UN and charities warn of mass starvation in Gaza

The Israel Defence Forces said on Saturday that fighter jets and ground troops “continued combat in different locations” across the Gaza Strip. Several sirens sounded in Israeli communities near the border with Gaza, it added.

The IDF on Saturday directed residents in several neighbourhoods in north Gaza to evacuate, and warned that fighting raged around a stretch of the main north-south highway, Salah al-Din. The military also directed residents of various neighbourhoods in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, to evacuate, saying a road near the north and east of Khan Younis city had become “a battlefield” and should be avoided.

Israel says its evacuation directives are aimed at reducing civilian deaths, including through a numbered map, airdropped leaflets and social media posts. Gazans reached by The Washington Post say the Israeli orders have been vague or contradictory, often sending them to other battlefields. Other residents with little internet or phone access say they have not received warnings at all.

As they search for safety, Palestinians in Gaza said they were also struggling to buy – or even find – food. “The prices are astronomical,” said Mohamad, 29, in Gaza City.

Large bags of flour that cost about $9 before the war now cost more than 10 times that, and were “not available in most cases”, he said. The humanitarian aid that did reach the area – in northern Gaza – was “often stolen”, he said, then resold at high prices.

Most people “enter uninhabited homes and take what they find inside”. He said he had been one of them. “It is a struggle for survival.”

Another Gaza resident, an employee at a relief organisation, said his group was previously distributing goods it bought at the market to homes and schools in Rafah. But it was recently forced to stop because “nothing is available in the market”, the resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons, said.

Two days ago, people looted a storehouse belonging to UNRWA, the UN relief agency for Palestinian refugees, “in front of my eyes”, he said. “There are people who have become bandits, blocking the routes of trucks with weapons and begging for aid.”

“Famine in Gaza,” he added, “is a matter of time.”

There was also growing alarm on Saturday over the safety of patients and staff members at Al-Awda Hospital, one of the last remaining medical facilities in northern Gaza. The hospital was being “besieged” by Israeli troops, according to Renzo Fricke, the head of mission for Doctors Without Borders, or MSF, which supports the hospital.

One of MSF’s staff members in the hospital reported on Friday that a sniper outside had killed two people at the hospital, including a volunteer nurse, Fricke said. The organisation’s staff had stayed at the hospital to care for patients, even as others fled northern Gaza.

Israel has argued that a ceasefire would leave Hamas in power, posing a threat to its security. The United States, Israel’s unflinching ally during the war, called the ceasefire resolution “not only unrealistic but dangerous”.

Robert Wood, the alternate US representative to the United Nations, said after the vote that it would leave Hamas “in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on October 7”.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said on Saturday that the US veto made it responsible for the bloodshed of Palestinians and complicit in “genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes committed by the Israeli occupation forces”.

The US policy “has become a danger to the world, posing a threat to international peace and security”, Abbas said in a statement, according to WAFA, the official Palestinian news agency. “This decision will haunt the United States for years.”

The foreign minister of Oman, a country that has close relations with the United States and has helped mediate between Washington and its adversaries in the region, condemned the veto as a “shameful insult to humanitarian norms” in a post on Saturday on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

“I deeply regret that the United States should sacrifice the lives of innocent civilians for the cause of Zionism,” the minister, Sayyid Badr Albusaidi, wrote.

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As the United States faced growing international pressure to support a ceasefire, the Biden administration said on Saturday it had approved a $US106.5 million ($161.8 million) sale of Army tank ammunition and equipment to Israel by invoking an emergency declaration that will bypass Congress’s typical review period for weapons sales.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken used the emergency declaration because “it is vital to US national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self-defence capability”, said the State Department in a news release.

A State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military matter, defended the emergency measure, saying the administration has used it to send weapons to Ukraine.

“Given Israel’s urgent defence needs, the secretary has determined this exercise of his delegated authority appropriate in this case as well,” the official said.

Josh Paul, a former State Department official who recently resigned after working for more than a decade on arms sales issues, criticised the decision to sell the weapons without congressional approval.

“This decision to use the same extraordinary emergency authority employed by President Trump to arm the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen directly contradicts a promise that Secretary Blinken made to Congress during his confirmation hearing that he would return to regular order,” Paul said.

The Washington Post

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