Recent shootings by Israeli forces of Palestinians trying to get desperately needed food aid have forced doctors in Gaza to scramble to save their patients’ lives — going so far as donating their own blood to make up for the territory’s near-empty blood banks and destroyed health care system.
A U.S.-Israeli aid distribution system began bringing in small amounts of food aid into Gaza last week, after the Israeli military spent three months blocking all aid from entering the territory and worsening an already horrific starvation crisis. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) forces Palestinians to trek to militarized distribution points, a system widely condemned by human rights groups, aid organizations and the United Nations.
But since the distribution began, witnesses say Israeli forces repeatedly opened fire on the starving population trying to receive food at the hubs — killing more than 100 Palestinians and wounding nearly 500 in attacks over the last week, health officials said.
“I was shot at 3:10 a.m.. As we were trapped, I bled constantly until 5 a.m.,” Palestinian civilian Mohammad Daghmeh said in a statement taken by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Daghmeh was one of many wounded on Sunday while waiting at the GHF distribution hub in Rafah, the southernmost area of Gaza that Israeli forces have essentially rendered uninhabitable.
“There were many other men with me. One of them tried to get me out. He was shot in the head and died on my chest,” Daghmeh continued. “We had gone there for nothing but food — just to survive, like everyone else.”
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The Israeli military initially said that troops did not fire at Palestinians “while they were near or within the aid site” on Sunday, but a CNN investigation published Thursday found that soldiers opened fire on the crowd. Israeli forces later acknowledged that troops fired “warning shots” during distribution on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.
The mass casualty attacks have led to doctors and barely functioning hospitals getting quickly overwhelmed by patients. MSF said its teams at Nasser Hospital are receiving waves of wounded, while a 60-bed Red Cross field hospital said it received 184 patients on Tuesday. Most of the patients are men likely trying to bring food back to their families, they said.
“They lay in their beds in the hallways because the rooms are already packed with injured people. They had visible gunshot wounds in their limbs, and their clothes were soaked with blood,” MSF field officer Nour Alsaqqa said on Sunday, adding that the men “look shattered and distraught.”
The bombing of hospitals combined with the scale of wounded Palestinians as a result of Israel’s 19-month siege has left Gaza’s blood banks almost empty. Dr. Ahmed Al-Farah told HuffPost last month that many Palestinians heeded Nasser Hospital’s desperate call for blood donations. But because of the extreme malnutrition most Palestinians are facing, he said every prospective donor was already anemic.
So the medical staff themselves began giving blood themselves — or at least those who were not yet malnourished.
“MSF colleagues had to donate their own blood to try to save people in shock, injured simply for trying to feed their children — and who often returned empty-handed,” MSF Switzerland President Micaela Serafini said in a statement on Thursday,
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The empty blood banks are representative of the cycle of death Palestinians face in a desolate Gaza: If people are shot down trying to bring home food aid, they will almost certainly require blood donations to survive. But people cannot donate blood if they are already malnourished, and patients cannot heal if they’re already malnourished.
The only way to address the widespread malnutrition is to allow a substantially higher amount of aid into the territory, and for families to be able to bring food home without getting killed, according to aid groups, who add that the GHF must step aside to allow humanitarian agencies with existing distribution networks to do the job.
“The trickle of aid allowed in the last two weeks is a token amount, drastically below what is required. Within their first days of operation, the new U.S.-Israeli militarized aid hubs have become terrifying kill zones, where starving people seeking food have been gunned down,” MedGlobal advocacy director Ana Moran said on Tuesday. “It is unconscionable to make people choose between starvation or being shot while seeking food.”
The average person in Gaza eats just 1,400 calories a day as of last month — just 67% of what a human body needs to survive, according to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The international community widely condemned Israel’s total blockade as a violation of international humanitarian law.
On Thursday, about 100 MSF volunteers protested outside the U.N. headquarters in Geneva, forming a red line to symbolize Israel’s violations of international humanitarian law. The GHF’s system is “not only ineffective but also dangerous and dehumanizing,” MSF Switzerland general director Stephen Cornish said in a Thursday statement.
“We denounce the militarization of aid, which goes against the principles of humanitarian action,” Cornish said. “Humanitarian aid must never be part of a military or political strategy but must only respond to the needs of the affected populations. We recall that this use of humanitarian aid for military purposes may constitute a crime against humanity.”
