Over half a million Gazans at risk of death from starvation due to Israeli attacks: Hamas

Osama Hamdan, who represents the movement in Lebanon, made the remarks at a press conference in Beirut on Monday.

“Due to the high number of displaced people, lack of viable shelters, and scarcity of adequate food aid, more than half a million of our people in the northern Gaza Strip face the real danger of death and are starving,” Hamdan said.

The official added that the people of Gaza have been forced to “grind animal fodder” in the absence of flour and food.

The Israeli regime launched its onslaught on Gaza on October 7, 2023 following Operation al-Aqsa Storm by the territory’s resistance movements.

More than 25,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, have lost their lives so far as a result of the brutal onslaught and a concomitant siege, which the regime has imposed on the territory with all-out American military and political support.

Hamdan stated Israel and the administration of the United States President Joe Biden are responsible for the massacres that have been carried out against Gazans, calling on international organizations to declare northern Gaza a “famine zone”.

He also urged the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League to intervene immediately to open Gaza’s crossings and bring in aid.

The Hamas’ official said despite what the Israeli regime and the United States claim, there are no safe areas across the coastal territory.

Since the onset of its military aggression on Gaza, the regime has also staged sporadic attacks against Lebanon, sparking a firefight with the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah.

Iraqi and Yemeni resistance movements have also conducted retaliatory strikes against Israeli and American targets as a means of protesting the onslaught on Gaza and the United States’ support for it.

Hamdan stressed that the US administration is fully accountable for the escalation that the region is witnessing due to its continued support for Israel and its aggression against Gaza.

The Israeli regime, he emphasized, has stopped short of achieving any of the goals it had sought to realize through its military aggression against Gaza.

“After 108 days of this Zionist-American war against the Gaza Strip, the enemy has failed to achieve any of its aggressive goals. It has not been able to break the will of our great, patient, committed, and sacrificing people, nor has it been able to defeat the resistance,” Hamdan continued.

He added, “Neither our people left their land, nor did the resistance raise the white flag, nor did any of [Israeli] captives return to it, except for those that the resistance released on its own terms.”

In another part of his remarks, Hamdan said the Hamas movement strongly condemns the US administration’s designation of Yemen’s Ansarullah resistance movement as a terrorist group.

“We also condemn the continuation of the brutal American-British aggression against the brotherly [nation of] Yemen … and we consider it a proof to US insistence on militarizing the Red Sea to protect the [Israeli] occupation and support its crimes and aggression,” the Hamas representative added.

Concluding his remarks, Hamdan reaffirmed that Operation al-Aqsa Storm was a “necessary step and a natural response” by the resistance to the Israeli regime’s plots against Palestinians.

He enumerated the regime’s plots as “liquidating the Palestinian cause” of liberation from Israeli occupation and aggression, “controlling and Judaizing” the Palestinian territories, and eliminating Palestinians’ sovereignty over the al-Aqsa Mosque Compound and other holy sites.

The Israeli regime has built hundreds of settlements across the Palestinian territories and is constantly ratifying plans to expand such structures, which are illegal under international law due to their construction on an occupied territory.

Backed by the regime’s forces, illegal Israeli settlers also regularly invade the al-Aqsa Mosque Compound, Islam’s third-holiest site, where it is forbidden to perform non-Muslim prayers or rituals based on longstanding international agreements.

The United Nations Relief Works and Agency (UNRWA) has also announced that more than half a million people in Gaza face catastrophic hunger.

In the northern part of the besieged enclave, very little aid has reached residents and displaced families there, who have begun to grind animal feed into flour.

UNRWA pointed out that intense fighting, communications blackouts and access restrictions have hindered the organisation’s ability to “safely and effectively deliver aid”.

The UN’s food agency has also warned that “very little” food assistance has made it beyond the southern part of the bombarded and besieged territory since the start of the war.

“It’s difficult to get into the places where we need to get to in Gaza, especially in northern Gaza,” said Abeer Etefa, the World Food Programme’s spokesperson for the Middle East.

“The risk of having pockets of famine in Gaza is very much still there,” she added.

Etefa noted that there was a “systematic limitation on getting into the north of Gaza, not just for the WFP”.

“This is why we’re seeing people becoming more desperate and being impatient to wait for food distributions because it’s very sporadic,” she said, adding, “They don’t get it frequently, and they have no trust or confidence that these convoys will come again.”