Doctors and staff fainting on duty from hunger in Gaza as growing numbers suffer malnutrition
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is appalled by an accelerating breakdown of humanitarian conditions in Gaza "where the last lifelines keeping people alive are collapsing," his spokesperson said.
"He deplores the growing reports of children and adults suffering from malnutrition," UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said.
"Israel has the obligation to allow and facilitate by all the means at its disposal the humanitarian relief provided by the United Nations and by other humanitarian organisations."
The Palestinian health authorities said that at least 99 people were killed in what is believed to be the deadliest day yet for families seeking aid since the war began in October 2023 – over 800 in total have been killed just trying to get food. The Israeli military has said it fired warning shots "to remove an immediate threat", but has questioned the death toll reported by the Palestinians.
The World Health Organisation said that its staff residence and main warehouse in Gazan city of Deir al-Balah was attacked three times on Monday.
Two WHO staff and two family members were detained, said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO Director-General, adding that three were later released, while one staff member remained in detention.
Israeli tanks pushed into southern and eastern districts of the Gazan city of Deir al-Balah for the first time on Monday, an area where Israeli sources said the military believes hostages may be held.
Israeli sources have said the reason the army had stayed out of the Deir al-Balah districts was because they suspected Hamas might be holding hostages there. At least 20 of the remaining 50 hostages in captivity in Gaza are believed to be still alive.
Families of the hostages have expressed concern for their relatives and demanded an explanation from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defence Minister Israel Katz and the army chief on how they will protect them.
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"The people of Israel will not forgive anyone who knowingly endangered the hostages - both the living and the deceased. No one will be able to claim they didn't know what was at stake," the Hostage Families Forum Headquarters said in a statement.
Gaza health officials have warned of potential "mass deaths" in coming days from hunger, which has killed at least 19 people since Saturday, the Hamas-run territory's Health Ministry said.
Health officials say hospitals have been running out of fuel, food aid and medicine, risking a halt to vital operations.
Health Ministry spokesperson Khalil Al-Deqran said medical staff have been depending on one meal a day and that hundreds of people flock to hospitals every day, suffering from fatigue and exhaustion.
In southern Gaza, the Health Ministry said an Israeli undercover unit had on Monday detained Marwan Al-Hams, head of Gaza's field hospitals, in a raid that killed a local journalist and wounded another outside a field medical facility run by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
An ICRC spokesperson said the ICRC had treated patients injured in the incident, but did not comment further on their status. It said it was "very concerned about the safety and security" around the field hospital.
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Irish Independent
13 minutes ago
- Irish Independent
‘Their little bodies are shutting down' – Gaza on brink of total collapse as mass starvation ravages every corner of society
Doctors are famished to the point that they have dizzy spells as they make their rounds, medics say, and the journalists documenting their caseloads are often too weak to even walk to the clinics. For months, aid agencies had warned of the coming crisis, as Israel halted the flow of aid to the Gaza Strip before attempting to replace UN relief efforts with distribution points inside military zones. It was a move Israeli officials said was aimed at pressuring Hamas, whose fighters attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, and continue to hold about 50 hostages who were abducted that day, about 20 of whom are believed to be still alive. But testimonies from doctors, relief workers and Gazans this week make it clear that a worst-case scenario is finally unfolding: Nearly one-in-three people are going multiple days without eating, according to the United Nations, and hospitals are reporting rising deaths from malnutrition and starvation. In a video filmed on Tuesday inside Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, families fretted over babies with distended bellies and tiny fists that they clenched as they cried. In one of the newly established malnutrition rooms, the mothers and children were so quiet that the loudest sound came from a pair of fans that beat weakly in the cloying heat. The Gaza Health Ministry said on Wednesday that 10 people had died of starvation in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total number of those killed by hunger to 111 since the start of the war. Among them was six-week-old Yousef al-Safadi, so small in photographs from the silver table of the hospital morgue that the white sleepsuit peeled back to show how his jutting ribs dwarfed his slight body. The International Rescue Committee, a global relief and development organisation, said on Wednesday that its teams had reported an increase in the number of children being rushed to hospitals because of malnutrition in recent days. 