Severe famine confirmed in Gaza; Israel denies it

Examining the new UN report confirming that the most severe famine conditions are underway in Gaza, with over 500,000 people at risk of imminent death.

Displaced Palestinians in Deir el-Balah in August 2024. (Photo: Ashraf Amra for UNRWA).

Today, as I report in my new article on my website, It’s Official: UN Declares Catastrophic Famine Conditions in Gaza; Israel Still Denies It, which I hope you have time to read, the UN’s mechanism for assessing famine, the IPC (the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) confirmed, in a devastating brand-new report, that the most severe famine conditions are occurring in the Gaza Strip, that this is an "entirely man-made" disaster, deliberately engineered by the State of Israel, and that it can and must be "halted and reversed", via an immediate ceasefire "to allow humanitarian aid to reach everyone in the Gaza Strip."

According to the IPCC, 514,000 people, roughly a quarter of Gaza’s surviving population, are experiencing famine, with the number rising to 641,000 by the end of September unless immediate action is taken.

The IPC sets stringent conditions on the evidence required for a famine to be declared. Famine (Phase 5) requires an area to have 20% of households facing an extreme food shortage, 30% of children to be acutely malnourished, and two adult non-trauma deaths or four child non-trauma deaths for every 10,000 people to be taking place every day “due to outright starvation or to the interaction of malnutrition and disease.”

The UN’s Tom Fletcher announced the publication of the report with articulate, controlled fury and indignation, and I include a video and a transcript of his speech, as well as some of the report’s main findings, and a history of Israel’s deliberate starvation of the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip over the last 22 months, including the malignant role played most recently by the misnamed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

Despite the copious evidence demonstrating Israel’s intent to starve the Palestinians as part of its genocidal assault on Gaza, including rulings by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, and mounting evidence of an increase in the starvation policies over the last six months, since Israel broke the six-week ceasefire deal with Hamas at the start of March, Israel has refuted the IPC’s report, with Benjamin Netanyahu calling it "an outright lie", and with the defense minister, Israel Katz, pledging to "open the gates of hell" in Gaza City via its imminent planned military invasion.

This would be an incomparable disaster, as Gaza City was identified by the IPC as the epicenter of the famine, but is there any way that Israel can be stopped?

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