‘Mass starvation' across Gaza as Trump puts pressure on Israel

Times

4 days ago

More than 100 aid organisations warned on Wednesday that 'mass starvation' was spreading across the Gaza Strip as President Trump intervened to put more pressure on Israel to change its tactics.
In a statement, the 111 signatories — including Doctors Without Borders (MSF), Save the Children and Oxfam — warned that 'our colleagues and those we serve are wasting away'.
'As the Israeli government's siege starves the people of Gaza, aid workers are now joining the same food lines, risking being shot just to feed their families,' the statement read.
It came as the United Nations said that more than a thousand Palestinians have been killed as they queued for aid in Gaza in the past two months.
The UN's human rights office said Israeli troops or other gunmen had shot 1,054 people since late May, of whom 766 were killed near sites run by the Israeli and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). The rest were killed while trying to reach UN aid convoys.
Israeli officials said they had not identified a famine in Gaza and blamed United Nations bodies for not collecting and distributing food and supplies. Some 950 trucks' worth of supplies were waiting to be collected by the UN from the Palestinian side of the Kerem Shalom and Zikim crossings, according to Cogat, an Israeli military agency.
According to the UN, Israel's restrictions and permit rejections are the reason for the mounting stockpiles at the border points, as aid organisations are regularly barred from transferring aid to warehouses and distribution sites, or risk coming under fire from the Israeli army if they do not obtain permissions.
As reports mount of children starving to death amid a dearth of supplies, Karoline Leavitt, Trump's press secretary, said the president had spoken to Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, and had been distressed by the latest 'mass-casualty event' at an aid station on Sunday, when Hamas said 79 civilians were killed after Israeli troops opened fire.
Trump had raised with Netanyahu recent airstrikes by Israel on troops loyal to the Syrian interim government and a strike on a Catholic church in Gaza, events Leavitt said had caught him 'off guard'.
Father Gabriel Romanelli, the priest of the Gaza church, has described for the first time since the incident on Thursday how an Israeli tank shell exploded on the side of the roof, wounding him in the leg and killing three parishioners.
Leavitt, referring to the shootings at the aid point, said: 'The president never likes to see that.' Israel said its troops fired 'warning shots' on Sunday, though both it and the GHF have repeatedly claimed that UN and Hamas figures are inflated. '[Trump] wants the killing to end and he wants to negotiate a ceasefire in this region,' Leavitt added.
In a statement on Wednesday, Hamas called for protests and sit-in demonstrations to take place at Israeli and US embassies across the world this weekend 'until the siege is broken and famine ends in Gaza Strip'.
Netanyahu and Hamas are under renewed pressure to reach a ceasefire deal. Both sides have agreed to one in principle but have not reached terms. Israel wants the right to resume the fight to 'eliminate Hamas' after a prisoner-for-hostage exchange, while Hamas is demanding the ceasefire be guaranteed as permanent.
Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff will travel to Europe this week to continue pushing for a ceasefire in the Palestinian territory, a US official said on Tuesday.
Axios reported that Witkoff is expected to depart for Rome on Wednesday and arrive on Thursday for a meeting with the Israeli minister of strategic affairs Ron Dermer and a senior Qatari envoy.
Trump hated 'the pictures of starvation of women and children who desperately need that aid', Leavitt added. The Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said that 100 people, including 80 children, had so far died of malnutrition.
Those figures could not be immediately verified but aid organisations have confirmed the deaths of children as malnutrition becomes widespread among the strip's two million inhabitants, most living in the rubble of its former towns. The UN's World Food Programme has estimated that nearly 100,000 women and children were already suffering from malnutrition.
Despite the calls for a ceasefire — or perhaps in preparation for it — Netanyahu has shown no sign of letting up in the attacks on Gaza. Tanks this week pushed into the town of Deir al-Balah, which had been less damaged than other cities in the strip to date.
In their statement, the 111 humanitarian organisations said that warehouses with tonnes of supplies were sitting untouched just outside the territory, and even inside, as they were blocked from accessing or delivering the goods.
'Palestinians are trapped in a cycle of hope and heartbreak, waiting for assistance and ceasefires, only to wake up to worsening conditions,' the signatories said.
'It is not just physical torment, but psychological. Survival is dangled like a mirage,' they added. 'The humanitarian system cannot run on false promises. Humanitarians cannot operate on shifting timelines or wait for political commitments that fail to deliver access.'
The World Health Organisation said its warehouse and staff residence in the town had been struck. Altogether, 25 Palestinians died in airstrikes across Gaza on Tuesday, the health ministry said.
Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general, told the security council the situation in Gaza was a 'horror show'. He said: 'We are seeing the last gasp of a humanitarian system built on humanitarian principles. That system is being denied the conditions to function.'
Romanelli told the newspaper La Repubblica about the explosion at his church. 'I was in my office working and I got up to get a tea with Father Yusuf,' he said. 'At that moment the shell arrived. The door blew in. If I had still been sitting at my desk I would probably be dead.'
Romanelli, 55, an Argentinian of Italian origin who was a confidant of the late Pope Francis, said he was making a good recovery but his community was still in shock.
'Luckily, most people were indoors. The children, thank God, were inside,' he said. 'The cross that was hit is very large. The fragments arrived throughout the courtyard. Whoever was outside was hit … Everyone was shouting. They were terrified.'
Pope Leo prayed for the injured and the three who died in the attack, reading out their names — Saad Issa Kostandi Salameh, Foumia Issa Latif Ayyad and Najwa Ibrahim Latif Abu Daoud — at angelus prayers on Sunday.
The Vatican has expressed growing frustration at the killings in Gaza. Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Catholic Church's senior representative in the Holy Land, said he had witnessed people queuing in the sun for a meal. 'This is a humiliation that is difficult to bear when you see it with your own eyes. It's morally unacceptable and unjustifiable,' Pizzaballa said.
Cardinal Augusto Lojudice, a former colleague of Leo when he served in the Vatican administration, denounced 'the killing of children queueing for a handful of rice'. 'The massacre of innocents cries vengeance to heaven. We can no longer hold back from denouncing it,' Lojudice said in an interview with La Stampa.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the top Vatican official after the Pope, questioned whether the attack was an accident 'or whether there was a desire to strike a Christian church, knowing that the Christians are a moderating influence in the Middle East and also in relations between Palestinians and Jews'.
Netanyahu has said Israel 'deeply regretted' hitting the church with 'stray ammunition'.