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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.
Hospitals in the Gaza Strip are reporting seven new deaths due to famine and malnutrition as Israel continues its starvation campaign against the Palestinian territory. Gaza’s hunger-related death toll is now at 154, with at least 89 children among the dead.
We’re joined now by Arwa Damon, award-winning journalist, formerly with CNN, now founder of INARA, a nonprofit currently providing medical and mental healthcare to children in Gaza. Her new piece for the Atlantic Council is headlined “Inside the Israeli government’s starvation of Gaza, from an aid group trying to deliver food.” She previously spent 18 years at CNN, including as senior international correspondent, joining us from Urla, Turkey.
Thanks so much for joining us again, Arwa. Describe what is happening right now in Gaza.
ARWA DAMON: You know, it continues to be indescribable, to be frank. We do have these airdrops that are taking place. We do have what is being described as a trickle of trucks going in. But nothing — nothing — is happening to actually, genuinely stave off the starvation that we’re seeing across the Gaza Strip. These airdrops, what we saw of them, for example, in the first 48 hours since Israel allowed them to begin, barely amount to a couple of trucks. What is managing to get into Gaza that is being collected by humanitarian organizations quite often does not make it to the warehouse, because organizations are either having to confront armed gangs — and I’ll note here that these armed gangs operate in what’s known as the red zone, which means that these are areas that are fully under Israeli control, and yet somehow these armed gangs continue to have the capacity to operate there — or the trucks are, quite simply, swarmed by masses of starving and desperate Gazans. The situation is beyond atrocious.
Look, my organization, INARA, managed to recently get its hands on some fresh vegetables. And this isn’t produce that came in from the outside. This is locally grown produce in the few greenhouses that are still accessible. And each parcel that we distributed was roughly 13 pounds. So, 13 pounds of fresh vegetable costs $120. And I was watching the video sent over by the team, and you would have thought that the children who were grabbing at these vegetables were grabbing at their favorite candy bar. And the joy that was felt by this one family is just so disproportionate, you would have thought that someone had given them the best gift ever. And that just really goes to underscore the level of hunger, of desperation, of struggle that is happening there.
And it is, quite simply, illogical and absurd that the best solution that the world can come up with right now is airdrops and a few dozen trucks, when we’re talking about needing hundreds of trucks every single day to begin to reverse the impact that this prolonged hunger and starvation crisis has had on the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.1 million residents.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your response to the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. in an interview on CNN with Wolf Blitzer yesterday. His name is Yechiel Leiter. He claimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is flooding food into Gaza.
YECHIEL LEITER: We feel the same way. The prime minister feels the same way. And that’s why he’s taken every decision possible to have food flood into Gaza. As a matter of fact, right now as we speak, there’s 636 trucks, semi-trailers, waiting to enter Gaza, and U.N. agencies are not picking them up, because of their argument with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. … I appeal to the international community and to the media. I mean, look, there have been pictures that have been broadcast, even on CNN — I got to say this, excuse me, but even on CNN — pictures of children who are suffering from cerebral palsy or cystic fibrosis, not from hunger, and yet we’re condemned for it. This has a long history of pointing the finger at the Jewish state. It really has to stop.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., Yechiel Leiter. Arwa Damon, can you respond?
ARWA DAMON: Yeah, and I’ll respond on a couple of points that he made. First of all, on the issue of, you know, U.N. agencies refusing to pick up the trucks, this is not the case. And let me just explain what the process is to actually pick up your cargo once it has been cleared by Israel. And I’ll quote a colleague of mine, who quite simply put it as “It’s not as if you’re going to a McDonald’s drive-thru.” When we want to go and pick up humanitarian aid that has been cleared by Israel, we first have to put in what’s known as a movement request. So Israel has to approve our movement, because to go and pick up that aid, we have to go through the red zone. This is not a quick process. Add to that, on the day that you want to actually move, you have to again wait for Israel to give you the green light. You then move to a holding point, where you again wait for the green light. And then you’re able to move and get whatever it is that you’re able to load up onto these trucks. Now, recently, over the weekend, for example, there were 15 movement requests that were put through. Half of them were flat-out denied. Others were impeded. And only a handful of those 15 movement requests were actually able to go forward. So, humanitarian organizations want to go and pick up the aid. We need Israel to facilitate that process and to ensure that that aid is able to be safely picked up.
On the issue of the images of, you know, starving children and this claim that they all have underlying chronic or congenital conditions, on the one hand, look, when we’re talking about something like hunger and starvation, we’re talking right now at this stage about weeks and weeks and weeks where the population of Gaza has gone through very low intake of nutrients and a very low intake of calories. This will first and foremost impact children under the age of 5, whose bodies are still growing, who need those energy stores to be able to keep going. And this results in what is known among children as wasting. So their bodies are, quite literally, eating themselves up because they don’t have enough energy store. And when it comes to children who have underlying chronic and/or congenital conditions, yes, they are among the first to also be highly susceptible to dying from malnutrition and starvation, because their bodies are already weakened. And so, to say, “Oh, look, this child has cerebral palsy, and that’s why they died,” that is very misleading, not to mention that a child with cerebral palsy, if they do have access to proper nutrients, proper food, proper medical care, they can actually live to be anywhere between 30 to 70 years old.
