2023-12-29 13:04:34
“We have become bones”laments Fatma al Madani, one of the many mothers in Gaza who doesn’t know how to feed his children, who cry all night on an empty stomach. Theirs is one of the many families displaced by the war in the Palestinian Strip, surviving as best they can in the face of a famine exacerbated by United Nations like a humanitarian “catastrophe”.
“The child screams all night because he is hungry,” this woman tells the Efe news agency. displaced with his family to Rafah, the furthest south of the coastal enclave. A tent in which ten people are crammed has become their precarious home, in which “There is not even bread to eat”.
“Everyone is hungry, everyone. I have kidney disease and I need special food, but I can’t find anything,” denounces this mother, because in addition to food there is a lack medicines, hygiene and water. And the little that is found to put in your mouth “is all expensive, you can’t buy anything,” because the prices they have fired in the face of scarcity.
“We can’t even make a piece of bread in this situation, in the middle of the sand and the tents,” he adds, because humanitarian aid barely arrives. “If you see something, it’s expensive, you look at it, but you can’t. buy,” says this woman.
Rationing the bread
Tag Ahmed, another of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people – it is estimated that around 1.9 million, 85% of Gazans, have had to leave their home – is categorical: “We live in poverty, in misery.” To the point of having to ration the little bread they get, “so that it doesn’t run out, it’s exhausting,” he says.
About forty people, four families, share a tent as best they can, the men sleeping outside, despite the cold. The little they get is cooked in a pot on an improvised stove, some bricks between which they burn firewood.
A few vegetables and some eggs, next to those with a baby crying non-stop, can be seen in one of the tents in a camp for displaced people, while outside some children play in the sand, not all of them wearing shoes. In another, some women prepare something with which trick the stomachbased on flour and water.
Rudab Abunazi, another displaced person, suffers the same thing: about thirty people crowded into a small space. “We are suffering a lot,” something that, in addition to being physical, “affects psychologically,” she says. Suffering from eczema, her condition “has worsened due to the conditions we live here,” where “everything is difficult, very difficult.”
“Unbearable living conditions”
“Living conditions are already unbearable, prices have doubled,” he says: “Everyone has a story, a suffering.”
The Half the population in the Gaza Strip is starving and nine out of ten people are not eating enough.and, as recently warned by the deputy executive director of the UN World Food Program (WFP), Carl Skau.
Several areas of Gaza have reached the highest level, that of “catastrophe”on the United Nations scale of food insecurity, due to famine in the north and south of the Palestinian Strip, an extreme situation that has not occurred since humanitarian crises such as those in Somalia or Ethiopia.
Related news
In addition to non-governmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch o Oxfam Intermón have denounced that hunger has become a weapon of war in Gaza.
Dying from hunger or from bombs in Gaza, where the dead from Israel’s military offensive exceed 21,300 and the injured more than 55,600, according to the Ministry of Health of the coastal enclave.
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