from their workplaces, the capacity of farmers to till the soil and other kinds of workers to hold down a paycheck and so buy food for their families has been severely disrupted.

Not surprisingly, 15 months of brutal war have played havoc with crop production. Cereal grain harvests in 2023 were far smaller than in previous years and stocks of grain (which typically supply 80% of Sudanese caloric intake) have already been fully consumed, with months to go before the next harvest, a stretch of time known, even in good years, as the “lean season.” And with war raging, anything but a bumper crop is expected this year. Indeed, just as planting season got underway, fierce fighting spilled over into wheat-growing Gezira, one of Sudan’s 18 “states” and renowned as the nation’s breadbasket.

Sudan desperately needs food aid and it’s simply not getting enough. The U.N. High Commission for Refugees has received less than 20% of the funds necessary to help feed the Sudanese this year and has had to “drastically cut” food rations. As Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, head of the aid nonprofit Mercy Corps, told the New York Times, “World leaders continue to go through the motions, expressing concern over Sudan’s crisis. Yet they’ve failed to rise to the occasion.”

Worse yet, in the swirling chaos, even the food aid that does make it to Sudan is largely failing to reach starving populations in anything approaching adequate quantities — and when available, it’s usually unaffordable. Famished people are reportedly boiling leaves, as well as eating grass, peanut shells, and even dirt.

Starvation: “A Cheap and Very Effective Weapon”

For many families, the one thing keeping starvation at bay may be a local free soup kitchen. In a report published in May, Timmo Gaasbeek of the Netherlands Institute of International Relations noted, “Sudan has a long tradition of sharing food. After the war broke out and hunger spread, community-level initiatives for sharing food sprang up across the country. These ‘soup kitchen’ initiatives are often informal but can be very well organized.”

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Gaasbeek warned, however, that soup kitchens can fill only so many gaping holes in a system shattered by wartime destruction, displacement, and crop failure. His institute estimates that at current rates of food sharing, 2.5 million people could die of hunger and disease by the time crops are harvested in September. In other words, a shocking 10-20% of the Sudanese in the hardest-hit areas could die — mortality rates similar to ones suffered during horrendous famines in parts of Nigeria in 1969, Ethiopia in 1984, and Somalia in 1992.

By Gaasbeek’s calculations, more aggressive food sharing through soup kitchens and other means could cut the total death toll to a still-appalling one million. But that seems unlikely since even the existing efforts by local mutual-aid groups and international organizations to provide food have come under attack from both sides in the war. Six international experts writing for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have accused SAF and RSF of “using food as a weapon and starving civilians.” They also found that the “deliberate targeting of humanitarian workers and local volunteers has undermined aid operations, putting millions of people at further risk of starvation.”

We recently got in touch with Hadeel Mohamed, an educator with whom we’d spoken last October after she fled Sudan for Egypt. In a July 16th email to us, she wrote that “the war in Sudan, like many wars, has proved to be more an attack on civilians than on any armed forces.” Still in contact with neighbors who stayed behind in Khartoum, she reports that neither army is protecting civilians. In fact, the two at times appear to be tag-teaming to do them in. When, for instance, RSF forces carry out a raid, her contacts tell her, SAF troops are often “removed from the locations hours before the attacks occur.” Worse yet, for those now trying to flee as she did last year, “Some said that, in their attempts to escape Khartoum, they’ve encountered RSF forces waiting to loot them. All their supplies were stolen once again!”

Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation told the BBC that the RSF paramilitary is “essentially a looting machine. They rampage through the countryside and towns, stealing everything there is.” They even bombed and looted the last hospital still functioning in Northern Darfur state. No less horribly, the government’s SAF troops are guilty of trying to starve people in areas now occupied and controlled by the RSF and, according to De Waal, neither side is willing to “relinquish what is a cheap and very effective weapon.”

Echoes from a Thousand Miles Away

Is Sudan’s nightmare starting to sound grimly familiar?

* Families displaced multiple times, with war following hot on their heels.

* Food aid falling desperately short of what’s needed.

* Humanitarian aid intercepted by soldiers and other armed men before it can reach intended recipients.

* Soup kitchens attacked.

* Aid workers targeted for death.

* Hospitals bombarded, invaded, and shut down.

* Crop production capacity sabotaged during a hunger emergency.

* Washington doing little or nothing to stop the horror.

Might we be thinking, perhaps, of a small 25-mile strip of territory a thousand miles directly north of Khartoum, just on the other side of Egypt?

