Paula Hancocks
Sham Qadeh, a 22-month-old Palestinian girl suffering from severe malnutrition and an enlarged liver, is pictured with her mom in a makeshift tent on June 28 in Khan Younis, Gaza. Doaa Albaz/Anadolu/Getty ImagesThe images of skeletal children that are now pouring out of Gaza are shocking but they should not be surprising. Humanitarian groups with decades of experience distributing aid in the Strip have been warning about this scenario for months, since Israel began throttling aid to a trickle.
Haunting footage of lifeless bodies with sharp bones protruding through stretched skin can be seen around the world. The pictures of starvation in Gaza are horrific, distressing and inescapable.The main United Nations agency for Palestinians said Thursday that “people are being starved, while a few kilometers away supermarkets are loaded with food,” highlighting the stark and uncomfortable reality between life in Israel and survival in Gaza.
On a popular US-Canadian podcast this week, listeners learned that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prefers Burger King to McDonalds, a ‘Whopper’ seeming to be his burger of choice. While Netanyahu did not introduce the topic, the public discussion on fast food by the man responsible for getting food into Gaza is, at its most generous, tone deaf.The US correspondent for Israeli newspaper Haaretz noted that Netanyahu “spent valuable time” on the burger chat “rather than answering legitimate questions about the Gaza humanitarian crisis or the delays in sealing a hostage deal and cease-fire.”
World leaders see the same pictures of starvation as everyone else and yet seem powerless to stop them, unable to pressure Israel into allowing more aid in or returning to the tried and tested UN-led distribution methods.Seela Barbakh, an 11-month-old Palestinian girl who is malnourished according to medics, is held by her mother Najah at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, Gaza on Wednesday. Ramadan Abed/Reuters
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