The American newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, said that most people in Gaza no longer consider obtaining fresh food a possibility, and that is why children recently felt joy and jumped out of their beds with joy when they learned that fresh fruit would be provided to them.
The newspaper explained – in a report by Abeer Ayoub and Omar Abdel Baqi – the joy of Haitham Dalo’s children, who had been eating canned food for nearly a year. Their father said, “My children were very happy to see apples for the first time in 9 months. They jumped out of their beds when they knew they would be eating the fruit.”
When Dalu received a box of fruits and vegetables weighing about 7 kilograms earlier this month, neighbors who had not received any yet offered him more than $150. “I had to refuse,” he said. “My children need it badly.”
Very hungry
The reaction of these children, who live in Gaza City with their parents, reflects the level of food insecurity that many people in Gaza suffer from, according to the newspaper. The majority of the Strip’s population of about 2.2 million people is facing severe hunger and is not getting enough food, according to aid groups.
The newspaper pointed out that relying on canned foods for months, with little or no access to fresh fruits, vegetables or protein, has a severe negative impact on health, stressing that dozens of people have died due to malnutrition, according to the United Nations.
Are distributions expanding?
But aid groups say they have recently been able to deliver fresh fruit and frozen meat to the north of the Strip, where many Palestinians have not seen such supplies for months because of heavy shelling and fighting that has made aid deliveries there impossible.
Although Arwa Suleiman, a 29-year-old mother of two in northern Gaza, received a chicken last week for the first time since the war began, she will share it with nine relatives. “We decided to save the chicken for Friday,” she said. “This is the day of the week when we traditionally cooked special meals before the war.”
The newspaper reported that the deliveries are not an indication that the hunger ordeal in Gaza is nearing an end. On the contrary, the general food shortage there has worsened in the months since Israel entered Rafah and closed the main border crossing. The United Nations said that the volume of aid entering Gaza has fallen by more than half since early May.
Earlier this year, the International Court of Justice, the United Nations’ highest court, ordered Israel to allow better aid flows into the Strip and reopen the Rafah border crossing, but the number of humanitarian missions Israel has allowed into southern Gaza fell by 28 percent in August, the United Nations says.
It was not known, according to the newspaper, whether the recent deliveries of fresh fruits and vegetables and frozen meat in northern Gaza would expand, or even continue, especially since the distribution of perishable items such as meat poses major challenges, with frequent power outages in Gaza.
“The need to ensure a continuous cold chain was a major reason for the delay,” said Steve Vick, a spokesman for the American Near East Refugee Aid organization, which recently distributed a rare 22-ton shipment of frozen meat in northern Gaza.