Gaza: They eat animal feed so they don’t die

Ground fodder loaves. This is the staple food for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in the northern Gaza Strip after 4½ months of Israeli siege – they eat whatever they can find to stay alive.

“We have no other choice, there is no white flour,” explains to “Monde” Mohammed Siam, a nurse at Doctors Without Borders, Al Shifa Hospital, in Gaza City. “We can’t even make money, all the banks have been destroyed.

Prices have skyrocketed. Some products are available for a few days, after a while we can no longer find them.”

In this area where some 300,000 Palestinians still live, according to the UN, one in six children under the age of 2 suffers from acute malnutrition, the World Food Program announced on February 19.

“There must be an urgent ceasefire.

Hunger is starting to set in, people have lost a lot of weight and are now weak. Every day, elderly people die because they don’t get enough nutrients, because the food is unhealthy.

We survive without natural proteins, fruits or vegetables, nothing…” Siam notes. In the Jambaliya refugee camp, north of Gaza City, residents “collect grasses and seeds of all kinds and use them to survive.

Often, they go several days without food,” describes Kathleen Procter, a researcher at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, who spent several years in the Palestinian enclave and has been collecting testimonies from Gaza residents daily since October 7, 2023.

In Rafah, in the South, where more than a million displaced Gazans are concentrated and where aid is most widely distributed, as of November 2023, “there is only canned food,” Procter adds.

Crops have been wiped out in fields destroyed by Israeli bulldozers and shelling, and farmed chickens have been missing for months. The port of Gaza and most of the boats were destroyed by the bombing so there is no way to fish.

Human Rights Watch and Oxfam have denounced Israel’s use of famine in Gaza as a weapon of war.

The Israelis have agreed to take part in peace talks to be held this weekend in Paris with representatives of the US, Qatar and Egypt, but continue to drip-feed humanitarian aid trucks in to meet the needs of the 2, 3 million residents of Gaza.

Thousands of trucks are waiting to enter Gaza, explains Scott Anderson, deputy director of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the enclave.

The Gaza Strip is in the grip of a “deadly combination of hunger and disease,” warns Dr. Michael Ryan, director of the World Health Organization’s Gaza Health Emergency Management Programme.

“Hungry, weakened and deeply injured children are more likely to get sick, and sick children, especially those with diarrhea, cannot absorb nutrients well. It’s dangerous and tragic, and it’s happening right in front of our eyes.”