But I will also point out that it’s not the first time that we’re hearing Israeli officials deny what we’re seeing with our very own eyes. We have also heard this from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself, saying there’s no starvation in Gaza. We can see what’s happening. We talk to our colleagues every single day. My own staff messaged me, saying, quite simply, “Arwa, I’m hungry.” And so, we’re at a point right now where it really feels as if Israel wants us or is trying to convince us that what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing from the population of Gaza, what we’re hearing from Palestinian journalists, what we’re hearing from humanitarians and other medical staff on the ground, be they Palestinians or those who are going in on any number of missions, that they’re all somehow not seeing what they’re actually seeing, and we’re not somehow seeing what is playing out on our screens every single day. It’s ridiculous.
AMY GOODMAN: And, you know, you, as a former CNN journalist, they can let the journalists in. There are Palestinian journalists. Many have been killed, but they do not allow in international journalists.
ARWA DAMON: No, they don’t. And actually, there was — I think it was yesterday or the day before — BBC and Sky News were taken on an airdrop that was carried out by Jordan. As the BBC was reporting, they were very specifically told not to film out the window.
And this call for international journalists to be allowed access to Gaza has been ongoing since the beginning of all of this. And that’s not to take away anything from the extraordinary work that Palestinian journalists themselves have been doing. But the sad reality is that if the international media, the outside media, wants to be able to push back against these, frankly, ludicrous Israeli claims, they do need to be allowed to go into Gaza and see it with their own eyes. And I have consistently said, and I said this from the first day I set foot in Gaza over a year ago, that if anyone goes into Gaza, within 15 minutes, the vast majority of what Israel is claiming just unravels before your very eyes.
And there is a reason why Israel doesn’t want to allow journalists into Gaza, and it’s not what Israel continuously claims, which are concerns over the journalists’ safety, because they didn’t even allow journalists, outside journalists, into Gaza during the ceasefire. And it does end up begging the question of: What are you so worried about? What are you afraid that these foreign journalists are going to actually uncover, that you are continuing to deny them entry?
AMY GOODMAN: Arwa, I wanted to turn to a video recorded by your team in Gaza.
ARWA DAMON: Our team went to visit this family. The motherhood showed up hysterical and desperate to our clinic. The twins were born in January. They’re both running a fever. I mean, just look at the rashes. They have diarrhea, but there aren’t enough Pampers. There’s not enough water to wash. There’s not enough anything. Look at what’s left of the baby milk powder. It’s barely a couple of scoops. But there isn’t any available on the market or anywhere else, because Israel has restricted the entry of baby milk powder. The kids are hungry. They haven’t showered in ages. Mom shows us how she had to chop off one of her daughter’s hair. It was so lice-filled that her scalp was bleeding. Our INARA team is able to provide them with whatever meager supplies that we still have.
And one of the boys tells Yousra, our program coordinator, that it’s his birthday the next day. And his mother says he asked her for bread on his birthday — not a cake, just bread. And then, do you know what happens? Yousra returns on her own time with this, a bread birthday cake, because this is the sort of kindness and gentleness and generosity that defines Gaza and how its people look out for each other whichever way they can.
AMY GOODMAN: Arwa Damon narrating the piece in Gaza. We last spoke to you, Arwa, just after you got out of Gaza last time in November. Are you allowed back in?
ARWA DAMON: No, I’m not. I attempted to go back in, and I applied to go back in five times in February and March, and was finally denied entry, with no specific reason that was given. And it’s worth noting, though, that the increase in denials of entry to those who are trying to go, either on humanitarian missions or on medical missions, has increased by 40%, and no one is really ever given a reason why. It just feels really like another way to sort of continue to suffocate the efforts of humanitarian organizations on the ground. It’s absolutely tragic.
And I just want to point out, you know, in that clip, because listening to it, especially that ending part, really does make me smile, and I do wish that everyone could just think that as they’re listening to the news, as they’re listening to the numbers, so many of those people whose faces they’re seeing, they carry the same level of kindness and tenderness that our staff, people like Yousra, do, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Arwa Damon, thanks so much for being with us, founder of INARA, nonprofit currently providing medical and mental healthcare to children in Gaza. We’ll link to your piece for the Atlantic Council, “Inside the Israeli government’s starvation of Gaza, from an aid group trying to deliver food.”
Next up, we go to the occupied West Bank, where an Israeli settler fatally shot Odeh Hadalin, a prominent Palestinian activist — he was 31 years old — who worked on the Oscar-winning film No Other Land. The Israeli settler is under international sanctions, but Trump lifted the U.S. sanctions on him. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: “Chardi Kala” by Sonny Singh in our Democracy Now! studio.
