‘There’s no food’: Palestinian-Canadians watch starving family die in Gaza

Palestinian families in Canada are pleading with the government and beyond to do more in the on-going hunger crisis in Gaza. CTV’s Kamil Karamali reports.

Najah Ashour watches a video of her cousin, Enaia Shurrab, in Gaza City — sobbing over the lifeless body of her five-month-old son — who she says died from starvation.

“I feel very sad,” Ashour whispers, sitting in her family’s apartment in Burlington, Ont. “She call[ed] me, ‘Please send me anything, can you buy milk for my baby?’ It broke my heart every minute. I tried to help.”

But she couldn’t get food to the Gaza Strip fast enough. Within days of that desperate phone call, her cousin’s infant son had died.

“She had … two babies,” Ashour says. Now, one of them [is] dead."

Ashour says her entire extended family is in Gaza, including aunts, uncles and cousins. All of them are starving, only having one meal a day in the evening, which she says is just a little bit of bread and water in the evening.

“I’m very, very worried about them, they keep calling me. All of my cousins, they need help.”

Surviving on bread and water

Her husband, Ahmed Ashour, has his brother and his family in Gaza, which includes three children. He says they barely have enough bread and water between them to keep them alive for much longer.

“There’s no food,” he says. “There’s just bread and water. They mix the water with sugar and salt to keep them awake. Because if they don’t take water with salt or sugar, they may (pass) out."

He hasn’t heard from them in the past few days — and doesn’t know if they’re getting enough to eat.

“I don’t know what I should do or where I should go. I feel helpless,” said Ahmed. “I don’t know right now if they are OK or not. I just pray for them every day.”

Ahmed says that although there is some food available, it is unaffordable — and he isn’t able to get his family the money they need to afford basic necessities.

“One kilogram of flour is more than 70 U.S. dollars — it is 100 Canadian dollars," said Ahmed.

“The price of one piece of tomato is 70 shekels — it is 70 U.S. dollars. So if you’re going to buy this, how many people are going to eat this? It is nothing," added Ahmed. “Even a kilogram of sugar or a kilogram of salt is 500 shekels — it’s 150 U.S. dollars."

Responsibility for delivering aid

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, earlier this week, condemned “the Israeli government’s failure to prevent the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian disaster in Gaza” — calling it “a violation of international law” and saying Israel’s control of aid distribution “must be replaced.”

Israel’s ambassador to Canada, Iddo Moed, responded by saying “Israel has neither interfered with nor blocked any aid, including Canadian-funded assistance,” claiming that “the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has made great strides in improving the efficiency and impact of the aid delivery program.”

Since Israel took control of aid distribution in Gaza — which it said was to prevent Hamas from stealing food and using it for profit — more than a thousand Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops while trying to access aid at distribution points.

The U.N. food agency accused Israel of using tanks, snipers and other weapons to fire on a crowd of starving Palestinians. Israel maintains its soldiers were firing warning shots “to remove an immediate threat,” and questioned the death toll.

Israel has also claimed the tonnes of aid sitting outside — and some of it even inside the Gaza border — are waiting to be distributed by United Nations aid groups, blaming them for food not reaching hungry and malnourished Palestinians.

But the U.N. has said that Israel has made the process of distributing aid difficult, filling it with bureaucracy and not guaranteeing safety to aid workers.

“What is missing right now is safe, sustained access. Aid workers face constant danger, crossings are unreliable, and critical items are routinely blocked,” said Stephanie Tremblay, associate spokesperson for the UN secretary-general, on Friday from the United Nations headquarters in New York.

“As access constraints continue — yesterday, out of 15 attempts to coordinate humanitarian movements inside Gaza, four were outright denied, with another three impeded. One was postponed, and two others had to be cancelled by the organizers,” she added.

Israel says aid airdrops resumed Saturday

The Israeli military said this week it will resume airdrop aid into the enclave on Saturday night.

“The airdrops will include seven pallets of aid containing flour, sugar and canned food to be provided by international organizations,” the military said in a statement — while adding it will establish humanitarian corridors for United Nations convoys.

All the while, the Ashour family is waiting to hear from their loved ones — not interested in playing politics — but instead just wishing for food to reach them before it’s too late. They’ve started a GoFundMe page to help their family in Gaza.

“They just want to live in peace. They just want to save their children, their lives,” said Najah Ashour. “They just want to live.”

With files from CTV’s Kristen Yu