Gaza’s health crisis has its own dreadful momentum. Even if the shooting ends today and the aid trucks begin to roll, the dying will carry on for some time
‘Famine is unfolding in Gaza today. We should not have to wait until we count the graves of children to speak its name.’‘Famine is unfolding in Gaza today. We should not have to wait until we count the graves of children to speak its name.’Gaza is already the most intense starvation catastrophe of recent decades. The death toll from hunger and disease may soon surpass the body count from bombs and bullets.The IPC provides the most authoritative assessments of humanitarian crises.
The only other occasion when IPC data showed famine was South Sudan in 2017. Civil war plunged half the country’s 10 million people into a food emergency, with 90,000 suffering famine. About 1,500 people starved to death in the two districts devastated by famine, but four years of wider food emergency claimed about 190,000 lives.
Our picture of starvation is a stick thin child wasting away, whose eyes seem swollen as her skin shrinks to her bones. Some children suffer kwashiorkor, a swollen belly that comes with acute malnutrition. Lacking shelter and exposed to cold and rain in winter, and heat and dust in summer, people succumb to hunger and disease more quickly. Without electricity or cooking fuel, mothers cannot prepare meals that young children can readily digest.
What solace is it to tell parents who have buried their child that it was not their fault? Survivors’ anguish lasts a lifetime.
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