International relief officials: Waiting for an official declaration of famine threatens the lives of Gazans

Dina Mahmoud (Gaza, London)

Amid expectations of the possibility of an actual famine in the Gaza Strip within the coming weeks, coinciding with calls for the need to stop the fighting immediately, in order to resume providing vital services to Gazans, relief experts have warned of the consequences of failure to deliver vital supplies to the Strip, until the official announcement of That its residents are facing such famine.
Waiting until that moment may warn – as these experts confirm – that the introduction of aid, regardless of its quantity, will come “too late,” and that opportunities to save the lives of many residents of the Strip may have already been wasted, in light of the risk of large numbers of deaths. Large among them, it will become very prominent in this case.
According to international relief officials, including Jante Suribto, head of the American branch of the non-governmental organization Save the Children, the Gaza Strip is witnessing a situation that has never been observed in any other part of the world. While humanitarian crises usually affect a specific segment or segments of the population, the current threats threaten Gaza, with its entire population of more than two million people.
As for Kirsten Johnson, who is responsible for the “Famine Early Warning Systems” network, which is a US government program that monitors the state of food insecurity in crisis areas around the world, she stressed that it is not necessary to wait for the official announcement of the occurrence of famine in Gaza, to begin working to flood the Strip. With aid.
Johnson pointed out that the passage of this period of severe food scarcity since the outbreak of the war means that the residents of the Gaza Strip will now take longer to recover from what befell them, especially since the continuation of the battles has led to the collapse of the health care system necessary to ward off the dangerous consequences of malnutrition.
Since the battles reached the city of Rafah in the far south of Gaza weeks ago, conditions have generally become worse in the Strip, with the halt of the entry of aid, including fuel, which is urgently needed, to enable relief trucks to move, as well as the operation of the few hospitals, which are still able to operate. To provide its services.
At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled from Rafah to the devastated areas in the north of that coastal enclave, where they receive only a very limited amount of water, food, and health care, amid the accumulation of waste and remnants of battle, and the spread of decomposing bodies in some areas.
This situation prompted doctors and experts in dealing with cases of malnutrition to say that even if food supplies begin to flow tomorrow, a large number of Gazans will face the risk of death, whether from hunger, or from contracting diseases that are easy to treat in normal times, such as diarrhea, which is due to either Due to the lack of medical care, or the fragility of their bodies due to their inability to meet their basic needs over the past months.
500 trucks
Even before the start of the current Israeli military operation in Rafah, international relief agencies were confirming that the amount of aid entering the Gaza Strip was much less than what was required. Before the war, the Gaza Strip received about 500 aid trucks daily, through the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings. But this number has decreased by approximately 75% since October 7, reaching approximately 119 trucks per day, according to United Nations data.