Israel’s food points are not just death traps – they’re an alibi for the starvation of Gaza

 

 

"When mass starvation grips a community, something rare and terrible occurs. Starvation is not only the biological phenomenon of the body wasting away. It’s also the death rattle of society. Famine is the sight of people scavenging for food in a garbage heap. It’s a woman cooking in secret, hiding food from her starving cousins. It’s a family selling its grandmother’s jewellery for a single meal, their faces blank and emotionless, their eyes glazed. This is the degradation, the humiliation, the shame – and, yes, the dehumanisation – that happens when human beings scrabble for food like animals.

This is a reality that no statistics can capture. And the methods for measuring food emergencies and assigning them grades – “famine” being the worst – break down when society breaks down in this way.

But just as an experienced physician can diagnose a fever without having to send blood samples to the laboratory, veteran humanitarian workers, who witnessed the depths of human suffering in Biafra in 1969 or in Ethiopia in 1984, recognise these symptoms when they see them.

And they see it in Gaza today."

 read report by ALEX DE WAAL 

Israel’s food points are not just death traps – they’re an alibi for the starvation of Gaza | Alex de Waal | The Guardian