Gazans suffering as famine looms ---KUWAIT TIMES

Children unfed all day, thousands for one toilet • Major powers call for trucePARIS: Palestinians displaced by the Gaza war are living in “appalling” conditions, with children sometimes going for a whole day without food and thousands sharing the same toilet, Oxfam warned on Tuesday. Deadly Zionist bombardment and fighting have raged in the Gaza Strip’s far-southern Rafah area near the Egyptian border in recent weeks, again displacing those who had fled there in search of safety. More than one million people have fled Rafah for other areas, according to the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA. Oxfam said more than two-thirds of Gaza’s population is estimated to be crammed into less than a fifth of the besieged territory. “Despite (Zionist) assurances that full support would be provided for people fleeing, most of Gaza has been deprived of humanitarian aid, as famine inches closer,” the aid agency said. “A food survey by aid agencies in May found that 85 percent of children did not eat for a whole day at least once in the three days before the survey was conducted,” it added. Since Zionist troops launched their ground assault on Rafah on May 6, an average of eight aid trucks per day have entered, Oxfam said, citing UN figures. While hundreds of commercial food trucks are estimated to be entering daily, the goods on board include non-nutritious energy drinks, chocolate and cookies, and are often very expensive, it added. “By the time a famine is declared, it will be too late,” Oxfam’s Middle East and North Africa director, Sally Abi Khalil, said. “Obstructing tons of food for a malnourished population while waving through caffeine-laced drinks and chocolate is sickening.” In an interview with French television last week, Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected allegations of starvation in Gaza, saying everything had been done to avert a famine. Gazans were eating 3,200 calories a day or 1,000 more than the daily requirement, he said. Oxfam said families in some parts of southern Gaza, like the coastal area of Al-Mawasi, designated a “humanitarian zone” by the Zionist army, were getting by with barely any water or sanitation services. “Living conditions are so appalling that in Al-Mawasi, there are just 121 latrines for over 500,000 people — or 4,130 people having to share each toilet,” Oxfam said. Meera, an Oxfam staff member in Al-Mawasi who has been displaced seven times since October, described conditions there as “unbearable”. “There is no access to clean water, and people are forced to rely on the sea,” she said. On Monday, sewage flooded a camp for the displaced in Khan Yunis after a wastewater pipe burst, an AFP reporter said, with some trying to scoop the filth out of their tents using plastic bottles. Heavy fighting rocked Gaza on Tuesday after G7 and Arab powers urged both the Zionist entity and Hamas to agree to a truce and hostage release deal outlined by US President Joe Biden. Mediator Qatar said it had yet to see statements from either side “that give us a lot of confidence”, but the foreign ministry said Doha was “working with both sides on proposals on the table”. Washington said it would seek a UN Security Council resolution to back the three-phase roadmap which Biden presented last Friday as the Zionist entity’s plan, even as the war has ground on. Biden told Qatar’s Amir that “Hamas is now the only obstacle to a complete ceasefire”, and “confirmed (the Zionist entity’s) readiness to move forward” with the terms he set out last week. The Gaza war raged on unabated, with the Zionist military reporting its fighter jets struck around “65 terror targets” across Gaza and that troops located tunnel shafts and weapons in the southern city of Rafah. Four bodies were retrieved from a bombed house in the Bureij camp in central Gaza, and three more from the rubble of a destroyed building in Gaza City, the civil defense agency said. Gaza’s government media office said another Zionist strike killed eight police officers in Deir al-Balah. The White House insisted Monday that the truce plan was the Zionist entity’s own and not drafted by Washington to put pressure on its key ally. However, Biden also took a swipe in an interview with Time magazine at Netanyahu, who is leading a shaky right-wing coalition government and has been fighting corruption claims in court. Asked if he believed the Zionist premier was dragging out the war for political self-preservation, Biden said: “There is every reason for people to draw that conclusion.” Biden also said that he and Netanyahu — who have had tense relations as the Gaza death toll has soared — were at odds over the need to create a Palestinian state. “My major disagreement with Netanyahu is, what happens after... Gaza’s over? What, what does it go back to? Do (Zionist) forces go back in?” asked the US president. “The answer is, if that’s the case, it can’t work.” French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday told Netanyahu in a phone call that the Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas that rules parts of the occupied West Bank should “ensure the governance” of the Gaza Strip after the war. Zionist bombardment and ground offensive have killed at least 36,550 people in Gaza, mostly women and children. Some 55 percent of Gaza’s structures have been destroyed, damaged or “possibly damaged”, according to the United Nations satellite analysis agency. UN human rights chief Volker Turk also threw his support behind the truce plan, saying of the war that “we don’t even know how to describe it anymore”. “It is beyond precarious. It is beyond catastrophic.” – Agencies