The end of Gaza’s Khan Younis may spell the imminent end of a people

Our aid agency has saved over 100,000 lives across Khan Younis and wider Gaza over the last 19 months. Within weeks, days and in some cases hours, it may have been in vain. Muslim Aid was shut out of the strip, along with all the other internationally recognised humanitarian agencies, when Israel imposed its second blockade on 2 March. Our medical checks continue, records accruing of a population wasting away.

On 15 April we delivered our most recent food parcels to Khan Younis, a region since Monday subject to a forced displacement order following a government minister’s sickening stated goal to “completely destroy and cleanse” Gaza.

Israel announced the immediate evacuation of Khan Younis on 19 May, warning it would from that moment become a dangerous combat zone. True enough, within hours infants out looking for bread featured among the first dozens killed in airstrikes and warnings were made of an “unprecedented attack”.

A British doctor working in Khan Younis has compared the city to Stalingrad.

Across central Gaza, parents are grinding animal feed to make bread. Children are sifting through flour infested with insects to end up with rotten flour. Hospitals are performing surgeries and amputations without anaesthesia. Children queue for hours in the hope of a single meal. After 11 weeks of a still barely permeated blockade on food and medicine, Gaza’s over two million people are not just enduring a war, deemed a genocide by Amnesty International, they are being starved in plain sight.

The UN warns that the risk of famine spreads across all of Gaza, with food production obliterated and aid barely being let in following the latest two month blockade. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) reports that 93% of the population is experiencing crisis-level hunger. With prices of basic staples having skyrocketed, a bag of flour, if available, costs nearly 20 times its pre-war price.

Israel’s intensified bombing of vital health infrastructure led to the total collapse of all hospitals in the north. Gazan health officials reported that intense fighting accompanied by a siege of Beit Lahiya has forced the last standing hospital, the Indonesian Hospital, to shut down, cutting off vital access to wounded patients and compounding the dire humanitarian situation.

The ongoing blocks on all but a tokenistic ‘basic’ supply of aid made so far this week is not an oversight in war policy, it reflects a deliberate strategy as outlined last week by the UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher. He called on Israel to end “cruel collective punishment” in Gaza and recognise that “international law is unequivocal”.

Read more:

• I’m an aid worker in Gaza – the situation has never been worse
• ‘It’s hell on Earth’: British doctors recall seeing ‘unimaginable suffering’ in Gaza
• Israel’s aid blockade is pushing people in Gaza to the brink of survival. It must be lifted – now

While the British government has joined France and Canada in more assertively condemning Gaza’s suffering, the UK continues to export F45 parts to Israel and power their killer drones with British engines. These sales persist despite the International Court of Justice (ICJ) hearing a case alleging Israel’s acts “plausibly” constitute genocide, and despite explicit statements from Israeli officials about displacing Gaza’s population.

The UK’s condemnation this week is welcomed. However this in itself will not save lives.

There remains no movement on arms policy. Britain must halt all weapons transfers to Israel, including direct arms and components that can be used for weapons and equipment. Palestine needs this policy change to be made immediately.

The UK should go further too, leveraging its UN Security Council seat to push for binding resolutions and greater pressure for aid distributed by recognised humanitarian agencies to start flowing right across Gaza. Again, this aid needs to circulate today.

Muslim Aid, working with partners on the ground, last month distributed 6,400 food parcels to families clinging to survival, 3,000 in Deir al-Balah, 2,400 in Khan Younis and 1,000 in Rafah.

These are not statistics, they are vulnerable families who woke up to one less day of hunger while countless others still wait for a lifeline blocked at the checkpoint, including coeliac patients whose gluten-free flour sits in warehouses in Arish (Egypt), prevented from entry.

The time for words has passed. The humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is a moral failure that will follow us into the future as our children pick up the pieces. Our aid workers will never give up on Palestine. The world watched Rwanda and Srebrenica unfold in real time, and history will judge how policymakers acted as Gaza inches closer to extinction today.

Khalid Javid is CEO of Muslim Aid.

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