Gaza famine: "My children watch videos of roasted chickens and hamburgers online, but I forbid them because it only harms them."

Bread and hummus for breakfast and dinner. For days now. “And that's if we're lucky, because there have been nights when there was nothing at all,” says Islam Umm Amar, a Gazan mother of three children under six, the last born at the end of 2023, when the war had just begun.

“The reports may declare the famine official as of today, but the UN is late because it has been punishing Gaza City for months,” she tells this newspaper bitterly by phone from the city’s old town. “I’ve been watching my children faint before my eyes for a long time because they’re so weak. We’ve all lost a lot of weight. I don’t know why Israel is taking revenge on us like this,” adds 32-year-old Umm Amar.

A UN report released Friday concluded that the famine, "entirely man-made," is already affecting 500,000 people in Gaza City, three neighboring towns, and several refugee camps. It added that the same "catastrophic conditions" will spread south to Deir al-Balah and Khan Yunis by the end of September if nothing changes. It also warned that the famine situation in the north of the Strip, "where the situation is equal to or worse than that in Gaza City," has not been assessed.

"My two young children have never eaten fruit, fresh meat, or tasted sweets. I don't think anyone outside of Gaza can imagine what this means or how we're living," laments Umm Amar.

It is impossible to produce or grow virtually anything in a Strip devastated and battered by bombing and mass displacement, where its two million inhabitants are crammed into a tiny 365-square-kilometer territory. Its population depends more than ever on the trickle-in humanitarian aid. According to the World Food Program (WFP), the territory currently needs more than 62,000 tons of life-saving aid per month.

My two young children have never eaten fruit, fresh meat, or tasted sweets. I don't think anyone outside of Gaza can imagine what this means or how we're living.

Islam Umm Amar, Gazan mother

In the Al Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, Dima al Batsh will once again serve her two teenage children watery lentil soup. In a backpack, they keep some cans of tuna and meat for emergencies or for an escape they fear will come in the coming days, as the Israeli army prepares to launch its evacuation plan and complete control of the city, which, if carried out, will result in the exodus of nearly a million people .

"My children beg me to go buy us something delicious to eat. They watch videos of roast chickens and hamburgers online, but I forbid them because it only hurts them," this civil servant told this newspaper. She lost her job when the Israeli bombings began in October 2023, following attacks by the Islamist Hamas movement.

“And it could be worse . I see people around me practically starving to death. Children are crying because they don't eat, and parents are desperate because there's nothing they can give them. That's the reality. Everything else is Israeli propaganda,” he says.

“It’s been a long time coming”

Samir Zaqut, one of the leaders of the Palestinian NGO Al Mezan, also believes that famine has been a reality in Gaza for weeks or months. “The report falls short and has been slow to arrive. When you live here, talk to people, enter homes and tents, you see that it has been going on for months,” he charges. “The Israelis propagandize that food is coming into Gaza and no one is starving, so that nothing changes and no one reacts,” he adds.

Coinciding with the release of the report on the famine in the Strip, the NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has released data from its clinic in Gaza City, where a total of 5,570 patients have been admitted for malnutrition since the end of May. "At the end of May, only one in seven were severe cases, while the rest were moderate. By early August, one in four cases were already acute malnutrition," they summarized, estimating that the overall number of patients has multiplied fivefold since May.

According to Zaqut, the lack of food is compounded by the quality of what people in Gaza consume. “There is no fresh food, only canned goods of poor quality. This is destroying our health, especially that of the weakest, such as the elderly, the chronically ill, babies, and pregnant women,” he laments.

“Today, for example, I went to the market and there were some tomatoes. A kilo cost more than 80 shekels (20 euros). Who can afford that?” he asks. Zaqut believes that currently, 80% of the people in the Strip are extremely poor and are manipulated by small-scale mafias to try to steal the few UN humanitarian aid trucks that Israel allows into Gaza.

"There are also groups of armed people waiting for parachutes to be dropped with food . This prevents people like me from going to those places out of fear, and hunger spreads further and further," he says.

Zaqut accuses Israel of "facilitating and encouraging" this situation. It does so by not allowing more trucks to enter, by not authorizing UN agencies to ensure their safety and proper distribution, and by selling the idea that people in the Gaza Strip are not starving thanks to the Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which distributes food in several locations in the south of the territory.

According to the UN , from late May to mid-August, at least 1,857 Palestinians died while trying to obtain food, 1,021 of them in the vicinity of the GHF. For this reason, the UN report notes that the food distributions carried out by this foundation "do not meet the criteria to be classified as humanitarian aid," although they are counted in its calculations.

The diameter of a child's arm

For Tirza Leibowitz of the Israeli NGO Physicians for Human Rights (PHRI), which last month published a report on the destruction of the Gaza healthcare system concluding that what is happening in the Strip amounts to genocide, the famine was "foreseeable" and is the result of "seeds of destruction that have been sown and watered will continue to claim lives for years." "What we are seeing now is the conjunction of the destruction of healthcare, famine, the resurgence of disease, and the collapse of treatment capacity," she said.

The report falls short and has been slow to arrive. When you live here, talk to people, enter homes and tents, you see this has been going on for months.

Samir Zaqut, NGO Al Mezan

Israel considered this report on the famine in Gaza to have been "tailor-made to fit Hamas's lies" and accused the institution of having lowered its standards for declaring a famine. The authors of the report have refuted these accusations and provided a corresponding technical explanation.

The Integrated Phase Classification (IPC), the globally recognized index independently developed by experts at the request of the UN and other international organizations, compiles this report and establishes five phases for measuring food security. For famine, the most severe stage, to be officially considered afflicting a population, three criteria must be met: one in five households must suffer extreme food shortages; 30% of children must be severely malnourished; and at least two in every 10,000 people (or at least four in every 10,000 children under five) must die each day as a result of absolute starvation or the interaction of malnutrition and disease.

In Gaza, it is currently not possible to weigh and measure children to estimate whether 30% of them are below the percentile considered dangerous for their health. Therefore, arm circumference is used, a method used in several places for more than a decade, which allows famine to be declared when 15% of children are below a certain measurement.

The report from this group of experts warns that "malnutrition will threaten the lives of 132,000 children under the age of five" in Gaza by June of next year.

“The report is based on biased and unreliable sources, many of them affiliated with Hamas, and blatantly ignores the facts and the broader humanitarian efforts led by the State of Israel and its international partners,” General Ghassan Alian, head of COGAT, the Israeli agency responsible for, among other things, authorizing the entry of aid into Gaza, insisted on the social network X.