Sadly enough, there are many striking parallels between the wars being waged on the civilian populations of Sudan and Gaza. It would nonetheless be wrong to blame world interest in the nightmare in Gaza for drawing attention away from the civil war in Sudan. Neither of those crimes against humanity, in their scale and ghastliness, should be exploited by anyone to minimize the weight and urgency of the other. Worse yet, simply paying more attention to the nightmare in Sudan and sending its people more food aid won’t address the imbalance. The fact is that neither the Sudanese nor the Gazans have received what they most urgently need right now: an end to their respective conflicts.

Efforts by the U.S. and other countries to push for cease-fires in both places and an end to each of those wars have proven almost cataclysmically inadequate and ineffective. For Sudan, it’s been especially discouraging. Talks last year between the SAF and RSF brokered by Saudi Arabia and the United States failed to even reduce the fighting there and recent attempts to revive those talks all too expectably broke down. In early June, Egypt hosted supporters of both of Sudan’s warring parties in Cairo for negotiations. The only outcome: the creation of a supremely bureaucratic subcommittee to draft a meaningless communique.

Collective Courage

Last October, Hadeel Mohamed wrote that there was then only one modest hope in Sudan. For the millions of Sudanese living through their latest national nightmare, she told us, “You really come back to more community-based aid. With our limited resources, with our limited abilities, we still find people rising up to take care of each other.” And they’re still doing it. It’s just not enough to prevent a disastrous famine, as long as the sectarian fighting continues.

With weak support from the outside world, civilians in Sudan have little choice but to rely on long traditions of social cohesion and mutual aid as they work to survive and somehow bring the war in their country to an end. In that, there’s yet another parallel with the war on Gaza’s civilians: the coordinated service, heroism, and sacrifice personified by Palestinian journalists, taxi drivers, first responders, healthcare professionals, and countless other people is now legendary.

Civilians in many such situations are too often portrayed in the world media as nearly helpless victims. The Sudanese and Palestinian people are showing that image to be fallacious by acting with the kind of collective courage, endurance, and solidarity that’s all too rare in the comfortably situated societies that are leaving them to starve. They’re being cruelly victimized, yet they’re refusing to play the victim.

The wartime food-sharing movement in Sudan that operates soup kitchens is a good example. It’s led by grassroots neighborhood groups called “resistance committees” that started forming more than a decade ago in the wake of the Arab Spring, with the mission of providing social protection and provisioning in their home communities. They have since proliferated throughout Sudan, operating locally and independently but together forming a remarkably well-integrated national network.

The resistance committees took a leading role in grassroots protests against the October 2021 military coup that cut short a national transition to democratic rule then underway in Sudan. Eighteen months later, the current war erupted when the two generals who had led that coup turned on each other, with one leading the armed forces and the other the Rapid Support Forces. Throughout the ensuing war, at great risk to their own safety, resistance committee members have played essential lifesaving roles. While working to fend off hunger in their communities, they have also prioritized the maintenance of human rights, continuation of social services, and defense of direct democracy, while urging fervent opposition to the SAF, the RSF, and more generally the incessant militarization of their country. Some are also mobilizing their communities for self-defense.

Sudan expert Santiago Stocker suggested recently that the resistance committees, “because of their support among youth and local legitimacy in Sudan, are a voice the international community should support and elevate.” The committees are one part of a broader grassroots civilian movement that participated in those ill-fated Cairo talks. That movement, Stocker argues, could sooner or later help break the deadlock in Sudan by pressing other nations to move decisively to help end the war. They could urge, for example, that “the international community… increase punitive measures, including sanctions, against RSF and SAF leadership and key members of the SAF’s governing coalition, including businesses and hardline religious groups.”

While it’s important indeed that Gaza remains a focus of our attention as long as the nightmarish Israeli campaign there continues, it’s no less important that those of us in the Global North focus on the less visible war in Sudan and push our governments to impose punitive measures on that country’s generals and other elites, while pulling out all the stops (and ample cash) to get food to the millions who desperately need it.

Sudan should simply no longer be callously ignored.

Copyright 2024 Stan Cox and Priti Gulati Cox

Via Tomdispatch.com

President Joe Biden announced the pier in his State of the Union address, pledging that “massive amounts” of humanitarian aid would come through it for Gaza civilians. The Pentagon is reported to have been taken aback by the announcement, on which they were apparently not consulted.

The little aid that came in through the pier could not easily be distributed because the Israelis have not permitted any governing force to replace Hamas, lest it prove the kernel of a Palestinian state. The security chaos created by the rolling Israeli military operations, which keep chasing people from one place to another, enabled armed gangs to form with an eye to usurping the aid.

The pier broke up in late May because of heavy seas, a problem that critics predicted before it was built. The pier’s humanitarian purpose was belied when it was usurped for a botched Israeli mission to rescue four hostages, in the course of which the Israeli military killed 270 innocents. That use of it ruined it for humanitarian purposes because it was then seen as an adjunct to the Israeli army and was marked as a target for Hamas. UN and other aid workers after that could not afford to have anything to do with the pier. The World Food Program had to hire anonymous contractors to take away the pallets brought in over it, lest they spoil.

