Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Prominent foreign policy journalist Colum Lynch has an exclusive at the Devex site, which is devoted to economic development news and has a special relationship to the US Agency for International Development.
Lynch has seen a memo entitled “Famine Inevitable, Changes Could Reduce but Not Stop Widespread Civilian Deaths,” which was produced by food security experts in US AID and the State Department, and which they sent to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. These US officials gave the memo a subheading that is damning for the Israeli government of PM Benjamin Netanyahu: “Israel-imposed administrative challenges are preventing the delivery” of food.
So two things are being asserted:
1. Famine in Gaza is now unavoidable and will kill many civilian noncombatants even if more food aid starts getting in now.
2. The responsibility for this starvation of children, women and noncombatant males lies squarely with Israel, which is obstructing food aid deliveries.
That is all you need to know. These experts have never seen a situation so bad.
Lynch quotes the memo, sent earlier this month:
- “Adequate health, nutrition, and water, sanitation, and hygiene … interventions, an immediate cessation of hostilities, and sustained humanitarian access will be required. Absent these conditions, all available evidence indicates rising acute food insecurity, malnutrition, and disease will lead to a rapid increase in non-trauma deaths, particularly among women, children, the elderly, and persons with disabilities.”
It continues that the
- “deterioration of food security and nutrition in Gaza is unprecedented in modern history, exponentially outpacing in six months the long-term declines that led to the only other two famine declarations in the 21st century: Somalia (2011) and South Sudan (2017).”
The National Institutes of Health concluded that “During 2010–2012, extreme food insecurity and famine in Somalia were estimated to account for 256,000 deaths.” The population of the country was then about 12 million, so that is 2.1% dead of starvation. If Gaza’s coming famine were only as bad as Somalia’s we’d expect 46,200 dead from starvation alone, more than have been killed by Israeli bombing during the past six months. But the USAID and State Department experts are saying that the Gaza famine is outpacing Somalia’s. Hence we can expect even more deaths from this cause.
The USAID/ State memo is consistent with what the World Food Program is assessing as of last Wednesday. According to UN News, Gian Carlo Cirri, WFP Director, Geneva office, said at a news conference on Wednesday of Gaza, “people are clearly dying of hunger.” So this catastrophe is not in the future. It is now.
Cirri said, “People cannot meet even the most basic food needs, they have exhausted all coping strategies, like eating animal fodder, begging, selling off their belongings to buy food. They are most of the time destitute and clearly some of them are dying of hunger.”
He called for massive food deliveries “in a very short time.” He said,
“We’ve mentioned the necessity to rebuild livelihoods, to address root causes and so on. But, in the immediate time, like tomorrow, we really need to significantly increase our food supplies. This means rolling out massive and consistent food assistance in conditions that allow humanitarian staff and supplies to move freely and (for) affected people to access safely the assistance.”
Food security experts, Cirri remarked, say that “We are getting closer by the day to a famine situation. Malnutrition among children is spreading. We estimate 30 per cent of children below the age of two is now acutely malnourished or wasted and 70 per cent of the population in the north is facing catastrophic hunger,”
Cirr added “There is reasonable evidence that all three famine thresholds – food insecurity, malnutrition, mortality – will be passed in the next six weeks.”
Reuters Video: “Gaza Strip could reach famine in six weeks, WFP says | REUTERS”
Lynch at Devex also has seen a study produced by USAID concluding that Israel is in violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and is impeding the delivery of US-funded humanitarian aid. It is therefore ineligible for US provision of offensive weaponry.
On February 8, President Joe Biden had issued a national security memo instructing Secretary of State Antony Blinken to seek written assurances from all recipients of such US military weaponry that they are abiding by IHL and not interfering with humanitarian aid shipments. Either the Israeli government has declined to proffer such assurances, or USAID has concluded that they aren’t worth the paper they are printed on.
The paper concluded that the killing of (at that time) over 32,000 persons by Israel, of which the US government assesses two-thirds or 21,120, were noncombatant women and children, could constitute a violation of International Humanitarian Law. The official death toll reported by the UN, based on Gaza Ministry of Health Statistics, has risen to over 34,000, but this number is widely considered to be a gross under-count, given that thousands of people were killed when Israeli fighter jets targeted their apartment buildings, and their bodies are under rubble, unrecovered. Many likely died a slow, agonizing death, trapped by fallen concrete blocks, thirsting to death. After 3 days without water, renal failure typically sets in. Some observers estimate that the real death toll may be 100,000, or 4.5% of the pre-war population. That is about the percentage of the non-Russian European population killed by Nazi Germany 1933-1945 (17 million out of about 400 million).
Although Israel claims to have killed 10,000 members of the Hamas paramilitary, the Qassam Brigades, and other militant groups, these assertions cannot be verified and seem unlikely to be true. It is likely that many of the 10,000 were elderly or boys or were civilian men with no connection to Hamas, or were civilian Hamas party members rather than Qassam Brigade fighters. International Humanitarian Law does not permit militaries to blow unarmed civilians who do not pose an immediate threat to smithereens from the sky, regardless of their party membership.
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