European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reiterated EU calls for Israel to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, as health workers warned Palestinians were facing “forced starvation.”
“The images from Gaza are unbearable,” von der Leyen said. “Civilians in Gaza have suffered too much, for too long. It must stop now.”
In 24 hours, 15 people — including four children — died of starvation, Gaza’s health ministry said Tuesday morning. The latest deaths bring the total figures, according to local hospitals, to 101 people in Gaza, including 80 children, who have died from hunger since the start of the war.
Israel has blocked most aid from entering Gaza since March, with the U.S. and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation taking over its distribution since May. At least 1,000 people have been killed seeking food from GHF and aid convoys since then, the U.N. Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA) estimates. Israel has previously disputed the number of casualties.
“The killing of civilians seeking aid in Gaza is indefensible,” EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas said on Tuesday, noting she spoke with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar to “make clear the [Israel Defense Forces] must stop killing people at distribution points.”
Kallas and von der Leyen’s statements come as foreign ministers across Europe and the Commonwealth area accused Israel of denying assistance to the civilian population in Gaza in a joint statement on Monday. Twenty EU countries, alongside the U.K., Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and the European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid Hadja Lahbib signed on to the statement.
In a post on X, Sa’ar said the countries behind the statement had made a “mistake … part of them out of good intentions and part of them out of an obsession against Israel.” Sa’ar added he had spoken to Kallas and told her Hamas was responsible for “deliberately creating friction between the civilian population, the aid distribution centers and the IDF.”
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot also demanded on Tuesday that Israel let journalists into Gaza, a day after the journalists’ association at newswire Agence France-Presse said their colleagues in Gaza were starving to death.
Health crisis spirals
“This is not hunger, this is not malnutrition. This is forced starvation, this is torture,” Saira Hussain, a British-Australian doctor currently working in Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, said.
“We’ve really not seen anything quite like this before,” said Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation and an expert on famine. “It’s genocidal starvation.”
On July 10, Kallas announced a deal with Israel to increase the flow of humanitarian aid, saying Israel agreed to open more aid crossings and let more food trucks into Gaza.
But these measures aren’t sufficient to reverse the humanitarian crisis, de Waal warned. “Think of this as a slide into mass starvation … they’re not addressing the downward slide, they’re just addressing the velocity.”
According to aid workers and health care professionals on the ground, the situation has turned increasingly desperate.
“I walked through the market yesterday searching for food, but sadly returned empty-handed. There isn’t a single grain of flour to be found,” said Mai Elawawda, a spokesperson for NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians in Gaza.
Health workers in Gaza report being overwhelmed with mass casualty incidents from the aid centers. On Saturday, there were “hundreds and hundreds of wounded” brought in with gunshot injuries from a GHF site, Hussain said.
Children with burn injuries and chronic diseases are suffering the most from the lack of food, Hussain said: “If you’re malnourished, your tissues don’t heal … All children suffer here, but when you think of the children who also have chronic conditions and chronic diseases that would be easily treatable in any other country, the situation is absolutely intolerable.”
Newborn babies are also struggling to survive as malnourished mothers cannot breastfeed, said Graeme Groom, a British orthopedic surgeon who returned from his most recent trip to Gaza in June. “There is some formula milk for normal babies, but the lactose-intolerant babies just die,” he said.
Claudia Chiappa contributed reporting.
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