It seems clear that the entire operation was a failed exercise in public relations by the Biden administration, which has sat on its hands while the extremist Netanyahu cabinet, full of the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, has half-starved or in some instances whole-starved the Palestinians of Gaza. A US administration has to have an answer when reporters ask it why it is allowing Palestinian children to become emaciated, and the pier was an attempted answer.

The other possibility was for the Biden administration to man up and just tell Netanyahu and his rogues’ gallery cabinet that they cannot starve innocent civilians as part of their campaign against Hamas, and that if they do not cut it out there will be hell to pay. But Biden is in the tank for the Israeli government. He keeps talking about knowing Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin, and though neither was, let us say, nice to Palestinians, they were not genocidal maniacs in the mold of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Biden may or may not be up to the job of the presidency in general, but he certainly is not up to dealing with Netanyahu, whom he has literally enabled to get away with murder (tens of thousands of murders). And Secretary of State Antony Blinken has all the sympathy for the human rights of Palestinians that Henry Kissinger had for those of the Cambodians, East Timorese or the Chileans.

Al Jazeera English Video: “US built aid pier scrapped as parts of Gaza starve”

The pier is gone, but the aid requirements remain. This week a group of United Nations special rapporteurs and other experts said that “the recent deaths of more Palestinian children due to hunger and malnutrition leaves no doubt that famine has spread across the entire Gaza strip.”

They pointed to the documented deaths of three Palestinians from malnutrition, saying, “With the death of these children from starvation despite medical treatment in central Gaza, there is no doubt that famine has spread from northern Gaza into central and southern Gaza.”

Nor, they argue, is this outcome, of stick-thin little kids expiring from Israeli abuse an accident. They write, “We declare that Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza. We call upon the international community to prioritise the delivery of humanitarian aid by land by any means necessary, end Israel’s siege, and establish a ceasefire.”

World Health Organization leader Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus likewise weighed in on Thursday, saying, that 74 aid trucks destined for Gaza are stalled at the Rafah crossing or in Ismailia.

The Israeli military has seized the Egyptian checkpoint at Rafah and is declining to let aid enter there, in contravention of the 1978 Camp David Peace Treaty.

Dr. Hanan Balkhy, the director of the World Health Organization for the Eastern Mediterranean region, is recently back from an 11-day visit to Gaza and the West Bank. She reported “running sewage and garbage in the demolished streets and the smell of fermented waste permeating the air,” saying, “This situation is providing the perfect breeding ground for diseases to spread, leading to an increase in cases of acute watery diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections among many others.” She spoke of a breakdown in law and order that makes it difficult to distribute food and medical supplies, and hinted at widespread violence and rape.

Hundreds of Palestinians needing dialysis or radiation treatment for cancer are thought to have died since the Israeli campaign began.

WHO says that there are at least 10,000 patients in Gaza with conditions, including cancer and severe malnutrition, that cannot be treated under current conditions in the Strip, and who need to be evacuated abroad immediately.

As someone who has studied Russian culture and history for decades, I think of Nazi Germany’s nearly three-year siege of the city of Leningrad, which stands out for the estimated 630,000 people the Germans killed slowly and intentionally thanks to starvation and related causes. Those few Russians I know who survived that war as young children still live with psychological trauma, stunted growth, and gastrointestinal problems. Their struggles, even in old age, are a constant reminder to me of war’s ripple effects over time. Some 20-25 million people died from starvation in World War II, including many millions in Asia. In fact, some scholars believe that hunger was the primary cause of death in that war.

We’ve been taught since childhood that war is mainly about troops fighting, no matter that we live in a world in which most military funding actually has little to do with people. Instead, war treasure chests go disproportionately into arms production rather than troops and (more importantly) their wider communities at home. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons are being developed with little or no ethical oversight or regulation, potentially removing many soldiers from future battlefields but not from the disastrous psychological scars of war. Meanwhile, in war zones themselves, among civilians, the long-term effects of armed conflict play out on the bodies of those with the least say over whether or not we go to war to begin with, its indirect costs including the possibility of long-term starvation (now increasingly rampant in Gaza).

Today, armed conflict is the most significant cause of hunger. According to the United Nations’ World Food Program, 70% of the inhabitants of war- or violence-affected regions don’t get enough to eat, although our global interconnectedness means that none of us are immune from high food, fuel, and fertilizer prices and war’s supply-chain interruptions. Americans have experienced the impact of Ukraine’s war when it comes to fuel and grain prices, but in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, which depend significantly on Eastern European foodstuffs and fuel, the conflict has sparked widespread hunger. Consider it a particularly cruel feature of modern warfare that people who may not even know about wars being fought elsewhere can still end up bearing the wounds on their bodies.

