Latest news with #starvation
Al Jazeera
2 days ago
- General
- Al Jazeera
LIVE: Israel stops food distribution for whole day in Gaza amid starvation
blinking-dot Live updates Live updates, LIVE: Israel stops food distribution for whole day in Gaza amid starvation Days after launching a controversial US-backed aid mechanism and killing dozens of aid seekers, Israel temporarily shuts all four aid sites.
CBC
3 days ago
- Health
- CBC
When hunger is a weapon
Since October 7, access to food in Gaza – and its systematic restriction by Israel – has been the subject of international condemnation. The most recent incident is the killing of dozens of Palestinians attempting to obtain food from an aid distribution centre. Israeli settlers have blocked roads, and aid delivery. Aid convoys and workers have also been targeted with violence. And as of March, Israel established a full scale blockade on aid into the Gaza strip. Today a trickle has been allowed into the territory. International organizations have been warning of famine in Gaza for more than a year. Alex de Waal is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, and author of 'Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine.' He joins the show for a discussion about starvation crimes, why the weaponization of food during wartime continues, and how famine has proven difficult to prosecute in court.
CTV News
3 days ago
- General
- CTV News
B.C. reviewing home-sharing program for adults with developmental disabilities
Florence Girard, seen here in a family handout photo from 2006, died of starvation in a Port Coquitlam, B.C., home in 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO The British Columbia government is commissioning an independent review of the province's home-share program, months after an inquest into the starvation death of a woman with Down syndrome in a Port Coquitlam share home. A statement from the Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction says the review will assess safety in home-sharing arrangements, standards that promote quality of life, as well as accountability and oversight measures. The government says it will convene an advisory body made up of individuals, families and service providers to give input for developing recommendations. Florence Girard was 54 years old when she died in 2018 weighing only about 50 pounds in the home where she lived as part of the home-share program for people with developmental disabilities, managed by the Crown corporation Community Living BC. A coroners inquest jury in January made 13 recommendations including calling for better training and pay for people who share their homes and an improved system to co-ordinate residents' needs. Shane Simpson, chair of Community Living BC's board, says in the statement that the Crown corporation welcomes the review and that the organization has made a number of changes to its processes and oversight since Girard's death. The government says the review is expected to be finished in the fall. This report by Ashley Joannou, The Canadian Press, was first published June 2, 2025
Al Jazeera
4 days ago
- General
- Al Jazeera
Gaza mother pleads for help to save emaciated 5-year-old
NewsFeed Gaza mother pleads for help to save emaciated 5-year-old Video shows 5-year-old Osama al-Ruqab is wasting away from Israel's forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. His mother pleas to get him specialised treatment abroad have been ignored.
Al Jazeera
4 days ago
- General
- Al Jazeera
In Gaza, aid kills
Today, three Palestinians have been killed and 35 wounded by Israeli fire near an aid distribution centre in the Gaza Strip's southern city of Rafah. The attack came a day after Israeli tanks opened fire on thousands of desperate and hungry Palestinians at the same site, killing at least 31 people. One person was also shot dead at another distribution site near the Netzarim Corridor in central Gaza the same day. There are currently only four such sites distributing food to Gaza's starving population of two million people, who for nearly three months were forced to contend with a full Israeli blockade that prevented the entry of all aid into the enclave. On May 19, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu magnanimously opted to allow a resumption of 'minimal' aid deliveries to Gaza, having determined that impending mass starvation was a 'red line' that might jeopardise the undying support of the US, Israel's traditional partner in crime and the primary enabler of its slaughter. And yet these mass killings suggest that the new 'minimal' arrangement offers Palestinians a decidedly horrific choice: either die of starvation or die trying to obtain food – not, of course, that these are the only two options for dying in a genocidal war in which Israel has indiscriminately bombed hospitals, refugee camps and everything else that can be bombed, killing more than 54,400 people. The aid distribution hubs are run by a sketchy new outfit called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), initially an Israeli brainchild that operates as a private aid organisation registered in both Switzerland and the US state of Delaware. As The Guardian newspaper noted, the GHF has 'no experience distributing food in a famine zone'. It does, however, have ties to the US and Israeli governments and employs former US military and intelligence officers. So it is that food distribution in Gaza now transpires under the supervision of armed US security contractors at hubs conveniently located near Israeli military positions. The four sites that are currently operational are located in central and southern Gaza while a significant part of the enclave's population is in the north. To reach the hubs, many Palestinians must walk long distances and cross Israeli military lines, further endangering their lives. No mechanism is in place to distribute food to elderly, sick or wounded Palestinians – not to mention starving people unable to engage in such physical exertion in the hopes of putting something in their stomachs. Furthermore, the GHF initiative feeds into Israel's forced displacement scheme whereby surviving Palestinians will be concentrated in the south in preparation for their eventual expulsion, as per US President Donald Trump's plan for a reborn Gaza Strip largely devoid of Palestinians. In other words, the GHF is not in Gaza to alleviate hunger or cater to the needs of its population; rather, the food distribution hubs are a lucrative PR stunt aimed at creating a 'humanitarian' distraction from a continuing policy of deliberate starvation and genocide. The United Nations and aid organisations have lambasted the weaponisation of humanitarian aid while the situation was apparently too much to handle even for Jake Wood, the former US marine sniper who served as the GHF's executive director before his recent resignation on the grounds that 'it is not possible to implement this plan while also strictly adhering to the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence'. The massacres of the past two days are not the first such incidents to occur on the GHF's watch. Since the launch of the initiative in late May, there have been numerous killings of Palestinians near distribution points. According to Gaza's Government Media Office, the total number of people killed while seeking aid from this scheme has reached 52 so far. And yet the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza trying to engage in that most necessary human activity of eating is hardly new. Recall that on February 29, 2024, at least 112 desperate Palestinians were massacred while queueing for flour southwest of Gaza City. More than 750 were wounded. After that particular episode, then-US President Joe Biden announced that the US would airdrop food into Gaza, another costly PR spectacle incapable of providing even a drop in the bucket in terms of the humanitarian needs of the population. A more straightforward and efficient move would obviously have been to pressure the Israelis to cease blocking aid trucks from entering Gaza by land – and for the US to, you know, cease bombarding Israel with billions of dollars in aid and weaponry. As it turned out, airdrops can be lethal too, and just a week after Biden's announcement, five Palestinians were killed when a parachute attached to an aid pallet failed to open. To be sure, there are few things more abominably ironic than hungry people being killed by food aid literally crashing onto their heads. Call it humanitarian slaughter. Then there was Biden's $230m humanitarian aid pier, which shut down in July after a mere 25 days of service. It was heavily criticised by aid groups as another expensive, complex and ineffective means of getting food and other aid into Gaza. But then again, effectiveness was never the point. Now, if the GHF's Gaza debut is any indication, the militarised distribution of food will continue to provide opportunities for mass killing as crowds of starving Palestinians gather around aid hubs. The phrase 'shooting fish in a barrel' comes to mind – as if the Gaza Strip weren't enough of a barrel already. To be sure, the idea of luring starving people to specific geographical points to facilitate Israel's genocidal conquest is singularly diabolical. And as the US persists in enabling Israel's fish-in-a-barrel approach, any remotely moral world would refuse to stomach the arrangement any longer. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
