The French NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has accused of deliberately starving the Palestinians in as a weapon of war, warning that its own staff in the enclave were themselves struggling to find sufficient food.
In a statement released on Friday, the MSF reported that one out of every four children between the ages of six months and five years old, as well as one out of every four pregnant and breastfeeding women, were malnourished in the devastated enclave.
Since May 18, the number of people enrolled for malnutrition treatment has quadrupled, whereas rates of severe malnutrition in children under five have tripled in the last two weeks.
“This is not just hunger — it is deliberate starvation, manufactured by the Israeli authorities,” the statement read. “The weaponization of food to exert pressure on a civilian population must not be normalized.”
The organization also lambasted the US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) over the nearly daily deaths of Palestinians shot by Israeli authorities near its distribution centers.
“What we are seeing is unconscionable; an entire people being deliberately cut off from food and water, all while the Israeli forces commit daily massacres as people scramble for scraps of food at distribution sites,” says Amande Bazerolle, MSF head of emergency response in Gaza. “Any shred of humanity in Gaza has been wiped out in the ongoing genocide.”
The report noted that the scarcity of food “is no longer about what people can afford. There is barely any food available in most of the strip.”
Meanwhile, Reuters interviewed United Nations and humanitarian agency representatives, who said the enclave was on the brink of running out of the specialized therapeutic food needed to save the lives of severely malnourished children.
Salim Oweis, a spokesperson for UNICEF in Amman, Jordan told Reuters that supplies of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food (RUTF), a crucial treatment, would be depleted by mid-August if nothing changed.
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