Gaza- The Septuagint patient, Jamila, has lived on water and salt for 3 days to avoid her constant sense of dizziness, nausea and imbalance, as a result of the acute Israeli starvation policy that kills Palestinians along the Gaza Strip.
This is the way that Daher, 76, resorted to one of the scarcity alternatives, and the people of the Strip themselves, who are currently forced in the most severe stages of starvation caused by a suffocating Israeli siege, the closure of crossings and the prevention of the introduction of humanitarian aid since last March.
In front of a tent in which she lives with her 14 family, she sat with a phenomenon exhausted and shows signs of extreme fatigue.
Harsh alternatives
Daher suffers from chronic diseases, and the medications you take regularly need to be completely missing from the market, and its weight has decreased since the siege is tightened from 97 to 67 kilograms, and has lost the ability to move except with great difficulty.
Her daughter Nevin, 48, told Al -Jazeera Net that the anxiety possesses the fate of her mother as she watches “her body eats each other of the severity of hunger.”
Nafin has 3 children’s grandchildren who do not stop crying all the time from the hunger tablet, and you find only water to circumvent them and silence “their stomachs”, and even the fresh water of drinking is not constantly available, this mother and grandmother speaks with painful bitterness.
Before the current hunger crisis intensified, this displaced family was from the town of Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, in its livelihood, it depends on a charitable formation from which it gets one meal of food, but it closed its doors similar to the dozens of similar takaia that came out of the service, either as a result of the direct Israeli targeting or the lack of goods and raw materials to prepare food.
The last time Nevin got a baking tie of 10 loaves 3 days ago, and according to its description it was a “great treasure”, and I divided each loaf into 4 quarters, and says, “We ate it on two days with salt or accuracy I made myself from the remains of a ground lentil.”
The bread is considered an essential component of the Gazans tables, and it is completely missing from the markets, and if it is found, its prices have reached unprecedented levels.
According to Nevin, one kilo of flour is sufficient to make 8 to 10 loaves and is currently reaching 200 shekels (about 60 dollars).
Big prison
Within 48 hours, the boy, the Prince of Nisleh and his family (6 individuals), did not eat except a cup of water mixed with a little salt and spices.
He resides in the 15 -year -old Al -Nasla and his family in a tent inside a camp in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood, north of Gaza City.
In just 3 days, the price of a kilo of lentils increased from 30 shekels to 100 shekels (about 30 dollars), while the spices are scarce and their prices are exorbitant, and the text says, “It is sold in grams like gold.”
The news of the famine and its repercussions occupy the largest part of the interaction of Gazans on social media platforms, and their participation in their personal experiences and their available alternatives that they had to attempts to overcome hunger.
Mohamed Adwan – a content maker – tells the experience of his friend’s family, and he found in fasting daily a way to resist hunger, and breakfast on one meal, which facilitates food that enables her to withstand until the sunset of the next day.
In his speech to Al -Jazeera Net, Adwan Net is likened to the life of 2.2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, currently in the reality of the prisoners in the occupation prisons, and says, “We also live in a large prison, and just as the prisoners are fighting their protest strikes by relying on water and salt, we found ourselves forced to simulate it and confront the deadly famine.”
Physical and psychological effects
In turn, the director of the Children’s Hospital and Childbirth in the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis does not see any feasibility in all these alternatives, and stresses that it “does not represent a substitute for food.”
Al -Farra told Al -Jazeera Net that “hunger not only threatens a person’s life, but also destroys his personality and dignity over time, and affects him deeply physically and psychologically, especially if it continues.”
Al -Farra warns that the repercussions of starvation began to appear among the Gazans, and appear to be overcrowded daily in dozens of malnutritions that do not stop in children and the elderly, but rather include all groups.
According to him, the physical effects of famine include:
- Lack of energy and exhaustion, as a decrease in calories leads to general weakness and continuous fatigue.
- Lack of weight and muscle atrophy as a result of breaking the body of the muscles to obtain energy after breaking the lipid tissue under the skin.
- Weak immunity, and the body becomes more vulnerable to infection and diseases.
- Anemia as a result of iron deficiency and proteins.
- Decreased ability to focus and poor memory.
- Severe malnutrition leads to swelling of the abdomen or feet.
- Growth stopped in children.
- Members failure in severe and chronic cases.
Therefore, Al -Farra says that the hungry or star human body falls in a state of slumber and then ends with death.
As for the psychological effects of starvation, it is their symptoms, according to Al -Farra:
- Anxiety and depression.
- Nervousness and mood.
- Poor the ability to make a decision and the inability to express, understand and realize.
- Social isolation and loss of interest in life.
- Food -related obsessions.
- Acute psychological disorders resulting from “chronic hunger” cases.
Among the dozens of daily cases caused by severe hunger, Al -Farra mentions two painful stories, one for a whole family that suffered collective poisoning as a result of eating spoiled food cans, and when the doctors asked her: Did you not examine the date of its validity? The mother replied, “We know that she is finished, but we have no alternative to hunger.”
The other story says that it is for a baby who does not exceed two months.
Shocking numbers
In his conversation with Al -Jazeera Net, the Director General of the Government Media Office, Dr. Ismail Al -Thawabta, puts the current starvation policy in numbers that reflect the depth of the crisis, and prove – in his opinion – what he calls the “starvation engineering” pursued by the Israeli occupation:
- 140 days since the complete occupation closes all the Gaza Strip crossings and prevent the entry of humanitarian supplies.
- 42 Kitting food targeted by the occupation in the context of imposing a starvation policy.
- 57 centers for the distribution of aid and food targeted by the occupation in the context of imposing starvation.
- 121 times the occupation targeted humanitarian aid convoys.
- 877 martyrs killed by the occupation in the “trap of death” in the vicinity of the aid centers of the American and Israeli -backed Gaza Foundation, and more than 5666 wounded and 42 missing.
- 650,000 children are exposed to death due to malnutrition and hunger.
- 70 children have been martyred due to malnutrition since the outbreak of the war.
- 620 deaths due to lack of food and medicine.
- More than 3,500 miscarriages among pregnant women due to the lack of necessary nutrients.