Exponential Famine on Gaza outpacing Somalia’s
Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan, reports today (4/27) in his blog Informed Comment that a memo from US AID and the State Department is titled “Famine Inevitable, Changes Could Reduce but Not Stop Widespread Civilian Deaths.”
Cole says the memo, produced by food security experts at US AID and the State Department, was sent to Secretary of State Blinken and had a sub-heading: “Israel-imposed administrative challenges are preventing the delivery of food.”
The memo, which was seen and reported by a veteran political journalist, is discussed in detail in Cole’s article. Cole says two things are being asserted in the memo:
1. Famine in Gaza is now unavoidable and will kill many civilian noncombatants even if more food aid starts getting in now.
2. The responsibility for this starvation of children, women and noncombatant males lies squarely with Israel, which is obstructing food aid deliveries.
Cole says the journalist who has seen the memo reports that it includes this statement:
deterioration of food security and nutrition in Gaza is unprecedented in modern history, exponentially outpacing in six months the long-term declines that led to the only other two famine declarations in the 21st century: Somalia (2011) and South Sudan (2017).
Cole states that the National Institutes of Health concluded that during 2010–2012, “extreme food insecurity and famine in Somalia were estimated to account for 256,000 deaths.” Cole calculates:
The population of Somalia was then about 12 million, so that is 2.1% dead of starvation. If Gaza’s coming famine were only as bad as Somalia’s we’d expect 46,200 dead from starvation alone, more than have been killed by Israeli bombing during the past six months.
Cole adds that the USAID/State memo is consistent with the World Food Program (WFP) assessment April 24 when Gian Carlo Cirri, WFP Director, Geneva office, said at a news conference that in Gaza “people are clearly dying of hunger.”
Cirri said, “People cannot meet even the most basic food needs, they have exhausted all coping strategies, like eating animal fodder, begging, selling off their belongings to buy food. They are most of the time destitute and clearly some of them are dying of hunger.”
“Malnutrition among children is spreading. We estimate 30 per cent of children below the age of two is now acutely malnourished or wasted and 70 per cent of the population in the north is facing catastrophic hunger.”
Cirri called for massive food deliveries “in a very short time.”
“This means rolling out massive and consistent food assistance in conditions that allow humanitarian staff and supplies to move freely and (for) affected people to access safely the assistance.”
“There is reasonable evidence that all three famine thresholds – food insecurity, malnutrition, mortality – will be passed in the next six weeks.” news.un.org/...
Cole points out that Israel is in violation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) by impeding the delivery of US-funded humanitarian aid. “It is therefore ineligible for US provision of offensive weaponry.”
On February 8, Biden issued a national security memo instructing Secretary of State Antony Blinken to seek written assurances from all recipients of such US military weaponry that they are abiding by IHL and not interfering with humanitarian aid shipments.
Cole comments that Biden’s memo seems to have been overlooked. He goes on to discuss Gaza death tolls reported by the UN.
Based on Gaza Ministry of Health Statistics, the number has risen to over 34,000, but this number is widely considered to be a gross under-count, given that thousands of people were killed when Israeli fighter jets targeted their apartment buildings, and their bodies are under rubble, unrecovered.
Some observers estimate that the real death toll may be 100,000, or 4.5% of the pre-war population.
Cole quotes the Israeli claim to have killed 10,000 members of Hamas paramilitary and other militant groups, but he thinks that is “unlikely to be true.”
It is likely that many of the 10,000 were elderly or boys or were civilian men with no connection to Hamas, or were civilian Hamas party members.
In any case, says Cole: “International Humanitarian Law does not permit militaries to blow unarmed civilians to smithereens from the sky, regardless of their party membership.”
www.juancole.com/...
