Standing over a tiny bundle wrapped in a sheet on a hospital bed, a young father drapes his hand across his face in despair. Mousa Salem, a Gaza photographer who videotaped this sad tableau and sent it to me, said the sheet swaddled 2-month-old Mohamed al-Zayegh, who died on Friday in Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza City. “Nutrition? What nutrition?” a staff member in scrubs says in the video. “The mother gave birth to him during the war.”
“The health of the mother affects the health of the baby,” he added. “This is very well known in the science of medicine and health. And all of this piled on the child and he got sick, he has a weak immune system. “
Another infant, 2-month-old Mahmoud Fattouh, died of malnutrition on Friday at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, according to Al Jazeera, which cited a news agency thought to be close to Hamas. “The baby has not been fed any milk for days,” a paramedic who took the child to the hospital said in a video verified by Al Jazeera.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the head of the pediatric department of Kamal Adwan Hospital, said this month he was seeing a number of deaths among children, especially newborns. “Signs of weakness and paleness are apparent on newborns because the mother is malnourished,” he said.
Reports of death by starvation are difficult to verify from a distance. The hunger in Gaza is caused but also partly hidden by a pitiless war that has obliterated hospitals, flooded morgues and damaged communication networks, leaving us to cobble together what’s happening from scraps of information. Relief organizations in Gaza struggle to figure out whether the crisis has crossed formally into famine; statistically, the clearest indication is that at least two people out of every 10,000 die every day from starvation. They measure the circumference of children’s upper arms to document the peril of their weight loss.
These children are not suffering from drought or crop failure or some other natural disaster. Their hunger is a man-made catastrophe. The Israeli government has slowed and even prevented food aid from entering the besieged Gaza Strip. Even when trucks do get through, Israeli bombardment and, more recently, the growing desperation of hungry mobs have turned food distribution into an arduous and sometimes deadly endeavor.
To a lesser but important extent, people in Gaza are hungry because the U.S. government — Israel’s pre-eminent military aid provider and political defender — has failed to use its considerable leverage to force Israel to let Gaza eat.
The threat of starvation is believed to be most intense in the bomb-scarred remains of northern Gaza, where by January, nutrition screenings found that more than 15 percent of children ages 6 months to 23 months were acutely malnourished, a condition rarely seen in Gaza before the current war. “Such a decline in a population’s nutritional status in three months is unprecedented globally,” UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the U.N. World Food Program said in reporting the latest grim statistics last week.
Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, troubled by stories of starvation, texted Cindy McCain, the head of the World Food Program, to ask whether “children have now crossed the awful threshold from being on the verge of starvation to dying of starvation,” he said in the Senate on Feb. 12.
“She wrote back, and I quote, ‘This is true,’” Mr. Van Hollen said, reading from Ms. McCain’s text message. “‘We are unable to get in enough food to keep people from the brink. Famine is imminent. I wish I had better news.’”
Michael Ryan, the executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies program, put it bluntly: “This is a population that is starving to death.”
We should not pretend these deaths were inevitable. All of this we already knew: Palestinian residents of Gaza have been reduced to eating grass. They drink fetid water. Grains meant for animal feed are pulverized into makeshift flour, but even that lowly sustenance has been running out. Palestinian starvation has been documented and reported. We knew.
It is a harsh death. Muscles weaken and shrink. The immune system falters, and infections take hold. Vital organs break down. The weakest die first — babies, the elderly, the sick.
In the early days of its onslaught, Israel’s defense minister declared that food, electricity and fuel would be cut off to Gaza’s 2.2 million inhabitants, nearly half of whom are children. Israel eventually began allowing some food and medical supplies to enter, but aid organizations warned it wasn’t enough.
As international disapproval has mounted, Israeli officials have said there was no shortage of food in Gaza and denied that they were responsible for people going hungry, accusing Hamas of pilfering aid bound for civilians and saying the United Nations failed to distribute food.
But these contentions have been dismissed by aid organizations trying to move supplies into Gaza. Israel has been blamed for creating byzantine delays at crossings and for failing to ensure safe passage in Gaza. It is accused of opening fire on U.N. aid vehicles returning from delivering aid and on crowds waiting for food. Acute hunger only increases the chaos: The World Food Program suspended food deliveries to northern Gaza last week because looters and desperate crowds were attacking the trucks. Jordanian and French military planes dropped food and other supplies into central Gaza on Monday, but some of the boxes fell into the sea, forcing people to scramble into the water to retrieve them.
On Monday the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said it had a new plan to provide aid to Gaza but gave no details.
The Palestinian writer Laila El-Haddad, who has family members in Gaza, told me that she has spoken to relatives who haven’t had fruit, vegetables or meat in three months. They are trying to survive, she said, by hunting for canned food and foraging for wild plants like sorrel and mallow. A few miles away, meanwhile, Israeli protesters have physically blocked aid trucks from entering the Gaza Strip.
The ominous absurdity of the situation is impossible to overstate. A freighter with food bound for Gaza, enough to feed more than one million people, languished for weeks at the Israeli port of Ashdod because Israeli customs authorities refused to process the food. The United States paid for 90,000 metric tons of flour on the freighter, and President Biden thanked Israel for letting it pass — except that Israel had done the opposite.
The Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich — an extremist settler in the West Bank who once said, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people” — said he wouldn’t allow the aid through because it was headed for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, the main provider of public services and aid in Gaza. His office said it was trying to find an alternate route because he feared the food would fall into Hamas’s hands. Israel eventually said it would allow the American flour to be distributed by the World Food Program, but it is not clear whether that has happened.
While the United States can’t be directly blamed for the hunger in Gaza, the Biden administration shares moral responsibility. Just when the spiraling humanitarian crisis should have been made a priority, the Biden administration opted instead to showily withhold funding to UNRWA. This was done even though aid groups say there is no other organization with comparable ability to distribute food in Gaza.
Mr. Biden’s decision came after Israel shared intelligence that a dozen UNRWA staff members played a role in the Hamas rampage of Oct. 7, which left roughly 1,200 people dead in Israel and some 240 more taken as hostages to the Gaza Strip.
These were, unquestionably, serious allegations, and UNRWA took them seriously, firing most of the implicated staff members even before investigating. The U.N. has begun two investigations into the allegations.
But the response from the Biden administration and the at least 15 other governments that suspended support to UNRWA is dangerously disproportionate. Even if the allegations turn out to be true — and they may well be — this scandal touches only about 0.1 percent of UNRWA’s roughly 13,000 Gaza staff members.
There is no tipping point at which the crimes of a handful of people justify kneecapping the main food source while famine looms.
When the International Court of Justice found it “plausible” that Israel had committed genocidal acts in Gaza, the judges warned of the urgent need for aid to relieve “catastrophic conditions.” On Monday the UNRWA commissioner general, Philippe Lazzarini, said that compared with January, only half as much aid is getting in.
“After the I.C.J. resolution, people expected that aid would enter in bigger quantities,” said Ammar Al-Dwaik, the director general of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights. “But what is happening is the opposite.”