America’s Post-9/11 Forever Wars

As one of the co-founders of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, I often think about the largely unrecognized but far-reaching impact of America’s post-9/11 war on terror (still playing out in dozens of countries around the world). Most of the college students who made news this spring protesting U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza hadn’t even been born when, after the 9/11 attacks, this country first embarked on our decades-long forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and all too many other places. By our count at the Costs of War Project, those wars directly killed nearly one million people in combat, including some 432,000 civilians (and still counting!), and indirectly millions more.

Our forever wars began long before local journalists in war zones first started to post bombings and so many other gruesome visions of the costs of war, including starvation, on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and other social media sites, as they did during the first days of the Russian bombing of Kyiv and, as I write, Israel’s seemingly never-ending assault on Gaza. Those journalists haven’t been fettered by the U.S. military’s embed programs, which initially hamstrung war reporters trying to offer anything but a sanitized version of the war on terror. In other words, Americans have, at least recently, been able to witness the crimes and horrors other militaries commit in their war zones (just not our own).

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And yet the human rights violations and destruction of infrastructure from the all-American war on terror were every bit as impactful as what’s now playing out before our eyes. We just didn’t see the destruction or slow-motion degradation of roads and bridges over which food was distributed; the drone attacks that killed Afghan farmers; the slow contamination of agriculture in war zones thanks, in part, to American missiles and rockets; the sewage runoff from U.S. bases; the bombings in everyday areas like crowded Iraqi marketplaces that made grocery shopping a potentially deadly affair; and the displacement and impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis because of U.S.-led drone attacks — to take just a few of so many examples. Of course, these aren’t problems as easily captured in a single picture, no less a video, as hospitals full of starving children or the flattened cities of the Gaza Strip.

America’s longest war in Afghanistan deepened that country’s poverty, decimating what existed of its agriculture and food distribution systems, while displacing millions. And the effects continue: 92% of Afghans are still food insecure and nearly 3 in 10 Afghan children will face acute malnutrition this year.

In the U.S., we haven’t seen antiwar protests on anywhere near the scale of the recent Gaza campus ones since the enormous 2003 protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, after which those hundreds of thousands of peaceful demonstrators thinned to a mere trickle in the years to follow. Sadly, Americans have proven selective indeed when it comes to reckoning with conflict, whether because of short attention spans, laziness, or an inability to imagine the blood on our own hands.

Denials of Humanitarian Aid

So, too, the U.S. has been complicit in denying aid shipments to people in the greatest need — and not just today in Gaza. Yes, Congress and the Biden administration decided to cut off funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) because of the alleged participation of some of its Gaza staff members in Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel. But don’t think that was unique. For example, in 2009, our government prevented more than $50 million in aid from entering Somalia, including aid from the World Food Program, even though aid groups were warning that the country stood on the precipice of mass starvation. In 2011, the U.N. officially declared a famine there and, to this day, Somalia’s hunger crisis continues, exacerbated by climate change and wider regional conflicts.

And that’s hardly the only way this country has been involved in such crises. After all, thanks to America’s forever wars, some 3.6 to 3.8 million people are estimated to have died not from bullets or bombs but, during those wars and in their aftermath, from malnutrition, disease, suicide, and other indirect (but no less real) causes. In such situations, hunger factors in as a multiplier of other causes of death because of how it weakens bodies.

Now, Gaza is a major humanitarian catastrophe in which the U.S. is complicit. Armed far-right Israeli groups have repeatedly blocked aid from entering the enclave or targeted Gazans clamoring for such aid, and Israeli forces have fired on aid workers and civilians seeking to deliver food. In a striking irony, Palestinians have also died because of food aid, as people drowned while trying to retrieve U.S. and Jordanian airdrops of aid in the sea or were crushed by them on land when parachutes failed.

This country’s complicity in Israel’s siege and bombardment of Gaza has been disastrous: an estimated at least two out of every 10,000 people there are now dying daily from starvation, with the very young, very old, and those living with disabilities the worst affected. Gazans are trying to create flour from foraged animal feed, scouring ruins for edible plants, and drinking tepid, often polluted water, to tragic effect, including the rapid spread of disease. Tales of infants and young children dying because they can’t get enough to eat and distraught parents robbed of their dignity because they can do nothing for their kids (or themselves) are too numerous and ghastly to detail here. But just for a moment imagine that all of this was happening to your loved ones.