'Their small bodies are shutting down. They can't breathe; their immune systems are collapsing,' said Scott Lea, the organisation's acting country director for the Palestinian territories. Tess Ingram, a spokeswoman for the UN children's agency Unicef, said rising rates of child malnutrition were preventable, but that the health care system needed to treat it was 'running on fumes or hit by strikes'. Throughout the war, which has killed more than 59,000 people in Gaza, according to the local health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, Israel has imposed severe restrictions on the amount of food and other aid entering the enclave. At times, it allowed more trucks to enter, including during a six-week ceasefire earlier this year. But on March 2, Israel reimposed its blockade, lifting it only partially in May after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said 'pictures of mass starvation' could cost his country the support of the United States and other allies. In a briefing with reporters on Wednesday, an Israeli military official said there was a 'lack of food security inside Gaza', but blamed a failure to distribute aid on the UN. 'There is no limit. The crossings are open – just bring the trucks and take the aid,' he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity, in line with the rules of the briefing. 'We're seeing the pictures also, and I want to tell you that we are taking it very seriously,' he said. 'We are analysing the number of calories per capita inside Gaza.' The UN says Israeli authorities are the 'sole decision-makers' on how much, aid enters Gaza, as well as the type of supplies that are allowed in. 'Once inside Gaza, movement requires navigating an obstacle course of coordination with Israeli forces, through active hostilities, traveling on damaged roads, and often being forced to wait at holding points or pass through areas controlled by criminal gangs,' UN relief chief Tom Fletcher told the UN Security Council in New York last week. Gaza's ability to make its own food has been almost entirely destroyed as Israeli military operations have wiped out farmlands and factories. As the summer heat bears down, hungry and thirsty civilians have run out of reserves to fall back on. Palestinians in the enclave are reliant instead on humanitarian aid that most people under Israel's new system cannot easily access. According to local health authorities, more than 1,000 people have been shot dead racing through territory controlled by the Israeli military toward distribution points run by US security contractors, where supplies are first-come, first-served. When victims of Israeli strikes, shelling or gunfire reach the hospitals, photographs show, their bodies are often visibly emaciated. In Gaza City's Sabra district, Ayat al-Soradi (25) said she was so malnourished during her pregnancy this year that she gave birth to her twins, Ahmed and Mazen, two months early. They each weighed about one kilo, and for almost a month, she had watched over them in their incubators as the nurses fed them with powdered milk. But even the hospital staff were running out of food. The flour, milk, eggs and meat that were available during an earlier ceasefire had disappeared from the market. A bag of flour and lentils could fetch almost $200 (€170). In WhatsApp groups, Palestinian families bartered for baby formula like the one doctors recommended for Ahmed and Mazen. The family could barely afford it once the twins were discharged. Ahmed died 13 days later. 'He was two months old,' Soradi said. And feeding Mazen alone was still a struggle. His baby formula was almost prohibitively expensive, when the family could find it at all, Soradi said. She mixed it with rice water to make it last longer, but the child barely grew. Ten days ago, he was readmitted to the hospital at a weight of 3 kilos as he ran a fever and struggled to breathe. Relief workers say parents throughout Gaza regularly forgo meals, and sometimes days' worth of food, to feed their children. In Deir al-Balah, Taghred Jumaa, a 55-year-old women's rights activist who described herself as relatively better off than most Palestinians in Gaza because she still had a salary, said that rationing the family's food meant her hair was falling out. Parts of her body felt numb, she said. In the northern district of Sheikh Radwan, relatives of two-month-old Sham Emkat said on Wednesday that she had been pronounced dead at 11.30pm the night before in al-Rantisi Hospital. In an open letter published on Wednesday, 115 organisations, including Doctors Without Borders, Mercy Corps and Save the Children, said Israel's blockade and ongoing military operations were pushing Gaza's more than two million people, including relief workers, toward starvation. Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, said that colleagues had begun receiving 'SOS messages from staff who are hungry themselves, who are exhausted themselves'. In conversations with Washington Post reporters this week, doctors, health officials and aid workers have all apologised for their lack of focus, citing hunger. In a statement this week, a group of journalists from the Agence France-Presse news agency warned that the Israeli blockade and subsequent hunger crisis had made conditions for their Palestinian colleagues in Gaza 'untenable'. The AFP's principal photographer, identified as Bashar, had posted to his Facebook page, saying that he no longer had the strength to work. 'Since AFP was founded in August 1944, some of our journalists were killed in conflict, others were wounded or made prisoner, but there is no record of us ever having had to watch our colleagues starving to death,' the statement said.
