General Discussion

Celerity

(44,499 posts) Thu May 23, 2024, 05:56 PM May 23

Israel's latest offensives unleash 'hell' in Gaza, aid groups say

Fighting in the north and south has deepened Gaza’s humanitarian crisis and reversed recent gains by aid groups in staving off starvation and disease.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/22/gaza-famine-aid-israel-hamas/

https://archive.ph/2OcWq

Palestinians wait for aid trucks to cross in central Gaza on May 19. (Abdel Kareem Hana/AP)

More food had finally started to reach famine-racked northern Gaza earlier this month, pushing down prices in the Jabalya refugee camp, where doctors like Yehia Abed were trying to save a legion of malnourished patients. Then came “another attack,” he said. Israeli military operations this month against Hamas in Gaza — from the last, desperate refuge for Palestinians in the southern city of Rafah to the devastated refugee camps of the north — have displaced nearly a million people, according to the United Nations, and further sealed off the territory to outside aid.

Aid groups say it has deepened the enclave’s humanitarian crisis and reversed their recent gains in staving off starvation and disease. Now, aid workers said, they are resorting again to triage. “Instead of looking at antenatal care for pregnant ladies, instead of looking at malnutrition, now we are looking at how to stop the bleeding,” Abed said in a phone interview, as an explosion rang out in the background. “That’s continuous,” he said. “Day and night.” Gaza’s latest trial started in early May, when Israel issued evacuation orders in parts of Rafah, signaling the start of a long-threatened invasion it said was aimed at destroying Hamas’s remaining battalions.

Aid agencies warned for months that an offensive in an area sheltering more than a million people would be disastrous. It is every bit the calamity they feared, they say. As fighting intensified in the east of Rafah, along with Israeli bombardment and artillery shelling across the city, hospitals and clinics were shuttered. Warehouses storing thousands of tons of food supplies became unreachable. Border crossings that were southern Gaza’s lifeline were closed or hard to access, keeping food, nutritional supplements and medicines out — and thousands of critically injured patients penned in.

Aid officials have watched in horror and disbelief as nearly half of Gaza’s population has been forcefully displaced in just over two weeks, with uprooted families struggling to find any open patch of land to settle on. Humanitarian groups have been left with little notion of how, and where, to serve the starving, the injured and the sick. It was “potentially the darkest chapter in this horrendous war that started seven months ago,” Ricardo Pires, a spokesman for UNICEF, said last week as the disaster unfolded. More than 800,000 people have fled in southern Gaza, according to the United Nations, and at least 100,000 have been displaced from parts of the north, where Israel has also launched a new offensive against Hamas cells that have regrouped in the enclave’s widening power vacuum.

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