About 95 percent of aid groups have suspended or cut their services due to Israeli bombardment and blockade.Israel’s total siege and bombardment of the Gaza Strip have left Palestinian children surviving on less than one meal a day, according to an urgent warning by the leaders of 12 major aid groups in the enclave.
The humanitarian aid system in Gaza “is facing total collapse” due to 18 months of Israel’s military operation and the recent imposition of a full blockade last month, the joint statement said on Thursday.
An estimated 95 percent of the 43 international and Palestinian aid groups have already suspended or cut their services in Gaza, amid “widespread and indiscriminate bombing making it extremely dangerous to move around”, it added.
“Kids are eating less than a meal a day and struggling to find their next meal,” said Bushra Khalil, policy head of the aid group Oxfam. “Everyone is purely eating canned food … Malnutrition and pockets of famine are definitely occurring in Gaza.”
Amande Bazerolle, emergency coordinator in Gaza for Doctors Without Borders, added that aid workers have been forced to watch people, many of them women and children, suffer and die while carrying “the impossible burden of providing relief with depleted supplies”. Advertisement
“This is not a humanitarian failure – it is a political choice, and a deliberate assault on a people’s ability to survive, carried out with impunity,” she said.
In Gaza City, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud reported on Friday that the enclave was running out of baby formula, leaving children and …