UN warns half of Palestinians in Gaza at risk of starving
The United Nations warned on Monday that the attacks on Gaza have created a humanitarian catastrophe, with half of the population facing starvation, New York Times reported.
According to a report by the UN, of the 2.2 million Palestinians living in Gaza, 90 percent have regularly experienced going without food for a whole day.
Arif Husain, chief economist at the World Food Program (WFP), said that the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza is among the worst he had ever seen.
“I’ve been to pretty much any conflict, whether Yemen, whether it was South Sudan, northeast Nigeria, Ethiopia, you name it. And I have never seen anything like this, both in terms of its scale, its magnitude, but also at the pace that this has unfolded.”
The territory currently meets at least the first criteria of a famine, with 20 percent of the population facing an extreme lack of food, Husain explained.
The Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, Omar Shakir, said that “For over two months, Israel has been depriving Gaza’s population of food and water, a policy spurred on or endorsed by high-ranking Israeli officials and reflecting an intent to starve civilians as a method of warfare.”
According to the NY Times, Israel has allowed around 100-120 aid trucks to enter Gaza each day, going down from the 500 trucks that used to enter the territory everyday before the war started.
