Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Trump peace plan has resulted in an agreement between Hamas and Israel to pause fighting and exchange prisoners. Other points in the plan, including an Israeli troop withdrawal and the laying down of arms by Hamas, appear still to be being negotiated, which is to say that we are hardly out of the woods. The Israeli government agreed to a phased withdrawal from the entire West Bank in 1993, and over 30 years later Israeli cabinet members are talking about simply annexing the entire territory and expelling its indigenous Palestinians.
What is indisputable is the desperate need for such a pause in fighting and Israeli military withdrawal. The human toll of every day of war is hard to imagine, harder still to express.
Dr. Masako Horino et al., writing in The Lancet , find that the Israeli cut-off of food aid in April produced a mind-boggling crisis in children’s health, with wasting (severe muscle loss) from malnutrition rising seen in nearly 16% of children screened in the Strip in August, with nearly 4% severely wasted. They calculate that this level of wasting malnutrition equates to more that 54,600 children needing therapeutic care. Note that the hundreds suffering from severe wasting may never fully recover and may suffer permanent cognitive damage. Note also that many of them may just die, as other children already have, from starvation, if food aid is not flooded into the Strip immediately.
- Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)
Horino concluded, “This study revealed that youngest children in the Gaza Strip are tragically bearing an unimaginable burden of preventable malnutrition during this war.”
After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cut off most food shipments into Gaza in April, food prices skyrocketed. By July, they had risen by a factor of 100. Economist Amartya Sen showed that in most famines, there is food around, it just becomes too expensive for people to afford. What food there is in Gaza is for the most part no longer affordable for most people, but it may well be that there also just isn’t much food to be had there. Some 80% of cropland has been destroyed by Israeli bombardment and fishermen are routinely fired on by the Israeli navy, so the Strip is more than ever unable to produce much of its own food.
The UNRWA physicians measured the circumference of the mid-upper arm in children with a color-coded tape to determine how much muscle and fate mass they have between the elbow and the shoulder. The acronym for “mid-upper arm circumference” is MUAC. A low MUAC score is extremely alarming and indicates the need for immediate therapeutic care.
Bill Maher, Van Jones and Tom Friedman may find dead Palestinian babies in Gaza hilarious. One wonders if they feel the same about the babies with sticks for arms and legs.
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That nearly 16% of children are suffering from wasting malnutrition was among the pieces of evidence that led the UN to a finding that Gaza is suffering a famine.
UNRWA quotes Dr Akihiro Seita, Director of UNRWA’s Health Department and senior author of the study, as saying, “Tens of thousands of young children in the Gaza Strip are suffering from preventable malnutrition, disease, and increased risk of death, as a consequence of the ongoing war. Without a lasting ceasefire and peace, this human suffering will continue.”
Horino and her colleagues also estimate that more than 30% of the at least 67,000 Palestinians killed by Israel over the past two years have been children.
Some 40,000 Palestinians of the 170,000 wounded in the war have suffered life-altering injuries, i.e. have been crippled or blinded or in some way severely impaired.
Tom Fletcher, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, said last week as the prospects for a cease-fire began brightening, “We have some 170,000 metric tons of food, medicine, shelter and other desperately needed supplies poised to enter Gaza from across the region. Our plan is not a theory – we know it works.”
Proceeds from the sale of Juan Cole’s book ‘Gaza Yet Stands go to humanitarian organizations working in Gaza.
The Lancet study did indeed find that wasting malnutrition among children examined in Gaza during the last ceasefire in January and February fell to 5% from double digits, showing that the UN and other aid organizations can mobilize quickly and throughout Gaza to get food and other aid to people.
“Gaza 63: Referencing Kathe Kollwitz’s 1924 poster, ‘Germany’s Children are Starving,'” Digital, ChatGPT, 2025.
Although the Israeli army had attempted to completely depopulate Gaza City of its some 1 million inhabitants over the past few weeks, UNRWA estimates that 200,000 people are still in the city, facing heavy bombardment until the pause in fighting actually goes into effect.
Beyond the hostage exchange and pause in fighting, the details to be worked out are a tangle. These further phases of any peace deal should not delay the most pressing step, the immediate shipment into Gaza of the UN’s 170,000 metric tons of food, which are in trucks just sitting outside the Israeli checkpoints and kept immobile by a cruel policy of deliberate starvation of civilians as a tool of war.
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