A growing number of Gazans, living in conditions where their most basic nutritional needs can’t be met, are approaching permanent stunting or death. The rapid pace of Gaza’s descent into famine is remarkable among conflicts. According to UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the World Food Program, the decline in the nutritional status of Gazans during the first three months of the war alone was unprecedented. Eight months into the Israeli assault on that 25-mile-long strip of land, a major crossing for aid delivery has again been closed, thanks to the most recent offensive in Rafah and a half-million Gazans face “catastrophic levels of hunger.” Thought of another way, the fourth horseman has arrived.

Hunger as a Cause of War

Famine is the nightmarish version of the gift that just keeps giving. Hungry people are more likely to resort to violence to solve their problems. War-afflicted Yemen is a case in point. In that country, the U.S. funded and armed the Saudi military in its air strikes against the Houthi-led rebels that began in 2015 and went on for years (a role now taken over by my country). One child under five is still estimated to die every 10 minutes from malnutrition and related causes there, in large part because war has so decimated the country’s food production and distribution infrastructure. Since war first struck Yemen, the country’s economy has halved, and nearly 80% of the population is now dependent on humanitarian aid. A direct consequence of the unrest has been the flourishing of Islamic extremist groups like the Houthis. Countries facing hunger and food instability are, in fact, more likely to be politically unstable and experience more numerous protests, some of them violent.

Nowadays, I find that I can’t help imagining worst-case scenarios like the risk of nuclear war, a subject that has come up in a threatening manner recently in relation to Ukraine. The scale of hunger that the smallest nuclear conflagrations would create is hard to imagine even by today’s grim standards. A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, for example, would distribute soot into the atmosphere and disrupt the climate globally, affecting food and livestock production and probably causing death by starvation in a “nuclear winter” of three billion people. Were there to be a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, an estimated five billion people might die from hunger alone in the famine that would ensue. It’s not an outcome I even care to imagine (though we all should probably be thinking about it more than we do).

Hunger at the Heart of Empire

Though this country is not (yet) a war zone, it’s not an accident that Americans are facing high food prices and record levels of hunger. The more than $8 trillion our government has spent over the past two decades on our distant wars alone has sapped resources for investment in things like transportation and better water systems here, while ensuring that there are more than 1.4 million fewer jobs for Americans. Meanwhile, military families struggle with far higher rates of food insecurity than those among the general population. Progressives and anyone interested in the preservation of this country’s now fragile democracy shouldn’t ignore the wasting of the lives of those of us who are hungrier, have a harder time affording daily prices, and have more in common with civilians in war zones than we normally imagine.

Seen in this light, the overwhelming focus of young Americans on the Gaza war and their lack of enthusiasm for preserving democracy, as they consider voting for third-party candidates (or not voting at all) and so handing Donald Trump the presidency, becomes more understandable to me. What good is a democracy if it hemorrhages resources into constant foreign wars? Certainly, the current administration has yet to introduce a viable alternative to our endless engagement in foreign conflicts or meaningfully mitigate the inflation of basic necessities, among them food and housing. President (and candidate) Biden needs to articulate a more robust vision for preserving democracy in America, which would include ways to solve the problems of daily life like how to afford groceries.

Still, while I’ll give our youngest generation of antiwar progressives kudos for holding elected officials to task for their myopic priorities, especially on Gaza, let’s also get real and look at the alternative rapidly barreling toward us: another Trump presidency. Does anyone really think that Gaza would be better off then?

What would happen to anyone protesting wars in Gaza or elsewhere? How would we pressure a president who has advocated violence to overthrow the results of a peaceful election?

Concerns about foreign wars can’t be solved by staying home on November 5th or voting for a third-party candidate or Donald Trump. The 2024 election is about preserving our very ability to protest America’s wars (or those this country is backing abroad), as opposed to creating a potential Trumpian forever hell here at home.

Think of Donald Trump, in fact, as the potential fifth horseman of the apocalypse, now riding toward us at full speed.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

As Israel’s offensive in Gaza rages on, people across the entire Gaza Strip find themselves in increasingly dire circumstances, with nearly the entire population experiencing high levels of food insecurity, including malnutrition, hunger and starvation. A famine review analysis from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification reported on June 25, 2024, that “a high risk of Famine persists across the whole Gaza Strip as long as conflict continues and humanitarian access is restricted.”

The Conversation asked Hasan Khatib, an expert in genetics and epigenetics, to explain the growing crisis in the Gaza Strip and what history lessons from earlier famines can teach us about the short- and long-term consequences of starvation, malnutrition and food insecurity.

What is food insecurity and how widespread is it in Gaza?

Food insecurity refers to the lack of regular access to safe and nutritious food necessary for normal growth and development and maintaining an active, healthy life. Severe food insecurity is characterized by running out of food and going a day or more without eating, leading to the experience of hunger.

