After a year of absence of fresh food in Gaza… a celebration with a shipment of apples policy
The American Wall Street Journal said that most people in Gaza no longer consider obtaining fresh food possible, so 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 written by Abeer Ayoub and Omar Abdel Baqi – the joy of Haitham Dalo’s children, who have been eating canned food for nearly a year, and 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 learned that They will eat the fruit.”
When Dalo received a box of fruit and vegetables weighing about 7 kilograms earlier this month, neighbors who had not yet received any box offered him more than $150. “I had to refuse,” he said. “My children desperately need it.”
Extreme hunger
The reaction of these children who live in Gaza City with their parents – according to the newspaper – reflects the level of food insecurity that many people in Gaza suffer from, as the majority of the Strip’s population of about 2.2 million people face severe hunger, and not enough food reaches them. According to relief groups.
The newspaper warned that relying on canned food 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 from malnutrition, according to the United Nations.
Are distribution operations expanding?
However, aid groups say they have recently been able to deliver fresh fruit and frozen meat to the northern Gaza Strip, where many Palestinians have not seen such items for months, due to intense bombing and fighting that has made aid delivery there impossible.
Although Arwa Suleiman (29 years old), a mother of two children, received a chicken in northern Gaza last week for the first time since the start of the war, she will share it with 9 relatives. She said, “We decided to keep the chicken for Friday. This is the day of the week on which we traditionally cooked special meals.” prewar”.
The newspaper stated that the deliveries are not an indication that the plight of hunger in Gaza is approaching its end. On the contrary, the general food shortage there has worsened in the months following Israel’s entry into Rafah and its closure of the main border crossing. The United Nations said that the amount of aid that entered… Gaza has declined by more than half since early May.
Earlier this year, the International Court of Justice, the UN’s 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 allowed in southern Gaza fell by 28% in August. As 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 presents 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, spokesman for US Near East Refugee Aid, which recently distributed a rare 22-ton shipment of frozen meat in northern Gaza.
