The Humanitarian Crisis In Gaza 🇵🇸

Science & Environment Humanitarian Issues & Natural Disasters
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Some good news:

Slovenia bans arms trade with Israel

The government of Slovenia says it has become the first European Union country to officially prohibit the export and transit of military weapons and equipment from or through its territory to Israel, or arms imports from Israel.

The Central European nation’s government said in a statement that the EU is unable to adopt “concrete measures” to stop the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza as a result of “internal disagreements and disunity”

“People in Gaza are dying because humanitarian aid is systematically denied them,” it said, adding that “it is the duty of every responsible state to act, even if this means taking a step ahead of others”.

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“There was very little food. The hospital was feeding everyone one meal a day, and it was pretty normal in Gaza then to just have one meal a day.”

Since she left, Dr Giles has been told the situation has worsened.

“There is no food supplied by the hospital anymore,” she said.

“They’re often starving and weak during the day, often feel a bit faint while they’re working, and they’re absolutely desperate to keep going.”

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Many adults in Gaza are malnourished too, but the impact on children is worse. The developmental damage is irreversible, said Rob Williams, the CEO of the War Child Alliance.

“The process of development stops, the process of building a brain, of creating neurons that will establish cognitive ability, will stop,” he said.

"If you’re a child at a vulnerable age for brain development … if that development stops, that is not reversible.

"The trucks coming in now will do nothing to restore the injury that’s been done to the brains and the physical development of children who have been acutely malnourished.

“It’s also true to say that hundreds of thousands of children have permanent damage — permanent physical and cognitive damage — from a deliberate policy of restricting the supply of food in Gaza.”

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Eight more people died of starvation or malnutrition in the past 24 hours, Gaza’s Health Ministry said, while another 79 died in the latest Israeli firing.

Israel disputes these figures but does not release its own to counter them.

Israel’s campaign has forced nearly all of Gaza’s more than 2 million people from their homes.

Some 188 Palestinians, including 94 children, have died from hunger since the war began, according to Gaza authorities.

An Israeli security official, in a briefing to reporters, acknowledged there might be hunger in some parts of Gaza but rejected reports of famine or starvation.

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Hamas and PIJ’s decision to publish videos of emaciated hostages at a time when Gaza itself is in the throes of the “worst-case scenario of famine”, according to the UN-backed food security organisation IPC, is deliberate.
The groups are using the international focus on the crisis in Gaza to push their message — a lack of food for Palestinians means a lack of food for captives
Just last week, former Israeli hostage Yair Horn said captives could tell when aid was available in Gaza because they would receive more food than at other times.

The sense being expressed in some corners of the Israeli media is that Mr Netanyahu will say one thing publicly, and do something which achieves an entirely different purpose behind closed doors.

In this case, he’ll express concern about the hostages but develop plans to push the war forward even further.

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Hamas said civilians had been waiting for basic supplies to be delivered via road for weeks. “This often results in desperate crowds swarming the trucks,” its media office said.

In a separate incident on Wednesday, Jordan said Israeli settlers attacked a Gaza-bound aid convoy of 30 trucks and accused Israel of failing to prevent such attacks.

The convoy crossed the Jordanian border and was heading towards Gaza’s Zikim crossing. Settlers blocked the road and pelted the trucks with stones, smashing windscreens.

“This requires a serious Israeli intervention and no leniency in dealing with those who obstruct these convoys,” government spokesman Mohammad al-Momani said.

He added this was the second attack on a Jordanian aid convoy, following a similar incident on Sunday.

Not only are they starving them,they are forcing people to fight one another for the small amount of aid they ration out.

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WFP made 138 requests to Israeli authorities to travel to Kerem Shalom and the northern aid depot near the Zikim crossing, but only 76 of those requests were approved.

When the green light was given, WFP said it took up to 46 hours for some of those convoys to make the journey — a long time, considering Gaza is less than 50 kilometres north to south.

Last month, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported the Israeli foreign minister was funding a tour of Israel for 16 US social media influencers, encouraging them to create content messages that aligned with Israeli government policy.

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Other Gazans, including the major of Rafah, Ahmed Al Sufi, called on the world to end the war and “find a real solution for the Palestinian people”.

“People are now trapped in a narrow coastal strip in western Gaza, western Khan Younis, and the western parts of the central region — specifically in the Al-Mawasi area, which lacks even the most basic necessities of life,” he said.