An initiative called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, managed by United Nations bodies and major relief agencies, was established in 2004 to enhance analysis and decision-making on food security and nutrition.

The IPC classification system identifies five distinct phases of food security:
1. Minimal/none; 2. Stressed; 3. Crisis; 4. Emergency; 5. Catastrophe/famine.

The IPC estimates that 96% of the population in Gaza – 2.15 million people – are experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity, classified as IPC Phase 3 or higher.

Approximately 50% to 60% of buildings throughout Gaza, and over 70% of those in northern Gaza, have been damaged or destroyed, including more than 90% of schools and 84% of health facilities.

Due to the destruction of food production and distribution infrastructure, all households skip meals daily, with adults reducing their portions. The IPC projects that by July 2024, half of the population will be classified as being in a famine, experiencing acute malnutrition or death.

As of June 6, 2024, the World Health Organization reported that 32 patients had died from malnutrition and 73 had been admitted because of severe acute malnutrition in Gaza. Malnutrition can weaken the immune system, increasing the risk of serious illness and death, primarily due to infectious diseases.

And as of the same date, the WHO reported 865,157 cases of acute respiratory infections, 485,315 cases of diarrhea, 57,887 cases of skin rashes and 8,538 cases of chickenpox, all of which can be exacerbated by malnutrition.

How do stress and trauma add to hunger?

Strikes by the Israeli forces across the Gaza Strip have resulted in civilian casualties, the destruction of homes and the displacement of over 1.7 million people since October 2023, including many families who had already been displaced multiple times.

The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that at least 17,000 children have been separated from their parents as of February 2024, and nearly all children in Gaza need mental health and psychological support. Symptoms observed among these children include heightened anxiety levels, loss of appetite, sleep disturbances and panic attacks.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency has provided critical psychological support, including psychological first aid, fatigue management sessions and individual and group counseling, to over 650,000 displaced persons, including 400,000 children.

UN Women, an organization focused on gender equality and the empowerment of women, reported that from October 2023 to April 2024, 10,000 Palestinian women in Gaza were killed, resulting in 19,000 children being orphaned. Approximately 50,000 pregnant Palestinian women and 20,000 newborn babies face limited access to health care facilities due to the bombardment of hospitals and health clinics.

In addition, more than 180 women per day are giving birth without pain relief, leading to a 300% increase in miscarriages due to the severe conditions. These dire conditions are causing severe stress and trauma among Palestinian children and women. This combination of stress, trauma and hunger can leave a lasting impact on both the women and their offspring.

TRT World Video: “Could famine in Gaza harm health of Palestinian future generations?”

What might the consequences be for future generations?

Over the past two decades, extensive research has investigated whether environmental factors such as hunger, stress and trauma can affect future generations that are not directly exposed to them. Pioneering studies of the Dutch famine, which occurred in the Netherlands from 1944 to 1945, found that these types of intergenerational effects were indeed happening.

During the Nazi occupation, food supplies were cut off from the western part of the Netherlands between November 1944 and May 1945, leading to widespread starvation. Decades later, researchers discovered that children and grandchildren of pregnant women exposed to the famine had a higher risk of health problems later in life, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other metabolic disorders.

Similarly, the Great Chinese Famine from 1959 to 1961, which resulted in an estimated 15 million to 40 million deaths, is one of the deadliest famines in history. It profoundly affected the physical and mental health, cognition and overall well-being of those exposed to it and their offspring.

Interestingly, our recent research into sheep demonstrated that paternal diet can alter traits such as muscle growth and reproductive characteristics, which can be passed down to two subsequent generations of sheep.

This inheritance of traits is mediated by chemical groups known as epigenetic marks. These epigenetic tags – known as DNA methylation or histone modifications – can originate from external sources, such as diet, or from within our cells. Histones are proteins that help organize and compact the DNA inside our cells.

These changes can control which genes are turned on or off. When exposed to hunger or stress, the epigenetic marks instruct our cells to behave differently, leading to altered traits. Remarkably, some of these epigenetic marks are inherited by offspring, influencing their traits as well.

Stress and trauma have been the focus of extensive research, particularly in understanding how extreme trauma can have biological effects that are transmitted to subsequent generations. Rachel Yehuda, an expert in psychiatry and the neuroscience of trauma, found that experiencing captivity or detention during the Holocaust was linked to elevated levels of epigenetic marks in a gene called FKBP5, which is involved in stress regulation. These epigenetic alterations were also observed in the children of Holocaust survivors.

Epigenetic changes can be reversible

Research shows that lifestyle and environmental factors play a significant role in influencing epigenetic marks. So positive changes in these areas can lead to the reversal of some of these epigenetic shifts.

