THE UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), which monitors hunger and starvation across the world, yesterday issued a warning that the ‘worst case scenario of famine’ has unfolded in Gaza as a direct result of the deliberate Israeli policy of starving Palestinians to death.
In its new report the IPC said: ‘Latest data indicates that famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.’
The report continues: ‘Amid relentless conflict, mass displacement, severely restricted humanitarian access, and the collapse of essential services, including healthcare, the crisis has reached an alarming and deadly turning point.’
Nearly 150 Palestinian children and adults in Gaza have died from starvation since the Zionist regime launched its genocidal war in October 2023.
That number is now spiralling upwards, with the IPC noting: ‘Malnutrition has been rising rapidly in the first half of July. Over 20,000 children have been admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July, with more than 3,000 severely malnourished. Hospitals have reported a rapid increase in hunger-related deaths for children under five years of age, with at least 16 reported deaths since 17 July.’
All the starvation of children and adults is a result of the deliberate policy of ethnically cleansing Gaza of Palestinians by the terrorist Zionist regime.
It is the outcome of the systematic closure of borders, preventing any food or medical supplies from entering the Gaza Strip – a state of siege to starve Palestinians out of their land or into the grave.
Yesterday, the news site Middle East Eye reported that UNRWA had told them that it has had 6,000 aid trucks in Egypt and Jordan for over four and a half months awaiting Israeli permits to enter Gaza.
Food on these trucks has been spoiled and rendered inedible by the restriction imposed by Israeli military.
It follows the outlawing of UNRWA, the UN’s largest humanitarian provider in Gaza, by the Netanyahu government, replacing aid distribution with sites run by the repugnantly mis-named Israeli-American Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
These ‘aid’ sites are just killing grounds for Palestinians desperate for food to feed their starving children.
The Zionist regime still denies there is starvation in Gaza with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claiming on Monday it was a ‘bold-faced lie’ to say Israel was causing hunger in the Strip and that there was ‘no starvation in Gaza.’
Netanyahu’s bare faced lies are no longer providing any cover for the genocide being carried out when every day of the week workers and people of the world witness on their TV screens the appalling pictures of small children reduced to skin and bones and on the point of death by starvation.
The massive wave of anger sweeping the world over the crimes against humanity inflicted on Palestinian children and babies in Gaza has forced the leaders of the capitalist world to attempt to divert attention away from their role in arming and financing Israel by calling for Netanyahu to permit limited aid to enter the Strip.
All the money and arms being pumped into Israel by the US and its allies in the UK to maintain and extend its role as the armed outpost of world imperialism in the Middle East keeps the barbaric war to ethnically cleanse Gaza going.
With over 2 million Palestinians in Gaza facing being starved to death, the tipping point has been reached for the working class to exert its power by forcing the trade unions in the US, UK and Europe to act and organise indefinite general strikes to bring down the genocidal-enabling governments, replacing them with workers’ governments and socialism.
The only way to end imperialist barbarism is for the working class to smash imperialism by taking power and advancing humanity with the victory of the world socialist revolution.
The immediate task today is to build up the WRP and Young Socialists in Britain and sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to provide the leadership required to dump imperialism in history’s dustbin where it belongs.
