Middle East Crisis: Half a Million in Gaza Face Starvation, Report Says (2024)

More food is reaching northern Gaza in recent months, but the risk of famine remains high.

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Gaza is at high risk of famine and almost half a million people there face starvation because of a catastrophic lack of food, a group of global experts said on Tuesday, though it stopped short of saying that a famine had begun in the enclave as a result of Israel’s war against Hamas.

The experts said that the amount of food reaching northern Gaza had increased in recent months. Israel, under intense pressure from global governments and aid organizations, recently opened border crossings for aid in the north.

The analysis by the group, called the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or I.P.C., carries considerable weight. The group is a partnership of U.N. bodies and major relief agencies, and global leaders look to it to gauge the severity of hunger crises and allocate humanitarian aid.

After Hamas led a deadly attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Israeli officials declared a siege of Gaza, and they have severely restricted the entry of humanitarian aid, saying they do not want it to help Hamas. From October to early May, the daily number of aid trucks entering the territory through the two main crossing points in southern Gaza dropped by around 75 percent, according to U.N. data, and reports of hunger and malnourishment have been widespread.

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Israeli officials have said for months that there is no limit on the amount of food and other aid that can enter Gaza. In recent weeks, Israel has increased the number of commercial vehicles carrying food and other goods across the border.

While acknowledging the hunger in Gaza, Israeli officials have accused Hamas of stealing or diverting aid. Ismael Thawabteh, deputy head of the Hamas government media office in Gaza, said last month that those allegations were “absolutely false and incorrect.” He added that, while there had been some looting of relief supplies, it had been done by a small number of people who had been forced into desperation by Israel.

Some Gazans have also accused Hamas of benefiting from looted aid.

The I.P.C. report said that almost all of Gaza’s population of around 2.2 million faced high levels of acute food insecurity, and it put Gaza at Phase 4, the “emergency” phase, on its five-level classification scale. But it also said that 495,000 people faced “catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity,” which is Phase 5 on the scale.

“In this phase, households experience an extreme lack of food, starvation, and exhaustion of coping capacities,” the report said.

In March, the I.P.C. predicted that famine would likely occur in northern Gaza by the end of May. But on Tuesday, it said that the amount of food and other nutrition delivered there had increased in March and April.

Those increases “appear to have temporarily alleviated conditions” in the north, the report said, adding, “In this context, the available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring.”

Sally Abi Khalil, the Middle East director of Oxfam, an aid agency that contributed to the I.P.C. report, said that the slight improvement in conditions in northern Gaza showed that Israel had the ability to end the hunger crisis.

“The figures in this report are a shameful testament to the failure of world leaders to heed earlier warnings and hold Israel to account for its deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war,” Ms. Abi Khalil said.

In early May, Israel’s military sent ground troops into the southern Gazan city of Rafah, and more than a million people, many of whom had previously been displaced from their homes, fled to a coastal area that lacks basic infrastructure, making them acutely vulnerable.

The military operation closed the Rafah border crossing from Egypt and disrupted aid deliveries at the Kerem Shalom crossing with Israel. The situation in the south has since deteriorated, the report said.

The I.P.C. said that to be able to buy food, more than half of households in Gaza “had to exchange their clothes for money, and one-third resorted to picking up trash to sell.” It added that more than half of households often did not have any food to eat and that more than 20 percent went full days and nights without eating.

The I.P.C. identifies a famine when at least 20 percent of households in an area face an extreme lack of food, at least 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition and at least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people die each day from starvation or disease linked to malnutrition. Since the I.P.C. was established in 2004, its approach has been used to identify only two famines: in Somalia in 2011, and in South Sudan in 2017.

After the group’s warning in March that Gaza was at risk of imminent famine, South Africa asked the U.N.’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, to issue emergency orders for Israel to stop what it called the “genocidal starvation” of the Palestinian people. The request was part of South Africa’s broader case that accuses Israel of genocide in Gaza, a charge that Israel rejects.

A month ago, the court, which is based in The Hague, ordered Israel to “immediately” halt its military offensive in Rafah, and it emphasized the need for open land crossings as part of its request for “the unhindered provision” of humanitarian aid. The Rafah offensive continues, but the order increased global pressure on Israel to scale back its attacks and limit civilian casualties.