“If the army enters these remaining areas, I honestly don’t know where people can go. There will be nowhere left. The situation would become absolutely catastrophic.”

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Better late than never.

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Israel continues to deploy a mixture of dubious denials and lack of transparency on its actions to blunt international criticism.

But its moves this week — which appear unlikely to either defeat Hamas or rescue Israeli hostages — only seem to further confirm that is not what this has all been about at all.

A land grab.

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The imagery shows just how Palestinians have been squeezed into a space, as other areas are deemed military zones by the IDF.

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Reports in Israeli media say the plan initially focuses on taking full control of Gaza City, relocating its estimated one million residents further south.

The plan has been met with criticism from world leaders as well as fierce opposition from some within Israel, including from military officials and the families of hostages still being held in Gaza who fear for their safety.

Israel has rejected criticism, with Defence Minister Israel Katz saying condemnation would “not weaken our resolve”.

The US has been less critical - with Donald Trump saying earlier in the week that it was “pretty much up to Israel” whether to fully occupy the Gaza Strip.

That’s American approval then.Nothing to stop them now!

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Public opinion polls show an overwhelming majority of Israelis favour an immediate end to the war to secure the release of the remaining 50 hostages held by militants in Gaza.

Israeli officials believe about 20 hostages are still alive.

Of course they only care about the hostages and they’ve taken long enough to protest.But anything to stop the genocide…

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Another major point of contention is what many see as the failure of the International Red Cross to bring food to the hostages. Food for the Palestinians in Gaza is not much discussed, except for a small group on the fringes.

“We believe that the Israeli public is ignorant on purpose,” says Gilad Melzer - holding up a sign saying “Stop Genocide” with a photo of a starving child.

“Some of it wants to stay ignorant and some, the government wants to keep them ignorant of what is going on in Gaza and they’re ignorant as well of what is going on in the occupied territories.”

“When you talk about the government it’s not only Gaza,” says David Solomon. “They are trying to undermine the democracy in Israel, they’re trying willingly to destroy the whole of Israel, they don’t care just for another year or two of their survival.”

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Since the beginning of the war in Gaza, at least 189 journalists and media workers have been killed , dozens have been injured and others are missing.

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We arranged to meet Yehuda Shaul at the road junction next to Sinjel. He is one of Israel’s most prominent opponents of the occupation.

Shaul founded an organisation called Breaking the Silence after, as a soldier, he saw first-hand the inherently brutal realities of a military occupation that has lasted almost 60 years Shaul says that the line between settlers and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has become blurred.

"Now the settlers are the military. In the military are the settlers. So that settler on the hilltop nearby a Palestinian herding community that was beating them up and throwing stones for the past two three or four years, trying to get him out, now is the soldier or the officer in uniform with a gun responsible for the area.

"So when he comes to a Palestinian and says, ‘you have 24 hours to pack up and leave or I’m going to shoot you,’ the Palestinian knows there is nothing to protect him.

Shaul believes Israel has two choices left. One direction, he argues, is “the vector that this government is writing, displacement, abuse, killing, destroying Palestinian life, ultimately, writing a vector to mass population transfer”.

“Or, it is two states where Palestine resides besides Israel and both peoples here have rights and dignity. These are the only two options in our cards. Now you and anyone who watches us, need to choose which one you support.”

"I actually believe that if 7 October taught us one thing it is, if you really care about protecting Israelis and Palestinian life, you need to take care of the root causes of the violence: decades of brutal military occupation, displacement of Palestinians and a conflict that is going on for about 100 years.

“Ultimately, the security protection, the sustainability of Jewish self-determination in this land, is interlinked and intertwined with achieving self-determination rights and equality for Palestinians.”
One sane voice in the middle of all this insanity.

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Several Israeli ministers no longer try to hide their desire to “cleanse” Gaza of Palestinians. Eliyah declared recently: “The [Israeli] government is in a race against time to annihilate Gaza. We are in the process of eliminating its inhabitants. Gaza will be entirely Jewish.”

In most normal democracies, a minister who spoke about “annihilating” a place with 2.1 million inhabitants would not keep their job. Not today’s Israel.

On UNICEF’s figures, Israel killed more than 17,000 children and injured 33,000 others in the first 21 months of the war. Or, in the words of UNICEF’s executive director Catherine Russell, Israel is killing the equivalent of a classroom of children every day.

Israel does not like to have the sort of backlash it is facing at the moment, but as long as the US continues to support its military campaigns, it will live with being unpopular.

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