While trucks carrying vital supplies accumulate on the border with Egypt, hungry children watch the garbage for food.
At least 57 Palestinians died to death in Gaza while the punishing blocking of Israel of food, water and other critical aid with the besieged enclave extends in its third month in the middle of the implacable bombardment.
The Gaza Government Media Bureau said on Saturday that most of the victims were children, as well as the patients and the elderly, condemning “the continuous use of food by the Israeli occupation as a war” and urging the international community to put pressure on Israel to reopen borders and allow aid.
Gaza has been under the total Israeli blocking since March 2, a video obtained by Tel Aviv Tribune Arab showing a large number of trucks carrying vital supplies on Saturday on the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip, the queue extending south beyond the city of Arish, located about 45 kilometers (28 miles) of the Rafah crossing crossroads.
The Tel Aviv Tribune team identified one of the last victims on Saturday, a little girl called Janan Saleh al-Sakafi, who died of malnutrition and dehydration at Ranti hospital, west of Gaza City. According to the United Nations, more than 9,000 children have been admitted to the hospital for treatment for acute malnutrition since the start of the year.
Reporting Gaza City, Hani Mahmoud, Tel Aviv Tribune, said he had witnessed the heartbreaking scenes of children crossing garbage, “in search of all that remains canned food”. The enclave, he added, had reached a “critical” point with international organizations outside the supplies and community kitchens unable to prepare meals for displaced people.
“Finding a single meal has become an impossible quest,” said Ahmad al-Najjar, a Palestinian moved to Gaza City, in Tel Aviv Tribune. “People here have witnessed a charitable organization after others declaring that they are not supplies, that they close their operations because they are unable to … offer the population the necessary relief.”
“It is frustrating and exasperating that trucks accumulate on the other side of the fence refused entry while people, even children, are in disastrous conditions.”
Hospitals face “acute shortages”
Suhaib Al-Hams, director of the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah, said in a statement that medical services knew “acute shortages in more than 75% of essential drugs”, with only about a week of supplies.
He warned that most of the Enclave medical services will stop without “immediate intervention” to reopen borders and allow medical and humanitarian aid through. He added that patients, who “die slowly every day without treatment” should be evacuated urgently.
The continuous blockade is the longest closure of this kind that the Gaza Strip has ever faced and has come while Israeli forces continue to bomb the territory, killing at least 70 Palestinians and injuring 275 others during the two days from Thursday to Saturday morning, according to the Ministry of Health.
On Saturday, two women were killed during an Israeli air raid in a house in the city of Al-Fakhari, near the southern city of Khan Younis in Gaza, according to reports from Tel Aviv Tribune Arabic.
In addition, a fisherman was killed and another injured by an Israeli naval attack off the coast of Gaza City.
Later in the day, two Palestinians were killed during an attack on Israeli drones against the Al-Mawasi region in the south of Gaza, formerly an Israeli “security zone”.
The War of Israel against Gaza killed at least 52,495 people and injured 118,366 since October 7, 2023, according to the Ministry of Health. Thousands of other missing under the rubble are presumed dead.
