#Israel #Gaza #BBCNews More than 100 aid agencies, including Save the Children and Médecins Sans Frontières, have warned that mass starvation is spreading across Gaza in a joint statement.
"Palestinians are trapped in a cycle of hope and heartbreak, waiting for assistance and ceasefires, only to wake up to worsening conditions," the statement says.
On Tuesday, the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said that 33 people had died of malnutrition in 48 hours.
Israel has acknowledged a significant drop in supplies reaching Gazans. But its officials say the food is there - and have blamed aid agencies for not getting it to Gazans.
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00:00More than 100 aid agencies have issued a joint statement warning that mass starvation is spreading across the Gaza Strip, despite Israeli denials.
00:09The signatories include major organisations such as Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and Oxfam.
00:16The Hamas-run health ministry said more than 30 people have died from malnutrition in the past three days.
00:22Israel has acknowledged the drop in the amount of aid reaching Palestinians but insisted they were seeing no signs of famine.
00:28Meanwhile, Israel has been continuing its military offensive.
00:33In a statement, the Israel Defence Forces said they had struck approximately 120 terror targets across the Strip.
00:40Gaza's Hamas-run civil defence says at least 17 Palestinians have been killed in strikes since early on Wednesday morning.
00:48Well, let's speak to our correspondent in Jerusalem, Yolande Nell.
00:53Now, this is a warning that we've been hearing for some time, Yolande, but now aid agencies are saying starvation is occurring.
01:03That's right.
01:04And they're talking about how, you know, with supplies now totally depleted, even their own colleagues in humanitarian organisations and their partners are wasting away, they say, before their eyes.
01:17This comes after we've had journalists talking about how their freelance colleagues on the ground are no longer able to work.
01:24We've had, of course, that joint statement by nearly 30 countries earlier in the week, including many of Israel's closest allies,
01:32really complaining about the drip feeding of aid with the current system that's going on in Gaza.
01:38But there was this figure that really stood out for me in this statement from the NGOs, and it says that on average, there's only 28 lorry loads of aid being distributed within Gaza each day.
01:53And, of course, that is just a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the needs of about 2 million people.
02:01What are the aid agencies asking for Israel to do?
02:05So what they want is for all of the land crossings into Gaza to be opened up.
02:14They want to have a full flow, a surge going in of clean water, of food, of shelters and, importantly, fuel as well, because that is, of course, part of the distribution effort.
02:25They need fuel to get around to key establishments, the desalination plant, to hospitals, but also for the lorries to take the aid to people.
02:37And they want this to be under what they're describing as a principled humanitarian mechanism overseen by the UN.
02:43And this gets back to a row that's really going on still between the Israeli military establishment in particular and the UN,
02:54with the Israeli authorities accusing the UN of not doing enough to get aid into the Gaza Strip.
03:00Just yesterday, we had the Israeli military spokesman putting out drone footage showing piles and piles of supplies,
03:09which had been cleared by Israeli security, to go inside Gaza, and it's not being picked up from inside the crossings.
03:17Well, the UN says that really one of the main reasons for that has been that it's not getting the guarantees that Israeli military will not open fire
03:27when it picks up those supplies, and desperate people are coming to try to get what they can.
03:34Also, it says that it's got new restrictions that it's seen since Israel eased its total blockade on the Gaza Strip two months ago
03:44to start allowing the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, this controversial American group that Israel backs to operate,
03:52but also to allow in a trickle of aid from the UN.
03:56And it's saying that it has to get Israeli military coordination for local drivers to go and pick up that aid from the crossings,
04:03then has to coordinate going through active military zones in the Gaza Strip.
04:08At a time when roads are badly damaged, there is still active combat going on.
04:14And we know that those operations, the new Israeli military offensive in Deir al-Balach,
04:19where there are key UN facilities based, that is also having a big impact on the aid distribution in Gaza.
04:28Yolande, for the moment. Thank you very much, Yolande Nell, in Jerusalem.
04:31Let's speak to Dr. Deirdre Noonan, an orthopaedic surgeon at Al Nasser Hospital in Gaza.
04:39Dr. Noonan, thank you very much for joining us here on BBC News.
04:42You've been to work in Gaza on numerous occasions.
04:47How have things changed since your last visit there in April?
04:51It's massively worse on every parameter that I can perceive.
04:59The situation with food is completely dire and totally unacceptable.
05:06I am seeing babies who are starving, but it goes through all age ranges.
05:13Even young, healthy adult men and women, formerly healthy adult men and women,
05:17are frequently just skin and bones here.
05:20Our nurses don't have enough energy to stand up for the duration of their shift.
05:25And we have children begging in the halls of the hospital, not just for food, but they are begging for fresh water.
05:32So not even the very basic minimums of standards for human life are being met here.
05:39What sort of medical issues are you facing when people come in for help?
05:44As a surgeon, I'm treating extremity injuries, and invariably these are related to the war.
05:53The vast majority of them are people that have sustained explosive injuries from Israeli tank shells or missiles or airstrikes
06:00that most often have struck the people when they are in their tents in a displacement zone.
06:06The second most common thing that I am seeing are people who have been wounded by gunshot wounds.
06:11And again, about 90% of those are related to the GHF food distribution sites.
06:18And they are harrowing stories of people that were so desperate to feed their families that they went into mortal danger to do so
06:27and come out with no food and a life-changing injury, sometimes an injury.
06:32These bullet wounds, they're wounds that can make people lose their limb.
06:36I have amputated multiple limbs on people that have been shot at the GHF.
06:41And I also occasionally see a patient who is being wounded by falling down or by a road traffic accident.
06:48But when I look deeper into the situation, almost every time it comes back to being related to violent attacks on Gaza,
06:58where one man who told me he was falling from a ladder, just a simple injury like I might see at home in Canada,
07:05when I asked him a bit more about why he fell, he said he fell because the ladder was shaking,
07:10because there had been an airstrike nearby.
07:12I had another patient with a broken ankle.
07:14He said that he'd been hit by a truck.
07:16And I wondered how it was possible to be hit by a truck in Gaza right now
07:20when there are so little fuel and so few vehicles moving around.
07:24And he told me that it was a truck that was speeding away from an evacuation zone
07:28as he was walking down the side of the street.
07:31So it's as though every single thing comes back to this assault.
07:34And every single injury, even if it doesn't seem like violent trauma, actually has a violent origin.
07:39How much riskier is it carrying out these operations on someone who is so weak from lack of food?
07:51It's hard to quantify, but we are all struggling in this third week,
07:55looking at the patients that we treated in our first week here and seeing outcomes that are much worse
08:01than we would normally have expected.
08:02We see it right now in terms of the wounds, wounds that are not healing, wounds that are infected.
08:09And we will see, I'm sure, later down the line, the same effects in bone.
08:14I treated a 12-year-old child a few days ago.
08:17Normally, children heal their bones excellently.
08:21This child had a very simple fracture, every reason to do well.
08:24But two months after his injury, the bone was crooked and there were no signs of healing.
08:28The surgeons, where we were able to very easily move his bone back into position,
08:32which is showing the result of energy and nutrient deficiencies that people have.
08:38And so as time goes on, orthopedic surgery, it takes a long time to see whether you are successful or not.
08:44But what I'm seeing now, and also by the number of limbs that I've amputated because of infection,
08:50my work does very little good when a patient does not have the adequate nutrition to cover.
08:55Dr. Deirdre Noonan, a Canadian orthopedic surgeon working at the Anasa Hospital in Gaza.
