Up to 90 percent of the aid that reaches the Palestinian area is plundered, the article authors write. "Plundering of aid convoys is allowed and has become everyday life", they write.
This has also been confirmed by testimonies from within the Gaza Strip, where desperate residents say that those who do not grab for themselves when the convoys arrive will not get anything at all.
The signatories are Jon Gunnarsson Ruthman, chairman of Doctors Without Borders Sweden, together with the chief physician Märit Halmin at Södersjukhuset – who herself has been down and worked in Gaza's emergency care in the summer – and Johan von Schreeb, professor of global disaster medicine at the Karolinska Institute.
They point out that some of the aid that Israel allows is pure "symbolic politics", and exemplify with the food that was released from airplanes on a date now in August. It corresponded to "less than one percent of the daily need, while news footage of parachutes that dropped down with food was cabled out as hopeful news".
Since the middle of July, at least 16 children have died from hunger-related causes and over 20,000 children have been treated for acute malnutrition, according to Doctors Without Borders and the UN.
What is needed is "immediate ceasefire, open borders for land transport and restoration of the UN's role in food distribution with a focus on women and children, as well as protection for civilians and humanitarian personnel. Starving civilians is a war crime. Passively accepting it is not just a moral betrayal – it is consent that makes us all accomplices", it says in the text.