One study showed that stress responses in adult rats that are programmed early in life can be reversed later in life. The researchers supplemented methionine, a methyl group donor that alters DNA methylation, to adult rats and observed that the stress response caused by maternal behavior in early life can be reversed in adult life.

I see an urgent need for the medical and scientific community to investigate the potential long-term impacts of current trauma and hunger on vulnerable populations in Gaza, particularly pregnant women and children. Notably, some of the epigenetic marks responsible for these long-term effects of trauma and hunger are reversible when conditions improve.

Hasan Khatib, Associate Chair and Professor of Genetics and Epigenetics, University of Wisconsin-Madison

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Middle East Monitor ) – Since October last year, it is estimated that approximately 70,000 tons of bombs have been dropped by Israel on the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza. The devastating death toll currently stands at around 36,550 Palestinians, including more than 15,000 children, and a further 10,000 missing, presumed dead, under the rubble of what remains of their homes. With famine looming in Gaza, these figures are set to be eclipsed, with the most recent warning from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN projecting that over a million people — more than half of Gaza’s population — will face death by starvation by mid-July.

This catastrophic analysis makes it clear that, in the absence of meaningful international aid intervention and an end to this latest onslaught against the Palestinian population, more civilians will die due to enforced starvation than as a direct result of unprecedented Israeli military bombardment.

It is important to be clear that this famine is entirely man-made. It is equally important to identify who is responsible. And there is plenty of opprobrium to go around. With backing from Western allies, who have continued to send military aid to Israel whilst failing to intervene meaningfully and secure a ceasefire, Israel has been given a green light to enforce starvation on the Palestinian population in Gaza.

Whilst famine is often a consequence of armed conflict, enforced starvation of a civilian population is something else.

It is a tactic deployed routinely by colonial powers to exert dominance over a colonised people. The current starvation of the civilian population in Gaza, therefore, involves numerous intersecting factors, all of which relate directly to Israel’s decades-long and enduring domination over Palestinian lives and livelihoods.

By preventing humanitarian aid supplies from entering the Gaza Strip, whilst imposing additional layers of bureaucratic hurdles to control what can and cannot be let in, Israel continues to create the conditions that perpetuate, and even accelerate, the starvation of Palestinians living in the Strip. Attacks on civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including the apparatus needed to provide and distribute food to the Palestinian population, we suggest, is a deliberate Israeli military tactic. And the evidence stacks up. Water sanitation stations, factories for processing food, aid warehouses, bakeries and flour mills have all been targeted routinely by Israeli military bombardment. Alongside infrastructure, those responsible for delivering life-saving aid have also been singled out for attack.

Hence, this manufactured famine cannot be analysed in isolation, but must be seen within the context of decades of colonial practices that have targeted Palestinians, attempting to erase both their physical and historical presence in Palestine. Indeed, since the start of the blockade against Gaza in 2007, Israel has engaged in a policy of enforced food insecurity through discriminatory and multi-layered policies, including the monitoring of certain food stuffs that are and are not permitted entry into the Strip. Siege warfare — illegal under international law — has meant that Palestinians’ daily calorie intake in Gaza is monitored and controlled by the occupation state, with food essentials such as meat, dairy, fruits and vegetables becoming a luxury.

Democracy Now! Video: “UNICEF Decries Israel’s “War on Children” as Starvation & Deaths Mount in Gaza”

According to a report released by Oxfam, food insecurity has increased rapidly during this ongoing genocide, to the point whereby the average daily calorie intake for Palestinians living in the north of the Gaza Strip has been decimated to just 245.

Yet those who are scouring the streets for food in Gaza today could receive humanitarian aid in less than fifteen minutes, if Israel opened the border crossings that it has closed purposefully, those crossings being in some instances a mere five kilometres away. Consequently, it is unsurprising that both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant stand accused by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of, amongst other alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, using starvation as a weapon of war.

It was Gallant who made very clear Israel’s intent to starve the Palestinian civilian population in October last year, when he declared a complete siege on Gaza and said: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”

To this day, no Western governments are taking decisive action to intervene, and they stand accused of aiding and abetting such crimes.

It could be argued that the international community, with insufficient aid and continued business-as-usual approach with its well-protected Israeli ally, is complicit in this erasure of Palestinian life. It should also be remembered that international allies, including British Prime Minister-in-waiting Sir Keir Starmer, were quick to suggest that Israel did, in fact, have a right to turn off water supplies to the Palestinian population in Gaza.

