In order not to die of hunger in the north of the Gaza Strip at war, Abou Gibril resolved to sacrifice his last wealth: his two draft horses, which he slaughtered and cooked, without daring to tell his neighbors what that he gave them to eat.
“We had no other choice, we had to kill the horses to feed the children,” this 60-year-old Palestinian farmer who took refuge in the large Jabaliya displaced persons camp told AFP.
The war took everything from him, he says. As soon as the fighting began in October, she destroyed her house and fields in Beit Hanoun, in the far north of the Gaza Strip. Abou Gibril and his family traveled a few kilometers to find refuge in Jabaliya, created in 1948.
Before the war, Jabaliya was already the largest camp for displaced people in Gaza, overcrowded, with more than 100,000 people crowded into 1.4 km2 according to the UN, between poverty, unemployment, stagnant water and power cuts.
Abou Gibril survives there with his family in a tent he made, next to a school formerly managed by the UN and where thousands of other displaced people have settled. And if the fighting has so far spared them, “it is hunger that is killing us” now, he says.
2.2 million Gazans threatened with starvation
According to the UN, 2.2 million people, the vast majority of the population, are threatened with famine in the Gaza Strip besieged by Israel. And these serious shortages could lead to an “explosion” of infant mortality in Gaza, where one in six children under the age of two is severely malnourished, Unicef warned this week.
The situation is particularly alarming in the north, prey to “chaos and violence”, according to the World Food Program (WFP), which suspended the distribution of its aid there on Tuesday, due to fighting or hungry crowds throw at trucks on the roads to loot them.
On Saturday morning, the Hamas health ministry announced that a two-month-old child, Mahmoud Fatouh, had died of malnutrition at al-Chifa hospital in Gaza City, less than 10 km from Jabaliya. A video relayed by media close to Hamas, and showing a dying baby presented as Mahmoud Fatouh, was circulating on social networks, without being able to be identified.
Horse meat unthinkable in normal times
Abou Gibril cooked the meat of the two horses, put it in rice (alone, due to lack of vegetables) and distributed it to his family, his relatives and a few neighbors, several dozen people.
But without telling them that it was horse, so that they could get their fill without being disgusted, since no one in Gaza usually eats these faithful companions of the peasants. Apart from two of his relatives, “no one knows that he actually eats horse,” he slips.
Since the Hamas attack on Israeli soil on October 7, during which at least 1,160 people died, 29,606 Palestinians have been killed, the vast majority civilians, in the retaliatory offensive carried out by Israel in the Strip. Gaza, according to the Health Ministry of the Palestinian Islamist movement which took power in the small territory in 2007.
2024-02-25 09:30:19
#Gaza #north #enclave #eat #horses #survive #hunger