Matthew Mpoke Bigg

Israel’s Supreme Court rules that the military must draft ultra-Orthodox Jews.

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Israel’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that the military must begin drafting ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, a decision that threatened to split Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government amid the war in Gaza.

In a unanimous decision, a panel of nine judges held that there was no legal basis for the longstanding military exemption given to ultra-Orthodox religious students. Without a law distinguishing between seminarians and other men of draft age, the court ruled, the country’s mandatory draft laws must similarly apply to the ultra-Orthodox minority.

In a country where military service is compulsory for most Jewish Israelis, both men and women, the exemption for the ultra-Orthodox has long prompted resentment. But anger over the group’s special treatment has grown as the war in Gaza has stretched into its ninth month, requiring tens of thousands of reservists to serve multiple tours and costing the lives of hundreds of soldiers.

“These days, in the midst of a difficult war, the burden of that inequality is more acute than ever — and requires the advancement of a sustainable solution to this issue,” the Supreme Court said in its ruling.

The decision threatened to widen one of the most painful divisions in Israeli society, pitting secular Jews against the ultra-Orthodox, who say their religious study is as essential and protective as the military. It also exposed the fault lines in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, which depends on the support of two ultra-Orthodox parties that oppose their constituents’ conscription, even as other Israelis are killed and wounded in Gaza.

Israeli courts have ruled against the exemption before, including Supreme Court decisions in 1998, 2012 and 2017. The top court has repeatedly warned the government that to continue the policy, it must be written into law — though that law would be subject to constitutional challenges, as previous ones were — while also giving the government time to hammer our legislation.

But for seven years, since the last law was struck down, successive Israeli governments have dragged their feet in drafting new legislation. In 2023, the law finally reached its expiration date, leading the Israeli government to order the military simply not to draft the ultra-Orthodox while lawmakers worked on an exemption.

On Tuesday, the court indicated that its patience had finally run out, striking down that order as illegal. It did not set a timeline for when the military must start conscripting tens of thousands of draft-age religious students. Such a move would likely prove a massive logistical and political challenge, as well as be met with mass resistance by the ultra-Orthodox community.

Instead, the ruling included a means of pressuring the ultra-Orthodox to accept the court’s judgment: the suspension of millions of dollars in government subsidies given to religious schools, or yeshivas, striking a blow to revered institutions at the heart of the ultra-Orthodox community.

The court’s ruling threatens Mr. Netanyahu’s fragile wartime coalition, which includes secular members who oppose the exemption and ultra-Orthodox parties that support it. Either group breaking ranks could cause the government to collapse and call new elections, at a time when popular support for the government is at a low. The opposition in the Israeli Parliament largely wants to end the exemption.

The Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7 — which ignited the eight-month war in Gaza — somewhat loosened the ultra-Orthodox stance on the draft, with some leaders saying that those who could not study scripture should go to the military.

“Still, the maximum that the ultra-Orthodox community is willing to give is far less than what the general Israeli public is willing to accept,” said Israel Cohen, a commentator for Kol Barama, an ultra-Orthodox radio station.

But the ultra-Orthodox parties, with few palatable options, might not be eager to bring down Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, he said. “They don’t see an alternative, so they’ll try to make it work for as long as they can,” said Mr. Cohen. “They will compromise more than they might have been willing to a year ago in an attempt to preserve the government.”

For now, the military must devise a plan to potentially welcome to its ranks thousands of soldiers who are opposed to serving and whose insularity and traditions are at odds with a modern fighting force.

The court’s decision creates a “gaping political wound in the heart of the coalition” that Mr. Netanyahu now must urgently address, said Yohanan Plesner, chairman of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank.

In a statement, Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party criticized the Supreme Court for issuing a ruling when the government was planning to pass legislation that would render the case obsolete. The government’s proposed law, the party said, would increase the number of ultra-Orthodox conscripts while recognizing the importance of religious study.

It was unclear whether Mr. Netanyahu’s proposal would ultimately hold up to judicial scrutiny. But if passed by Parliament, a new law could face years of court challenges, buying the government additional time, said Mr. Plesner.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Tuesday immediately sparked outrage among ultra-Orthodox politicians. Many ultra-Orthodox view military service as a gateway to assimilation into a secular Israeli society that would lead young people to deviate from a lifestyle guided by the Torah, the Jewish scriptures.

