Along with the bombs, hunger. And while the regional and international community pressures Israel to allow more humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip, the population of the enclave is dealing with what the United Nations has described as ''famine-like conditions''.
Famine, what is meant
But what exactly is meant by famine? To understand this we need to rely on a five-level system of food insecurity scale developed by a group of international organizations and charities known as the 'Integrated Food Security Phase Classification'. When you reach the fifth level, then you have a famine, while at the third level we talk about ''crisis'' and at the fourth level we talk about ''emergency''. The United Nations and its affiliated Famine Review Committee experts speak of famine when, in a given area, at least 20 percent of families are facing extreme food shortages, at least 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition and two people out of every 10,000 die every day due to hunger or diseases in some way attributable to the lack of adequate nutrition.
To understand whether a famine is underway in the Gaza Strip, we need to go back to the end of last year when United Nations officials declared that approximately 377,800 people, or approximately 17% of the population of the Gaza Strip, should be considered at the fifth level of food insecurity scale. This means they faced the same conditions as people living in areas previously declared famine zones. How could Somalia be in 2011 or South Sudan in 2017.
The ''use of an agreed definition'' of famine ''is a fairly recent development. Before 2000, we didn't have a technical definition,'' Paul Howe, director of the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University and former official of the World Food Program, explained to the Washington Post via email. What made it necessary were concerns that ''the lack of a shared definition could postpone humanitarian responses, make it difficult to prioritize resources in different contexts and complicate efforts to discourage future famines,'' Howe specified. However, the declaration of famine, made by the local government or a senior United Nations official in the area, does not carry binding obligations. Either way, it serves as a way to raise global awareness about the severity of a food crisis.
Hunger, malnutrition and starvation
In addition to famine, there is ''hunger'', ''malnutrition'' and ''starvation''. By ''hunger'' we can mean a short or even long-term condition. A person may feel hungry if he or she doesn't eat all day, while a child may feel hungry if he or she has skipped meals or if he or she has had little food for a long period of time, as explained by Catherine Bertini, professor emeritus of international affairs at the Syracuse University. Instead, ''malnutrition is when you have a bad diet – continues Bertini – A person can be malnourished either because they eat too much unhealthy food or because they don't have enough food to feed themselves''. Instead, ''starvation'' is a process that leads to death if someone does not have enough calories or a balanced diet, he specifies.
''So hunger can become severe malnutrition leading to starvation, which in turn leads to death. When deaths occur in a certain population, particularly children, due to starvation, then it could be a famine,'' he explains to the Washington Post.
And this is what the population of the Gaza Strip is facing, which, as the United Nations has revealed, suffers from a serious shortage of food. Since the Israeli retaliation began on October 7, daily shipments of food and aid have fallen far below the 500 truckloads of supplies needed each day to meet the basic needs of the two million Palestinians living in the enclave. There is talk of around twenty aid trucks in seven days in February, with a single record of 300 trucks on 28 November. For aid, we are now looking to the sea, where the first Open Arrms and World Central Kitchen ship landed on Saturday, while a second is ready to set sail from Cyprus.
''The problem is that the famine, as well as the response to it, has become a political issue. Would declaring famine put an end to the conditions that lead to it? No. War is the cause of famine, and as long as it continues, so will hunger,'' said Tylor Brand, professor of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland.
The first time that the United Nations technically defined a country as famine-stricken based on the fifth level of food insecurity was in July 2011, Somalia. At least 250,000 people, half of them under the age of five, died as a result of the famine, the Washington Post reported. In some parts of Somalia, more than six per 10,000 children under five died every day, according to then-UN official Mark Bowden. In February 2017, the UN declared a famine in South Sudan, saying 100,000 people were suffering from starvation. The worst food crisis in modern human history was the 1959-61 famine in China where over 20 million people died, according to Beijing government estimates.
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