When mass starvation grips a community, something rare and terrible occurs. Starvation is not only the biological phenomenon of the body wasting away. It’s also the death rattle of society. Famine is the sight of people scavenging for food in a garbage heap. It’s a woman cooking in secret, hiding food from her starving cousins. It’s a family selling its grandmother’s jewellery for a single meal, their faces blank and emotionless, their eyes glazed. This is the degradation, the humiliation, the shame – and, yes, the dehumanisation – that happens when human beings scrabble for food like animals.
This is a reality that no statistics can capture. And the methods for measuring food emergencies and assigning them grades – “famine” being the worst – break down when society breaks down in this way.
But just as an experienced physician can diagnose a fever without having to send blood samples to the laboratory, veteran humanitarian workers, who witnessed the depths of human suffering in Biafra in 1969 or in Ethiopia in 1984, recognise these symptoms when they see them.
And they see it in Gaza today.
Turn to the statements of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – the US and Israel-backed organisation that began operating in May – and you enter a different world. The GHF presents itself as a professional, compassionate operation designed for the 21st century. You will see images of order and efficiency, and a proud announcement that it delivered more than 2m meals yesterday from its four “secure distribution sites”.
And alongside the pictures of those starving children, of women collapsing from hunger, there are also pictures of healthy young men. In contrast to the footage, filmed by Palestinian journalists, of the desperate scramble for the little aid still provided through the UN, the GHF has images of orderly distributions, of its own workers holding the hands of Palestinian children.
Israeli spokespeople insist that the United Nations has hundreds of trucks of food inside the Gaza perimeter that it refuses to distribute.
But that rosy picture doesn’t stand even the simplest scrutiny. There are four reasons why it’s at best an improvisation by amateurs and at worst a cover for the crime of ongoing mass starvation.
First, the numbers just don’t add up. In April, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN calculated the food stocks remaining in Gaza, after 18 months of siege and war, and two months of total Israeli blockade. It estimated that food availability would fall to only half what’s needed to sustain life at some point between May and July. That means that the aid effort needs to cover the entirety of Gaza’s food needs. Two million meals a day is less than half of what’s needed. The GHF rations may have slowed the march of starvation, but not by much.
Second, you can’t relieve famine by numbers alone. The GHF system is like standing at the edge of a big pond and feeding the fish by throwing breadcrumbs. Who gets to eat its rations?
Starvation strikes the vulnerable minority. The metric used by the UN for determining when acute food insecurity is at famine levels is when 20% of families are facing extreme food shortage. Starvation strikes the weakest, not the strongest.
Over the decades, humanitarian programmes have worked out how best to target the poorest, such as women without their husbands, looking after several children and perhaps elderly parents as well. It’s the last mile of aid delivery that counts.
The GHF runs four ration stations. Three are in the far south of Gaza in the ruins of Rafah, one in central Gaza. They’re all in military zones. They open for short periods and short notice. To get these rations, people must camp out in the rubble – ready to rush to the gates at a moment’s notice, and running the gauntlet of the Israel Defense Forces’ military posts. They know that the only means IDF soldiers have for crowd control is firing live ammunition – even when they’re not shooting to kill.
When the GHF speaks of “secure distribution sites”, it’s referring to how it controls its packages up to the point of handing them over, not to how it safely delivers them to the neediest. Dozens of aid seekers are killed each day trying to reach these sites.
How will the overstressed mother of hungry children, or elderly or disabled people, join this stampede? How would they run the gauntlet not only of those military posts but also of the gangsters keen to steal the most valuable foodstuffs for themselves, or to sell in the market? The GHF has no idea who is eating the rations. Theirs isn’t a formula for feeding the poorest. It’s the law of the jungle.
Third, the assistance must be designed for what people really need. Top of the list are specialised foods to care for malnourished children who cannot consume regular meals, such as Plumpy’Nut, a ready-to-use therapeutic food.
The GHF ration box typically contains flour, pasta, tahini, cooking oil, rice and chickpeas or lentils. No baby food. No Plumpy’Nut. And it has no trained nurses or nutritionists in the community to actually provide therapeutic care to starving children.
Consider the desperate mother who’s literally at the end of the food chain: how will she cook the rations she gets? How does she find clean water? Israel has reduced water availability to a small fraction of need, and is bombing the remaining desalination plants. What can she use to make a fire? Without electricity or cooking gas, she may burn garbage to heat food.
And last and most tellingly, a truly humanitarian operation supports the afflicted people, respecting the dignity of those in need, working with the communities. The GHF, essentially, does the opposite: it humiliates and undermines.
The social breakdown that we are witnessing, the degrading of human beings, is not a byproduct of the harm that Israel is inflicting. That’s the central element of the crime: destroying Palestinian society. The government of Israel shows no indication that it cares in the slightest whether Palestinians live or die. It wants to avoid the stigma of being accused of starvation and genocide, and the GHF is its current alibi. Let’s not be fooled.
