Men sit together overlooking a view of tents sheltering Palestinians displaced by confict by the Hamad Residential City complex in the north of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. AFP
“For three of these, once the food and water had been delivered to the school where people were sheltering, it was then cleared and shelled within hours,” Oxfam wrote in a press release, according to AFP.
Oxfam is among the many charities that have said that Israel had prevented them from delivering aid to north Gaza since early October when the military launched a renewed assault on Jabalia, Beit Lahiya, and Beit Hanoun. At that time, the Israeli army claimed it was trying to stop Hamas fighters from regrouping there.
When any trickle of aid is delivered (which includes ready-to-eat rations, wheat flour, water, and so on), the civilians collecting it in northern Gaza are at risk of being killed by Israeli airstrikes, which have hit schools-turned-shelters, refugee camps, and hospitals.
Oxfam says about 130,000 people have now been forcibly displaced from the north Gaza governorate, with roughly 70 percent — 91,000 — being women and girls who are trying to survive in abandoned buildings and overcrowded shelters in Gaza City.
Sally Abi-Khalil, Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa director, said: “The situation in Gaza is apocalyptic and people are trapped, unable to find any kind of safety. The absolute desperation of having no food or shelter for your family in the biting cold of winter. It is abhorrent that despite international law being so publicly violated by Israel and starvation being used relentlessly as a weapon of war, world leaders continue to do nothing,” according to The Guardian.
“Gaza has been widely destroyed and the entire population is suffering. The public sector has collapsed and the humanitarian system is on its knees. We plead with the entire international community – stop this, now. You have the diplomatic and economic levers to make Israel stop. Every day that passes without a ceasefire is a death sentence for hundreds more civilians,” she added.
In November, the independent Famine Review Committee (FRC), a committee of global food security experts, issued a rare alert warning that there is a “strong likelihood that famine is imminent in areas” of the northern Gaza Strip.
The FRC said it could be “assumed that starvation, malnutrition, and excess mortality due to malnutrition and disease are rapidly increasing” in northern Gaza.
“Famine thresholds may have already been crossed or else will be soon,” the global hunger monitor noted.
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