On Sunday morning, Israel announced it would begin a daily “humanitarian pause” in three densely populated areas of Gaza as it comes under increasing international pressure to alleviate the territory’s worsening starvation crisis.
Other measures also announced include the resumption of airdropped aid, the activation of a desalination plant and the provision of humanitarian corridors to facilitate UN aid deliveries within Gaza.
How bad is Gaza’s starvation crisis?
Last week the territory slipped into a full-blown starvation crisis, with dozens dying from hunger. According to the World Food Programme (WFP), 90,000 women and children are in urgent need of treatment for malnutrition, while one in three people are going without food for days.
Doctors in Gaza have described struggling to keep up with the number of patients coming in seeking treatment for malnourishment, with few tools at their disposal to provide them help.
“Our malnutrition ward in the hospital is extremely overcrowded. Due to the large number of cases, some children are forced to sleep on the floor,” said Dr Ahmad al-Farra, the director of paediatrics at Nasser medical complex.
The hunger crisis has affected virtually everyone in the Gaza Strip, with organisations such as the UN describing their staff as “walking corpses”.
How much aid was getting in before Sunday?
After resuming fighting in mid-March, Israel blocked all aid from entering Gaza for two and a half months, in what it said was an attempt to exert pressure on Hamas to release hostages.
In May, Israel started allowing a trickle of aid in, mostly through the private US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). Israel proposed the GHF as an alternative to the UN-aid system after claiming – without providing evidence – that Hamas was systematically stealing aid from the UN.
More than 1,000 people have been killed while trying to get aid, most of them near GHF food distribution sites. In total, Israel has let in 4,500 UN aid trucks into Gaza since May – an average of about 70 trucks a day. This is a far cry from prewar figures of 500-600 trucks a day, which the UN said is a requisite amount to help restore the health of Gaza’s population.
How will Israel’s announcement change the amount of aid that gets into Gaza?
Israel has announced airdropped aid will resume, which humanitarian organisations have said will provide a negligible amount of supplies. It also said that humanitarian corridors would be established to facilitate the entry of UN aid trucks into Gaza, though the number of trucks that will be allowed in was not specified.
NGOs say these steps may ease aid access, but with mass starvation already under way, far more is needed. In particular, humanitarian groups have called for a full ceasefire in order to get civilians the help they need.
“We have to go back to the levels we had during the ceasefire, 500-600 trucks of aid every day managed by the UN, including Unrwa, that our teams would distribute in 400 distribution points,” said Juliette Touma, the Unrwa director of communications.
She explained that aid agencies had previously walked Gaza back from the brink of starvation and that to do so again, an unimpeded flow of aid would be needed to “reverse the tide and trajectory of famine”.
Unrwa, which Israel banned from operating in Gaza in January, has 6,000 trucks of aid loaded with food, medicine and other hygiene supplies in Jordan and Egypt. The WFP said on Sunday it had enough aid to feed the population of Gaza for three months.
Israel’s latest announcement also is unclear about how long it will maintain the pauses and corridors. Humanitarians have said consistency is key to their work.
It also appears that Israel is relaxing some of its restrictions on the role of the UN in distributing aid in Gaza, but to what extent is unclear. The UN has said that only it is able to distribute aid efficiently within the territory, pointing to the deadly killings around the GHF as an example of why expertise is needed.
What difference will increased aid deliveries mean for Palestinians?
Palestinians are reacting to Israel’s announcement with caution, unwilling to raise their hopes after repeated promises of an imminent ceasefire have fallen through.
People said they saw no immediate difference in the availability of food and of prices – with the exception of flour, the price of which dropped 20% overnight.
It is the first day of Israel’s so-called humanitarian pauses, so it could be a while before increased aid has a noticeable effect on the ground. However, Gaza’s population is running out of time. Each day, more people die from hunger and the number of people suffering from severe malnutrition grows.
Doctors have also warned that alleviating the starvation crisis will not be as easy as flipping a switch. People who are suffering from acute malnutrition need specialised treatment, as they can develop refeeding syndrome if they resume eating normally after a prolonged period of hunger.
“All of these folks who have been deprived for so long, we worry about the complications that they may have developed,” said Dr Thaer Ahmad, a doctor who has worked on medical missions in Gaza.
