MORE than half a million people are starving in Gaza, the United Nations Relief Works and Agency (UNRWA), World Food Programme (WFP) and Gaza’s Hamas government reported yesterday, calling for the UN to declare the besieged Strip a famine region.
On the 109th day of the Israeli Zionist genocidal aggression on the Gaza Strip the death toll reached 25,490 people, mostly women and children, with 63,000 injured, with thousands more still missing under the rubble.
The Israeli military committed many new crimes and murders yesterday, including firing artillery shells at the headquarters of the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) in Khan Younis in southern Gaza.
The PRCS said the shelling coincided with ‘intense gunfire from Israeli drones, resulting in injuries among internally displaced individuals who’d sought safety on our premises.’
UNRWA warned yesterday that ‘very little’ food assistance has made it beyond the southern part of the bombarded and besieged territory since the start of the war.
Abeer Etefa, of the World Food Programme said: ‘The risk of having pockets of famine in Gaza is very much still there. There is a systematic limitation on getting into the north of Gaza, not just for the WFP.
‘This is why we’re seeing people becoming more desperate and being impatient to wait for food distributions, because it’s very sporadic. They don’t get it frequently, and they have no trust or confidence that these convoys will come again.’
Speaking on Monday night, senior Hamas official Osama Hamdan held the Israeli occupation government and the United States administration responsible for the massacres and atrocities in Gaza, calling on international organisations to declare northern Gaza a famine zone.
Hamdan urged the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League to make immediate efforts to bring aid into Gaza.
‘For the 108th day, the Nazi occupation persists in its barbaric aggression and genocidal war against our Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, during which it has committed the most heinous crimes and horrific massacres against defenceless civilians, mostly children and women, through continuous indiscriminate bombardment and systematic destruction of all aspects of human life across the Gaza Strip,’ he said, adding:
‘There are no longer safe areas in the Gaza Strip as the occupation regime and the US administration claim, and it is no longer a secret the nature of the third stage that has been announced by this Nazi enemy in partnership with America and the West.’
