From a Congressperson I admire:
I want to skip the discussion about the politics that led us to this point. I have discussed this with some Arab-American music friends, and I want to tell them I already know about the Balfour Declaration of 1917, along with hundreds of years of messy history.
and from Christiane Amanpour:
The bottom line for this diary is the famine is happening right now and we are spectators to a genocide of maybe a million people. Mostly women and children. The projected toll rivals that of the Armenian Genocide, which is said to have been between 600,000 and 1.2 million people.
More than five months after Israel ordered all Palestinians in the northern Gaza Strip to evacuate southward, around 300,000 remain. The majority are living in one neighborhood in eastern Gaza City: Shuja’iya.
Israel’s month-long invasion of the neighborhood in December left behind a trail of devastation. Still under siege, its Palestinian residents are risking death to get their hands on a bag of flour.
“I cannot describe the situation we are in now,” Nader Jerada, 33, told +972 with palpable frustration. “We are exhausted from hunger. I want to scream that we have no food. I have six children: six mouths to feed. Yesterday, my daughter was crying from hunger. I want to cut myself hearing her cry.”
“We have lost all dignity because of the war,” 22-year-old Shuja’iya resident Said Sweirki said. “We have become like animals. Our lives have no meaning, and no one cares for or values us in Gaza. We scream, starve, and die alone. Does the world know that we’re eating animal food? We live without the basic necessities of life: no electricity, no water, no fuel. We collect firewood for hours from the streets and destroyed houses. We’ve returned to the Stone Age.”
Read the full report by Mahmoud Mushtaha through this link on our website:
Here is what I know about malnutrition — Nepal tangent
The west-Central part of Nepal was an area of “food insufficiency” during part of the eleven-year civil war. I started volunteering there in 2007, teaching nursing in a hospital in Palpa District run by Christian missionaries. (I am catholic but not an evangelical by any stretch of the imagination. I did it because I was curious, for lack of a better term).
There were no overweight people anywhere. I worked on the pediatric ward at the hospital, and child nutrition was a daily discussion at rounds. One population of pediatric patients consisted of burn victims, whose healing process required lots of high-quality calories. Every patient was evaluated for nutritional status, and like just about every hospital in the region, ours was affiliated with a separate facility that focused on improving the nutritional status via intensive feeding. If a child or adult needed surgery, it was often the practice to send them for a period of supplemental feeding before they could be a candidate, and this was done wherever possible. Otherwise the malnourished person would take up all the bed space and there would be no room for more acute patients to be admitted.
A small vignette of hunger
I was on the pediatric ward in Nepal when we gave lunch to a three-year-old girl with a burn injury. It was dal-bhaat — lentils and rice. The child ate it with her hands and — it was the usual mess you might expect from a child that age. Rice went on the floor. The mom was about sixteen (I think). I watched the mom as she got on her hands and knees and ate every single grain of rice off the floor.
Porridge
To this day, when I smell porridge cooking somewhere, I have an olfactory reminder of “Sarbotham Pitho” When you see a picture of starving people being given a bowl of what looks like porridge, this is the recipe for the porridge. There were lots of cultural issues around the feeding of children, this too is a whole ‘nother story. Nepal made dramatic improvements to address child malnutrition, but “stunting” is a lifelong outcome of victims and it will also be true in Palestine even for the survivors of this current crisis.
Definition of food insecurity and famine
Since 2004 there is now a classification system in use to quantify food insecurity. Its known as the IPC. It is used as a predictive tool.