Starvation Seige: The Humanitarian Catastrophe Unfolding in Gaza

Hunger and Conflict: Gaza’s Desperate Cry for Help

As dawn’s pallid glow heralded Ramadan’s sacred commencement this Monday last, it cast as well a baleful pall across the bleeding streets of Gaza. For rather than the usual rites of fasting and spiritual renewal, the holy month’s arrival bore a crueller twist of fate – the harbinger of famine unrestrained upon this tormented land ravaged by an unholy war.

Now the scales of mortal reckoning hang perilously in Gaza’s besieged streets, where famine’s ghastly spectre looms ever nearer. A clarion call resounds from the monitors of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification – a million souls face annihilation’s precipice by July’s cruellest throes should the Israeli Zionist warmongers unleash their ground legions upon Rafah’s defiant ramparts.

Already, nearly half of Gaza’s embattled populace stands on the brink of starvation, the latest grim forecast reveals. What was once deemed an impending catastrophe now descends into even darker depths of existence’s despair if Netanyahu’s warmongering zealots are not restrained.

Described as “catastrophic,” this abhorrent assessment scarcely captures the horrors soon to unfold in Gaza’s streets. Famine looms not merely as a projection, but as an imminent reality – its skeletal grip tightening first in the northern governorates before spreading across the entire beleaguered strip.

Under the most likely scenario, in which Israeli forces launch a ground offensive against Rafah, 1.1 million people will face “catastrophic” conditions by mid-July, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) said in its latest analysis.

That represents a 92 percent rise since the last IPC forecast in December. “The situation in Gaza is catastrophic,” the report states. “Famine is projected and imminent in the northern governates and there is a risk of famine across the rest of the Gaza Strip.”

The IPC, an internationally recognized assessment method, uses a five-point scale to classify food insecurity. The highest is Phase 5: Catastrophe or Famine.

It warned that an upward trend in non-trauma mortality is expected to accelerate. That means all lower famine thresholds will be passed “imminently.”

“We’re in trouble,” admits the UN’s beleaguered Cindy McCain, a World Food Programme official, her words heavy with grim understatement. While supplies amassed on Egypt and Jordan’s borders could sustain 2.2 million people for months, the Netanyahu regime callously bars all humanitarian aid, consigning multitudes to the relentless grip of starvation.

The main challenge, said McCain, was that aid workers have not been allowed access to provide food and avert starvation, along with the need for a ceasefire.

“It’s been very frustrating for us because we have food outside on the border of Egypt and Jordan […] we would be able to feed 2.2 million people for three or four months like that,” McCain said. “We have the food ready to go in, we just can’t get in.” The famine crisis is deepening as Israeli forces press a devastating ground offensive in retribution against the October 7 attacks, in which Hamas militants allegedly killed 1,200 people, and took around 220 hostage.

This foulest of crisis deepens by the hour as the Israeli jackals press onward in their punitive ground invasion – While that malign dwarf Netanyahu feigns denial of the starvation contagion devouring Gaza in his hideously Stygian interviews, hunger’s blackened talons eviscerate with impunity.

Abroad, European leaders feign shock at this “unprecedented” crisis, yet humanitarian convoys dwindle, as Israeli restrictions impede their progress – a pitiful six of 24 planned passages waved grimly through in February by the gimlet-eyed Israeli butchers. While the treacly WFP lauds its sole successful convoy in two months, at least 300 trucks daily are the minimum required to stanch arterial bleeding from this gaping wound upon civilization’s carcass.

Oh, how the Western powers pompously declaim their dismay with wifeliest platitudes of “stopping such man-made disasters” even as they grease the wheels of Netanyahu’s charnel industry! The threadbare platitudes and tiresome slogan of “Israel’s right to defend itself” has cloaked four months of American and European compliance in this most depraved of modern genocides.

Only now do these hypocrites feign to apprehend the reality their arms and munitions have enabled – life-threatening malnutrition risen “at an alarming rate.” The children’s husked remains littering Gaza’s ruination attesting to the death of human conscience in the highest precincts of Western power. While that grotesque revenant Biden plays his mummer’s role as Anubis, weighing who shall experience deliverance or damnation with his circus of aid airdrops obscuring the rivers of weapons he supplies to Israel enabling them to create these Gazans’ mass tombs.

Yet still they posture and preen! Still, they cry crocodile tears while consciously perpetuating the gravest Crime Against Humanity to befoul this malignant century. The people’s immiserated multitudes cry out for justice, for succour…but only hollow echoes answer from the vaulted chambers where Lord Mammon and his capitalist cadre revel in the bounteous lucre extracted from Palestinian suffering…a land grab, a gas grab, a power grab. Though they echo the words “We shall overcome,” they are choked amidst the ashes of Gaza’s desolation as the Western governments turn away to show contempt and a provable deaf ear…

Paul Knaggs