Medical officials in Gaza report rising cases of acute malnutrition, and community kitchens that served 1m meals a day are shutting down for lack of basic essentials. Aid agencies say they have distributed all remaining stocks of food. Dozens of bakeries that supplied vital free bread closed last month. “By the time a famine is declared, it will be too late. The crime wave is because you have 2 million or more desperate, traumatised people packed together with virtually no policing,” said one humanitarian official in Gaza. Gaza City has been worst hit by the crime wave, though some incidents have been reported elsewhere in the territory. One group of armed men broke into two or three bakeries in Gaza City last week, hoping to find flour, then targeted a soup kitchen when they found nothing. In another incident, thieves took a community kitchen’s last stocks as well as all its pots and pans. In a third theft, staff at a distribution site run by an NGO were held at knifepoint as it was looted, while the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) said it had to evacuate staff on Wednesday after thousands of Palestinians breached its Gaza City field office and took medications. Louise Wateridge, a senior emergency officer at Unrwa, called the looting “the direct result of unbearable and prolonged deprivation”. Witnesses described clashes between armed thieves and security guards in recent days. Anas Raafat, a 25-year-old lawyer in Gaza City, said he and his family had been woken when armed gangs attacked a warehouse of a humanitarian aid organisation nearby. “By a miracle, none of my family members were injured. We lay flat on the ground for over two hours during the gunfire,” he said. You can read more of the reporting by Jason Burke in Tel Aviv and Malak A Tantesh in Gaza here: Israel’s aid plan, combined with plans for moving much of the Gaza Strip’s population to the south, has reinforced fears that the overall intention is full occupation, reports Reuters. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said on Tuesday the plan was “the opposite of what is needed” and other agencies also questioned the plan, which they have only been briefed on verbally, according to two aid officials. “It is totally wrong that a party to the conflict – in this case Israel – should be in control of lifesaving aid for civilians,” Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council said on the social media platform X. “This new Israeli aid plan is both totally insufficient to meet the needs in Gaza, and a complete breach of all humanitarian principles,” he said. Aid agencies have criticised Israeli plans to take over distribution of humanitarian aid in Gaza and use private companies to get food to Palestinians after two months in which the military has prevented supplies from entering the territory. It comes as Gaza has been hit by a wave of looting and theft as increasingly desperate Palestinians struggle to get food while criminal gangs exploit a breakdown in law and order. Aid officials and witnesses in the devastated territory describe armed men attacking humanitarian warehouses, firefights over remaining food stores and a spate of stealing of supplies vital for survival, such as solar chargers, batteries, phones and cooking pots. Gaza is on the brink of catastrophe after two months of a total blockade by Israel, aid workers say, with many families down to one meal a day. Spoiled flour is being sold for 30 or 40 times its usual price and no fuel is available other than wood or discarded plastic. Israel has provided few details about its Gaza aid distribution plans, announced on Monday as part of an expanded operation that it says could include seizing the entire Gaza Strip. For the moment, the blockade will continue until a large-scale evacuation of the population from northern and central areas to the south, where there will be a specially designated area cleared near the southern city of Rafah, Israeli officials have said. More on this story in a moment, but first, here are some other key developments: Medical officials in Gaza report rising cases of acute malnutrition, and community kitchens that served 1m meals a day are shutting down for lack of basic essentials. Aid agencies say they have distributed all remaining stocks of food. Dozens of bakeries that supplied vital free bread closed last month. An Israeli government minister has vowed that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed” as a result of an Israeli military victory, and that its Palestinian population will “leave in great numbers to third countries”, raising fears of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territory. The declaration on Tuesday by the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, came a day after Israel’s security cabinet approved a plan for Operation Gideon’s Chariots, which an Israeli official said would entail “the conquest of the Gaza Strip and the holding of the territories”. The US will halt its bombing campaign against Yemen’s Houthis after the Iran-aligned group agreed to stop targeting shipping in the Red Sea. The halt – announced by the US president, Donald Trump, during an Oval Office meeting with Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, came on a day in which Israel claimed its jets had fully disabled Yemen’s main airport, including three civilian aircraft on the ground, in retaliation for a missile strike on Sunday that hit within the perimeter of Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. Israel’s attack on the airport in Yemen’s Houthi-controlled capital Sana’a destroyed terminal buildings and caused $500m in damage, its director told Houthi media on Wednesday. He said earlier in a statement on X that the airport was suspending all flights until further notice after sustaining “severe damage” in the Israeli strikes. UK firms have exported thousands of military items including munitions to Israel despite the government suspending key arms export licences to the country in September, new analysis of trade data shows. The research also raises questions over whether the UK continued to sell F-35 parts directly to Israel in breach of an undertaking only to sell them to the US manufacturers Lockheed Martin as a way of ensuring the fighter jet’s global supply chain was not disrupted, something the government said was essential for national security and Nato. More than a dozen senior Conservative MPs and peers have written to the prime minister calling for the UK to immediately recognise Palestine as a state, breaking ranks with their own party to do so. Seven MPs and six members of the House of Lords have signed the letter to Keir Starmer urging him to defy the Israeli government and give formal recognition to Palestine in advance of key UN talks next month. Sudan’s security and defence council has declared that it will break diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates over its alleged backing of the paramilitary Sudanese Rapid Support Forces. During a televised speech on Tuesday, Sudan’s defence minister, Yassin Ibrahim, said Sudan was “severing diplomatic relations with the UAE” and recalling its ambassador, claiming the Gulf nation had breached Sudan’s sovereignty through its RSF “proxy”, which has been fighting the army in a bloody civil war since April 2023.
Author: Amy Sedghi