Children share a small amount of food provided by the UN's World Food Programme. Credit: WFP/Ali Jadallah - Photo: 2024

On World Food Day, We Should Have Remembered the People of Gaza

By Anuradha Mittal*

OAKLAND, California | 17 October 2024 (IDN) — It has been 43 years since the World Food Day was first celebrated on October 16, 1981, following United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) establishing the day in 1979 to raise awareness about hunger and promote action to end it.

In 2024, when another World Food Day rolled by (October 16), the theme was “Right to foods for a better life and a better future.”

Try telling that to the starving population of Gaza.

Starvation, along with Israel’s incessant air strikes, bombardment, and ground offensives, is the weapon of war against the innocent civilians in Gaza. Especially children.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), used by governments, humanitarian organizations, and other actors to make decisions about how to respond to food crises, has called for urgent action against hunger in the Gaza.

Sounding the alarm in June 2024, it shared that a high risk of famine persists across the whole Gaza Strip as long as conflict continues, and humanitarian access is restricted.

The civilians of Gaza have a right to food for a better life and to a better future like everyone else. However, amidst non-stop bombardment of refugee camps, tents and hospitals housing displaced populations – 2024 World Food Day was stained by the disgrace of starvation deaths and famine becoming a reality.

The entire population of Gaza faces the most extreme form of hunger. With over 100,000 tons of food positioned at different corridors in Jordan, Ashdod, and Egypt, Israel’s blocking of aid and refusal of a ceasefire, have resulted in children dying of malnutrition and starvation as the international community watches.

Israel’s latest blocking of nearly all food aid from entering northern Gaza is a war tactic: “Stay and starve, or follow orders to flee to the south, where there’s no guarantee of safety or shelters for the displaced.”

“A catastrophe within a series of catastrophes.”

Jonathan Fowler, a spokesman for UNRWA, the UN agency overseeing the distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza, has called the situation in north Gaza “a catastrophe within a series of catastrophes.”

There is nowhere for the children, mothers, and fathers of Gaza to go. The situation is so bad that even the 2024 Presidential candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, took to social media platform X to express concern and advocated: Civilians in Gaza “must be protected” and Israel must do more to ensure aid reaches people in need. “International humanitarian law must be respected,” she added.

Amnesia amongst US politicians blinds them to the fact that they are the provider of weapons to Israel’s killing machine; They are the enablers of the starvation deaths amongst the innocent civilians in Gaza.

To Vice President Harris: the United States can take action to stop starvation as a war crime in Gaza. In fact, you can end United States culpability in a genocide.

Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic and hand surgeon, and Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma and critical care surgeon, who bore witness to the unspeakable during their volunteer service at a Gaza hospital, sent an open letter to President Biden and Vice President Harris in July 2024.

They said: “The moment the United States cuts off military aid to Israel the bombs will stop falling and the troops will withdraw. We must decide, once and for all: are we for or against murdering children, doctors and emergency medical personnel? Are we for or against demolishing an entire society? Are we for or against starvation?”

We deserve an answer. [IDN-InDepthNews]

Anuradha Mittal is the Executive Director of the Oakland Institute, California, USA (www.oaklandinstitute.org)

Photo: Children share a small amount of food provided by the UN’s World Food Programme. Credit: WFP/Ali Jadallah

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