STARVATION IN GAZA

FOCUS CONFLICT

- Binaifer Nowrojee

Starvation is the slow, silent unmaking of the body. Deprived of basic sustenance, the body first burns through sugar stores in the liver. Then it melts muscle and fat, breaking down tissue to keep the brain and other vital organs alive. As these reserves are depleted, the heart loses its strength, the immune system surrenders, and the mind begins to fade. The skin tightens over the bones, and breathing grows faint. Organs begin to fail in succession, vision fails, and the body, now empty, slips away. It is a prolonged, agonizing way to die.

We have all seen the images of emaciated Palestinian babies and children withering away from starvation in their mothers’ arms. Yet now that Israel is intensifying its war - embarking on a new campaign to “conquer” Gaza City - thousands more Palestinian civilians may be killed, either by bombs or by starvation.

“This is no longer a looming hunger crisis,” Ramesh Rajasingham, a senior United Nations humanitarian official, told the UN Security Council on 10 August. “This is starvation, pure and simple.” Alex de Waal, an expert on famine, estimates that thousands of Gazan children are now too weak to eat, even if they had access to food. “They have got to that stage of severe acute malnutrition where their bodies just can't digest food.”

There is a growing consensus that Israel is committing the most serious of crimes in Gaza, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare. Palestinian and international human-rights groups raised the alarm about this risk within months of the start of the war, and it has since been echoed by states on every continent, as well as by many in Israel. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for example, has decried what he describes as war crimes in Gaza, and leading Israeli human-rights groups say Israel’s actions in the territory amount to genocide.