Irish Independent
13 minutes ago
- Irish Independent
The Irish Independent's View: Collective inaction on Gaza is a dark stain on humanity
The totally preventable tragedies of Gaza are a black mark on our age. But where is the global pressure to insist that the cruelty must end? One wonders if 21st-century life has really become so transactional as to be impervious to the traumas of defenceless children. If such is the case, we are in a very dark place. Surely the unwarranted cruelty witnessed daily in Gaza is intolerable to a rules-based order. Yet it appears that, even after 22 months, there are no depths of agony from which the people of the enclave can hope to be spared. The starvation in Gaza is of a magnitude that medics sent in to help are collapsing from hunger And so US secretary of state Marco Rubio thought it fitting to lash out at France for becoming the first G7 nation to recognise Palestine as a state. It was, he said, a 'slap in the face' to the families of the victims murdered by Hamas. Can he be unaware that since then, 60,000 Palestinians have been killed? Concerns for them and their remaining loved ones and the worsening death toll seems non-existent. All death is deplorable. To be casual about the mass taking of life is to risk being trapped in an inescapable moral vacuum. The starvation in Gaza is of a magnitude that even the medics sent in to help are collapsing from hunger. At the same time, the killing of desperate people – many of them children taking on the responsibility of fending for the families – continues. The lines of the skeletal and the destitute queuing for whatever scraps they might be offered belong in the Dark Ages. As daily bombardments continue, Israeli troops fire near where the aid is handed out. Recently returned from Gaza, Dr Nick Maynard told RTÉ he had seen young boys who were shot in the testicles. He believed they had been used as target practice as their wounds were all of a similar nature. But even as the deaths from starvation mount, Israeli heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu went on radio to claim: 'There's no hunger in Gaza.' Israel 'is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out', he said, calling Palestinians 'indoctrinated Nazis'. 'Thank God we are wiping out this evil,' he added. I can't imagine I'm going to die of starvation after 21 months of bombing One female doctor is quoted in the Washington Post as saying: 'I can't imagine I'm going to die of starvation after 21 months of bombing. We are all walking towards death.' Atrocities are no less atrocious because they are carried out by elected politicians and facilitated by democratic governments. Yet in this darkest hour, Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appear to be abandoning peace talks. Mr Netanyahu said it was clear that Hamas did not want a deal, and Mr Trump said they would have to now be 'hunted down'. That Hamas needs to be brought to account is not in question. But this 'forever war' in which civilians and children are deemed worthless and expendable is unjust and indefensible and must be stopped.