“The State of Israel was established in order to be a home for the Jewish people, for whom Torah is the bedrock of their existence. The Holy Torah will prevail,” Yitzhak Goldknopf, an ultra-Orthodox government minister, said in a statement on Monday.

After the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on southern Israel, Israelis united in determination to strike back. But as thousands of reserve soldiers were asked to serve second and third tours in Gaza, the fault lines in Israeli society quickly resurfaced.

Some Israeli analysts warn that war could spread to additional fronts in the West Bank and the northern border with Lebanon, leading the government to call for more conscripts and further straining relations between secular and ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Already many Israelis — secular, religious and ultra-Orthodox alike — see the draft issue as just one skirmish in a broader cultural war over the country’s increasingly uncertain future.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews have been exempt from military service since the founding of Israel in 1948, when the country’s leadership promised them autonomy in exchange for their support in creating a largely secular state. At the time, there were only a few hundred yeshiva students.

Now there are over 60,000 draft-age religious students, and the ultra-Orthodox have grown to more than a million people, roughly 13 percent of Israel’s population. They wield considerable political clout and their elected leaders became kingmakers, featuring in most Israeli coalition governments.

But as ultra-Orthodox power grew, so did anger over their failure to join the military and their relatively small contribution to the economy. In 2019, Avigdor Lieberman, a former ally of Mr. Netanyahu, rebuffed his offer to join a coalition that would legislate the draft exemption for the ultra-Orthodox. The decision helped send Israel to repeated elections — five in four years.

Last year, after Mr. Netanyahu returned to power at the helm of his current coalition, he sought to legislate a plan to weaken the country’s judiciary, setting off mass protests. For the ultra-Orthodox, who backed the judicial overhaul, a major motivation was ensuring that the Supreme Court could no longer impede their ability to avoid the draft.

Gabby Sobelman and Myra Noveck contributed reporting.

Aaron Boxerman reporting from Jerusalem

A strike in Gaza kills a sister of Hamas’s political leader and her family.

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A strike in the northern Gaza Strip killed a sister of Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, and her family on Tuesday, the armed group and a Gazan rescue official said.

Hamas confirmed the death of Mr. Haniyeh’s sister, Zaher Haniyeh, in a statement. The Israeli military said it was aware of the reports but could not “currently confirm” that it had struck the Haniyeh family home.

Mr. Haniyeh, who heads the Hamas political bureau from exile in Qatar, is a longstanding political leader of the group that governs the Gaza Strip and that launched the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

Mahmoud Basal, a spokesman for the Palestinian Civil Defense, said that emergency rescue crews had removed the bodies of Mr. Haniyeh’s sister, her husband and their eight children from their home in the Shati neighborhood in northern Gaza, which was demolished in the strike.

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An Israeli airstrike in April killed three of Mr. Haniyeh’s sons and three of his grandchildren while they were traveling in a car in Gaza. The Israeli military confirmed the strike and said the sons were active in Hamas’s military operations.

At the time, Mr. Haniyeh did not specify his sons’ roles in the group but called them martyrs. He said that 60 members of his extended family had been killed by Israel over time.

Hiba Yazbek reporting from Jerusalem

What is a famine and who determines that one exists?

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A group of global experts said on Tuesday that Gaza is at high risk of famine, but it stopped short of saying that one had begun.

Officially determining that a famine exists is a technical process. It requires analysis by experts, and only government authorities and top U.N. officials can declare one.

So how is famine defined? Here’s a closer look.

What is a famine?

Food insecurity experts working on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or I.P.C., an initiative controlled by U.N. bodies and major relief agencies, identify a famine in an area on the basis of three conditions:

  • At least 20 percent of households face an extreme lack of food.

  • At least 30 percent of children suffer from acute malnutrition.

  • At least two adults or four children for every 10,000 people die each day from starvation or disease linked to malnutrition.

Since the I.P.C. was developed in 2004, it has been used to identify only two famines: in Somalia in 2011, and in South Sudan in 2017. In Somalia, more than 100,000 people died before famine was officially declared.

I.P.C. analysts expressed grave concern about food insecurity in Yemen and Ethiopia related to the civil wars in those countries, but said not enough information was available from governments to issue a formal assessment.

The classifications of famine in Somalia and South Sudan galvanized global action and spurred large donations.

