The latest news on Gaza. I can think of only one thing worse than starving to death, and that is to see your children starve to death. In the Gaza Strip this nightmare is the harsh reality that more than 1.5 million people face every day as Israel's punishment and bombardment of Hamas persists. The war has wreaked havoc not only by wiping off the map any structure in the Strip over two storeys high, but has left its population without supplies or access to aid.
This afternoon the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), an organisation supported by the US and Israel, reported (thank you, BBC) the entry into Gaza of 13 truckloads of potatoes for distribution to the refugee and displaced population. This comes after more than a hundred independent organisations (including UN representatives) denounced a Class 5 (catastrophic) famine on the population, where some ten people a day are dying of pure malnutrition.
This is especially dramatic in the only hospital left standing in Gaza, where they claim that pregnant and malnourished women are desperate for the future. The UN agency for sexual and reproductive health (UNFPA) warns of "catastrophic birth outcomes" in Gaza as a result of "hunger, psychological trauma and the collapse of health care".
These conditions, UNFPA warns, "threaten the survival of an entire generation".
Israel has also warned at UN headquarters in New York that it will not renew many of the employees of the UN humanitarian agency OCHA because, it claims, "they are linked to Hamas".