That the Israeli state can manufacture a famine that is starving children at the fastest rate ever recorded, whilst simultaneously enjoying impunity, is a damning indictment of international law. Forcing starvation on a civilian population who have endured over eight months of western-sponsored military bombardment, is a stain on the international community and our institutions, one that will be impossible to repair. International intervention must be forthcoming immediately.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

President Joe Biden’s floating pier off Gaza, which went operational on Friday, is such a Potemkin Village. While it isn’t completely useless, it cannot replace overland truck deliveries of food and aid. At most it will supply 150 trucks worth of aid daily, when 500 are needed. It is a PR band aid on the gaping wound of Israeli genocidal blockage of aid to the civilian population.

The pier’s operation is interrupted anytime there are high winds or sea swells. It is far from population centers. It is vulnerable to Israeli indiscriminate artillery and drone fire. It can be hit by Hamas sabotage. It depends on the delivery of the aid by United Nations workers (including UNRWA, which Biden hysterically defunded because of Israeli lies that it is a Hamas front). These aid workers, as with those of the World Central Kitchen, have sometimes been struck by Israeli fire, apparently in some cases deliberately.

The floating pier cost $320 million, which could have fed a lot of Palestinians if the Israelis hadn’t closed off almost all aid truck routes into the Strip.

Al Jazeera English: “Aid agencies: Land routes are more effective”

Meanwhile, in the real world the Israeli attempt to make Gaza uninhabitable and to ethnically cleanse its Palestinian inhabitants accelerated.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that the Israeli army has in recent days forced 640,000 Palestinian refugees out of Rafah (to which it had earlier exiled them).

Embed from Getty Images
Displaced Palestinians pack their belongings before leaving an unsafe area in Rafah on May 15, 2024 (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images).

This expulsion of nearly a fourth of the entire population is problematic because, OCHA says, “Our colleagues working on ensuring that people in Gaza have adequate shelter say there are no remaining stocks of shelter materials inside Gaza.”

No shelter, no shelter materials.

People don’t have a pot to piss in. Or defecate in. The mass displacement at Israeli hands “has exacerbated the water and sanitation crisis, with sewage overflow and solid waste spreading across roads, displacement camps, and the rubble of destroyed homes – with a catastrophic impact on health.”

I repeat, sewage overflow and solid waste are spreading across roads and through the makeshift camps. Aid workers have talked about Gaza being awash in green slime, with the toxic brew spread to humans by a cloud of aggressive black flies that try to get into your mouth. The NGO Action for Humanity (AFH) says that some 270,000 tons of garbage and sewage have piled up in Gaza, with the Israelis interdicting access to the major landfill and preventing it from being disposed of.

AFH continues, “The lack of safe drinking water and poor sanitation conditions continue to fuel rising cases of acute jaundice syndrome and bloody watery diarrhoea, posing a significant public health challenge.”

These refugees, hungry, sick, and some wounded by Israeli indiscriminate fire, have been death-marched to Deir al-Balah governorate or to Khan Younis, both of which have been destroyed and left bereft of shelter, toilets, functioning hospitals and bakeries. The World Health Organization says of hospitals that they are themselves on life support because the Israelis have embargoed the fuel they need to operate: “Spokesperson Tarik Jašarević reported that only 13 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are now partially functioning, emphasizing that fuel is required for electricity and to run generators. He said health partners require between 1.4 million to 1.8 million litres monthly so that hospitals can function, but only 159,000 litres have entered Gaza since the border closure, ‘and that’s clearly not sufficient.'” The Israelis are letting in a tenth of the fuel needed to run the hospitals.

Imagine being told you have to hit the road carrying your few possessions and children, after months of starvation and drinking dirty water, and to try to find shelter in Khan Younis, which looks like this:

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A displaced Palestinian woman pushes a stroller as she walks in front of destroyed buildings in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on May 16, 2024, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the militant group Hamas. (Photo by AFP) (Photo by -/AFP via Getty Images)

Or perhaps you might prefer the well appointed apartments of Deir al-Balah after they’ve been the recipients of the tender mercies of the Israeli military:

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DEIR AL-BALAH, GAZA – MAY 15: A general view of the completely destroyed house belonging to the Berash family and the damaged buildings around it as a result of the Israeli attack on Bureij refugee camp in Deir Al Balah, Gaza on May 15, 2024. As a result of the Israeli attack, one building was completely destroyed and many houses and structures in the surrounding area were damaged as Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip continue uninterruptedly for 222 days. (Photo by Ashraf Amra/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Grain is essential to the human diet. In central Gaza, there are only five bakeries still functioning that Israel shells haven’t pulverized, four in Gaza City and one in Deir Balah. About twelve more are physically intact but have the severe disadvantage of having no fuel or flour, which would not make for what you might call… a bakery.

UN and volunteer aid workers can therefore only provide tiny meals, and are concentrating on Khan Younis and Deir al Balah.