‘The fact I cannot feed my kids three meals a day makes me hate myself’

THE United Nations warns of food shortages. Hospitals refuse all non-emergency care to avoid running out of medicine.

Power outages are widespread, and a lack of fuel for generators threatens water supplies.

Israel’s military offensive, and its closure of the territory’s border crossings, has worsened the plight of Palestinians in the already devastated Gaza Strip.

Signs of a humanitarian crisis are appearing in villages such as Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, where Israeli tanks and bulldozers have damaged homes, levelled crops, toppled electricity poles and torn up underground water pipes while searching for tunnels and explosive devices used by militants to attack southern Israel.

“I am a nationalist, but this poverty — the fact that I cannot even feed my kids three meals a day — makes me hate myself,” Musbah al-Sultan, 36, said in his bullet-ridden home, surrounded by his wife and seven children.

In the two-story house that he inherited from his father, the kitchen and refrigerator contained little food. Typical meals consist of water, tea and biscuits, he said.

Before the offensive, al-Sultan and his wife, Khadija, got by operating a shop that sold household products and accepting food donations from local charities. But last Friday, Israeli forces destroyed the store after a militant hiding behind it shot a Kalashnikov at a tank and troops returned fire, al-Sultan said. He showed reporters the wreckage of the building in an area that had been cleared by bulldozers.

Israel acknowledges the situation in Gaza is difficult, but denies the Palestinians face a humanitarian crisis. Israel says it continues to transfer goods into the coastal strip, despite border crossing closures.

Poverty has long been the status quo in the Gaza Strip, with each year of Israeli-Palestinian fighting compounding the hardship.

But the plight has grown desperate since the Hamas militant group took power in March. Israel and international donors cut off funding because Hamas refused to recognise Israel.

Today, nearly 80% of Palestinians live below the poverty line and unemployment has reached 40%, aid agencies say.

Just before the latest Israeli offensive began, the UN had extended its daily food rations for Gazans from 635,000 to 735,000 people in a territory with a population of 1.4 million.

The UN also has 230 containers of food waiting to pass through the Karni cargo crossing between Israel and Gaza.

If the containers don’t reach Gaza, aid agencies would begin to run out of beans and whole milk this week.