GENEVA, July 25. /TASS/. The Doctors without Borders (MSF) humanitarian organization has accused Israel of using hunger as a weapon in the Gaza Strip.
"The Israeli authorities’ deliberate use of starvation as a weapon in Gaza, Palestine, continues, seeing hunger reach unprecedented levels, with patients and healthcare workers themselves now fighting to survive," it said in a press statement.
"What we are seeing is unconscionable; an entire people being deliberately cut off from food and water, all while the Israeli forces commit daily massacres as people scramble for scraps of food at distribution sites," the MSF quoted Amande Bazerolle, MSF head of emergency response in Gaza, as saying. "Any shred of humanity in Gaza has been wiped out in the ongoing genocide."
"MSF staff are receiving an increasing number of malnourished patients at our clinics, while they themselves struggle to find sufficient food. Across screenings of children aged six months to five years old, and of pregnant and breastfeeding women, at MSF facilities last week, 25 per cent were malnourished. At the MSF clinic in Gaza City, in the north of the Strip, the number of people enrolled for malnutrition treatment has quadrupled since 18 May, while rates of severe malnutrition in children under five have tripled in the last two weeks alone," it said.
Humanitarian assistance from international humanitarian organizations and UN structures has not been reaching the Gaza Strip since March 2, Israel closed all checkpoints. Since May, Israel has been enforcing a new US-backed scheme to organize aid for Gaza residents, which transfers practically exclusive rights to establish distribution centers and provide food and essential goods to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). According to the plan, all international organizations involved in aid efforts, including UN agencies, are to operate solely through the GHF.
The plan was severely criticized by international organizations, which insist that the organization of aid distribution centers in the so-called "security zones" in the south of the enclave may entail the forcible displacement of the enclave’s population. International humanitarian and human rights organizations have been regularly reporting killings of civilians flocking around GHF food distribution sites. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, as many as 1,054 people queueing for humanitarian aid had been killed by the Israeli military as of July 21, including 766 in the exact vicinity of GHF outlets.