Irish Independent
13 minutes ago
- Irish Independent
Letters: Echoes of Sarajevo, yet we are supposedly the ones who are ‘out of step'
The telegram referred to the Genocide Convention, set out the criteria for defining genocide and cited the 'constant and indiscriminate shelling and gunfire' of Sarajevo by Radovan Karadzic's Yugoslav People's Army, 'which have taken a heavy toll among the civilian population'. It added that 'minority groups are also being harassed and subjected to pressure in an attempt to force them to leave' as evidence that genocide was being committed. In 2005, the US Congress passed a resolution declaring that 'the Serbian policies of aggression and ethnic cleansing meet the terms defining genocide'. Over the last two years in Gaza, there has been continual and indiscriminate shelling and gunfire, which has taken a heavy toll among the civilian population. Tens of thousands of innocent people, including 17,000 children, have been killed. Almost two million Palestinians have been displaced. Israel has engaged in collective punishment of a captive civilian population, using starvation as a method of war and ethnic cleansing on a huge scale. It is genocide. There are many similarities between what happened in Sarajevo and what is happening in Gaza. Yet the US ambassador to Ireland, Edward Walsh, recently said Ireland is 'much out of step' with America on Israel and Palestine. It is the US government that is much out of step with any objective sense of morality. Are there any two words in the English language hollower than 'never again'? Or maybe the term does not apply if the perpetrators are Israeli, in which case it is meaningless. The people of Palestine are not some kind of sub-human dark matter to be left to a psychopathic regime to erase and displace. They are human beings who deserve the full protection of international and human rights law. 'The West' should hang its head in shame. Rob Sadlier, Rathfarnham, Dublin 16 Western powers are either complicit, or apathetic to sickening Gaza atrocities Many of us thought the genocidal situation in Gaza could not get much worse. On July 25, I listened to Professor Nick Maynard speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland on his latest experiences working as a surgeon in Gaza. Even the word 'genocide', or any words, fail to adequately describe the barbarism being inflicted by Israel and its supportive allies on the Palestinian people. Prof Maynard's first-hand eyewitness accounts cannot be ignored. The deliberate starvation of children and adults while thousands of truckloads of food are being prevented from crossing the border into Gaza, combined with bombing, shooting and destruction of all vital life-saving facilities, amount to crimes against humanity. Yet the so-called international community, including the Irish Government, continues to fail to act to end these atrocities. Many have been actively supporting this genocide by providing weapons and other military, financial and political support to Israel. The French government belatedly promising to recognise the state of Palestine, the Irish Government still failing to enact the Occupied Territories Bill and the failure of the UN, EU, US and others to effectively sanction Israel are just some examples of double standards, or no standards at all. Edward Horgan, Castletroy, Limerick It's the Israeli forces who are the main perpetrators of 'terror' in horrific war Spokespersons for Israel's government excuse the actions in Gaza as a 'war' on terrorism. The only terror seen in Gaza is that inflicted on unarmed civilians by the Israel Defence Forces – on children in particular. It's time for the world to speak the truth in relation to Israeli activities in Gaza. Michael Moriarty, Rochestown, Cork Cork fans could take a leaf out of Geneva of Ulster's book on modest mourning Frank Coughlan's lament on Cork's loss in the All-Ireland final deserves sympathy and perhaps a cold compress, but I must gently remind him that some of us are not inclined to such theatrical mourning ('A Tipp of the hat, as a proud Cork man is put in his place', Irish Independent, July 25). Here in Armagh, the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland – if anyone's asking – we go about our GAA heartbreaks, triumphs and theological responsibilities with the quiet assurance of a place that knows its worth. We've had more than our share of heartbreaks, but prefer to carry them with a degree of decorum. We're less the Venice of the North and more the Geneva of Ulster: small, significant and quietly influential. Even in defeat, modesty can be its own kind of statement. Enda Cullen, Tullysaran Road, Armagh 'Nothing to see here' is US government response, so what's in the Epstein files? While campaigning for the US presidency last year, Donald Trump promised to release all files about the well-connected sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump's MAGA supporters have since grown frustrated with the administration's handling of the issue, including its failure to deliver a rumoured Epstein 'client list'. In a memo earlier this month, the US Justice Department and FBI said there was no such list. Riddle me this: How is it that Trump and his Republican colleagues appear to be blocking the release of these files when there is supposedly no list? John O'Brien, Clonmel, Co Tipperary Kudos to Ringrose for the honesty concerning his health after Lions pick I commend Garry Ringrose. Having been selected for the British and Irish Lions for the second test, he opted out of the team for the sake of his health and success of his fellow players. Having been team doctor to Ulster, Ireland and Barbarians rugby union over many years, I can assure you this would never have happened in the amateur and early professional era, as players would try to pull the wool over the team doctor's eyes to get their feet on the pitch. His decision shows honesty. Well done, Garry, and hopefully you will be fit for the final test game.
