Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
Ann Arbor– The Trump peace plan has resulted in an agreement between Hamas and Israel to pause fighting and exchange prisoners. Other points in the plan, including an Israeli troop withdrawal and the laying down of arms by Hamas, appear still to be being negotiated, which is to say that we are hardly out of the woods. The Israeli government agreed to a phased withdrawal from the entire West Bank in 1993, and over 30 years later Israeli cabinet members are talking about simply annexing the entire territory and expelling its indigenous Palestinians.
What is indisputable is the desperate need for such a pause in fighting and Israeli military withdrawal. The human toll of every day of war is hard to imagine, harder still to express.
Dr. Masako Horino et al., writing in The Lancet, find that the Israeli cut-off of food aid in April produced a mind-boggling crisis in children’s health, with wasting (severe muscle loss) from malnutrition rising seen in nearly 16% of children screened in the Strip in August, with nearly 4% severely wasted. They calculate that this level of wasting malnutrition equates to more that 54,600 children needing therapeutic care. Note that the hundreds suffering from severe wasting may never fully recover and may suffer permanent cognitive damage. Note also that many of them may just die, as other children already have, from starvation, if food aid is not flooded into the Strip immediately.
Horino concluded, “This study revealed that youngest children in the Gaza Strip are tragically bearing an unimaginable burden of preventable malnutrition during this war.”
After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cut off most food shipments into Gaza in April, food prices skyrocketed. By July, they had risen by a factor of 100. Economist Amartya Sen showed that in most famines, there is food around, it just becomes too expensive for people to afford. What food there is in Gaza is for the most part no longer affordable for most people, but it may well be that there also just isn’t much food to be had there. Some 80% of cropland has been destroyed by Israeli bombardment and fishermen are routinely fired on by the Israeli navy, so the Strip is more than ever unable to produce much of its own food.
The UNRWA physicians measured the circumference of the mid-upper arm in children with a color-coded tape to determine how much muscle and fate mass they have between the elbow and the shoulder. The acronym for “mid-upper arm circumference” is MUAC. A low MUAC score is extremely alarming and indicates the need for immediate therapeutic care.
Bill Maher, Van Jones and Tom Friedman may find dead Palestinian babies in Gaza hilarious. One wonders if they feel the same about the babies with sticks for arms and legs.
Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is author of, among many other books, “Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires” and “Engaging the Muslim World.” He blogs at juancole.com; follow him at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page