What has the I.P.C. said about hunger in Gaza?

The first I.P.C. report on Gaza, released in December, found that the enclave’s entire population was experiencing food insecurity at crisis or worse levels. Though the group said Gaza had not yet crossed the famine threshold, it warned that the risk of famine-level hunger would increase if the war did not stop.

A second analysis in March projected that famine was “imminent” for the 300,000 Palestinian civilians in northern Gaza, and that such conditions would develop by the end of May.

The group’s analysis on Tuesday said almost half a million people in Gaza face starvation because of a catastrophic lack of food. It said aid deliveries had improved the situation in the north, but that Israel’s ground operations in the south had disrupted aid distribution there.

What are the complications in declaring a famine?

The December I.P.C. analysis relied on publicly available data from international and local aid groups in Gaza that the group said met its methodology standards. But I.P.C. analysts said they lacked recent data on the prevalence of acute malnutrition. Getting that data is very difficult in a war zone and poses a burden on already overwhelmed health care workers, the group added.

The organization’s criteria were originally designed to address weather-related famine, not wartime crises like the one in Gaza. But most severe hunger crises in recent history have been driven by conflict rather than weather.

And while I.P.C. experts perform the analysis that can classify a famine, it is up to government authorities and the United Nations to formally declare one.

In some cases, countries have hesitated to do so. In 2022, Somalia’s president expressed reluctance to declare a famine during a severe hunger crisis brought on by a drought. And in 2021, Ethiopia blocked a classification of famine in the Tigray region through heavy lobbying, according to a top U.N. official.

It is unclear exactly what authority could declare a famine in Gaza. The I.P.C. group said the process typically involves the government in a country and its top U.N. official. Determining who that authority would be in Gaza was beyond the organization’s scope, it said.

Gaya Gupta

Austin and Gallant meet as attacks intensify across Israel’s border with Lebanon.

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Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and his Israeli counterpart, Yoav Gallant, were meeting on Tuesday in Washington to discuss the war with Hamas in Gaza and to address the intensifying conflict along Israel’s border with Lebanon.

Mr. Gallant’s last visit to the Pentagon was in March, but the two defense chiefs have been in “almost weekly” contact since the Hamas-led attack in Israel on Oct. 7 set off the war in Gaza, Gen. Patrick S. Ryder, a Defense Department spokesman, said in a briefing on Monday.

Mr. Gallant is meeting with Mr. Austin on his third day of talks with senior Biden administration officials. Days before, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, declared that the intensive phase of fighting in Gaza was nearing an end and indicated that Israel was preparing to turn its focus to the threat from Hezbollah. The United States is seeking to prevent those tensions along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon from becoming another full-fledged war.

In a statement on Monday, Mr. Gallant’s office said that he had discussed with American officials the transition in Gaza and its effect on the region, including with Lebanon.

The indication of a new phase of the war in Gaza increases pressure on Israeli officials to develop “robust, realistic” plans for governance in Gaza after the war, Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, said in a briefing on Monday. “We don’t want to see in Rafah what we’ve seen in Gaza City and Khan Younis, which is the end of major combat operations and then the beginning of Hamas reasserting control,” he said.

Mr. Gallant and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met in Washington on Monday. According to Mr. Miller, they discussed the stalled cease-fire negotiations with Hamas, next steps for governance and security in Gaza, and the importance of those efforts to Israel’s security. Mr. Blinken also emphasized the importance of keeping the conflict with Hezbollah from escalating further.

That was a recurring theme in American officials’ talks with Mr. Gallant this week. “We’ve been very clear that we’re focused on a diplomatic solution as it relates to the tensions that we see on the border,” General Ryder said at the Pentagon briefing. “We’ll stay focused on that.”

The Israeli defense minister began his meetings in Washington on Sunday, sitting down with Amos Hochstein, a Biden adviser who has overseen previous talks between Israel and Lebanon. A week earlier Mr. Hochstein met with Mr. Netanyahu in Jerusalem and with Lebanese officials in Beirut, as the Israeli military warned that Hezbollah’s cross-border strikes against Israel risked a wider confrontation.

On Monday, Mr. Gallant met with William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director. On Wednesday, he is scheduled to meet with President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.

Ephrat Livni

Middle East Crisis: Half a Million in Gaza Face Starvation, Report Says (2024)
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