You give us lovely words

Gaza "food security" update.

This is a follow-up to “What We Talk about When We Talk about Food Security”, which you can read here. -JRS

To turn back to Gaza, things have gone from worse to worse. This week, the World Bank Group issued a statement that half of the people of Gaza – i.e. over one million human beings – are on the brink of famine. The most recent Special Brief from the IPC Global Initiative, making use of its coldly bureaucratic classification system, categorizes every single resident as in either Phase 3, 4 or 5 – that is, in crisis, emergency, or catastrophe, respectively. 

That same brief states that “extensive damage has been inflicted on the local food system, including agricultural infrastructure” and that – I’ll set aside their use of the passive voice – Israel has destroyed over “300 home barns, 100 agricultural warehouses, 46 farm storages, 119 animal shelters, 200 farms, as well over 600 wells.” In mid-January, UN experts reported that Israeli forces had also “destroyed approximately 70% of Gaza’s fishing fleet” – I should add that, as explained by globalEDGE in 2022, the Israeli blockade had already severely restricted the industry, “historically […] the backbone of Gaza’s workforce”.  

This week on Twitter, Muhammad Shehada, journalist and Chief of Programmes and Communications at Euro-Med Monitor, stated that Israel had, in the span of three days, killed numerous individuals responsible for the safe distribution of aid in Gaza as well as the prevention of looting and chaos. These include police officials Fayeq Al-Mabhouh, Raed Al-Banna, and Mahmoud Al-Bayoumi, as well as Amjad Hathat, Director of the Emergency Committee in western Gaza, and two “mukhtars” or tribal committee leaders, Jamal Al-Kahlot and Ismail Al-Nono.

That’s all from the Israeli side; in the US, Congress announced a $1.2 trillion bipartisan spending measure for defense, homeland security and other programs. That bill also bans funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), a key provider of humanitarian aid in Gaza. The House of Representatives approved that measure on Friday.

If you haven’t yet connected the dots in this dismal picture, I hope things seem a little clearer, at least; as I wrote in January, “Palestinians in Gaza are not starving, they are being starved.”

What else can we say, in the face of such compounding horror? I’ve no idea – but will keep writing, anyhow. Both because Palestinians at home and in the diaspora plead with us to do so, and, as Sarah Thankam Mathews recently wrote, to “choose nihilism is to participate in the continued colonization of the future”. Despair is a privilege we must do without. 

I’ll end this newsletter with part of a recent speech by Michael Fakhri, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva: 

“The images of starvation in Gaza are unbearable. And you’re doing nothing. You talk, and you talk, and you talk, and you give us lovely words. How is it that the Human Rights Council is not addressing a situation in which we’ve never seen a civilian population go so hungry, and so completely, in any time in modern history. We’ve never seen children pushed into malnutrition so quickly. This is on your watch. Please, turn your words into action.”