\n<\/p>\n
Palestinians collect food aid from the US humanitarian aid distribution centre in Rafah.<\/span>Abed Rahim Khatib\/AP<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 2018, <\/span>while on a medical mission near the Gaza border, an Israeli sniper shot Dr. Tarek Loubani in both legs. Despite this, Loubani, an emergency room specialist and activist<\/a>, has returned to Gaza almost every year from his home in Canada to help treat Palestinians. For the last two months, he has been working out of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.<\/p>\n The reports coming out of Gaza over the last month have been grim. Aid groups say<\/a> a \u201cworst case for famine\u201d is playing out in the strip. The United Nations and humanitarian organizations report that only a fraction of the needed aid has been delivered to a starving population. One in three people have not eaten for days, according to a recent UNICEF<\/a> report, and 80 percent of deaths of children in the region are due to starvation. A whistleblower told Mother Jones <\/em>that aid distribution in the region is \u201cabhorrent<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n These reports come in stark contrast to the publicity around efforts by the Trump Administration, including the touting of the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Fund (GHF). Last week, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and President Trump\u2019s Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff spent more than five hours touring a GHF food distribution site in Rafah, where the UN says<\/a> more than 1,373 Palestinians have died trying to access aid since late May. <\/p>\n \u200a\u201dPresident Trump and everybody around him belongs in jail. \u200aWhat they have done is to actively support and perpetuate a genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cOver 100 MILLION meals served in 2 months,\u201d wrote Ambassador Huckabee in a post on X shortly after his trip. This week, Huckabee said that the US would throw in its support to expand the GHF from 4 sites to a total of 16 sites<\/a> across Gaza. This is despite the Financial Times<\/em> reporting the sites are \u201cdeath traps<\/a>\u201d where hungry Palestinians go for food only to be shot at by the Israeli Defense Forces. (In a statement, the Gaza Humintarian Fund said reports about its failures are part of a \u201cdisinformation campaign\u201d and some doctors in the region are \u201cnot aiding civilians, they\u2019re aiding Hamas.\u201d)<\/p>\n Dr. Loubani is about seven miles from Rafah. He spoke to Mother Jones <\/em>last week about conditions on the ground.<\/p>\n This interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n You\u2019ve said that you\u2019ve seen starvation in every patient that you\u2019ve seen. What is that like in medical terms?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n So when I first came, I understood that Palestinians hadn\u2019t eaten for two months. But I was in denial about how bad it was. What I saw was that every day, patients were bad. I remember the first time that I saw a little girl, she was eight months old, brought to me\u2014she was sticks and bones and she was dead. And her father had brought her for resuscitation because he assumed there was something we could do.<\/p>\n Realizing this is real\u2026 The patients kept getting thinner over the two months I\u2019ve been here, until the point around a month ago, where I had to admit to myself that I\u2019m not seeing any patients with fat anymore. I\u2019m not seeing any patients where I can\u2019t make out their ribs, or I can\u2019t make out their spine.<\/p>\n The starvation, truly, is a hundred percent. What I can tell is that somebody used to be overweight before\u2014you know, you can see how much skin they have or had. But right now every single patient that I see is suffering from some level of malnutrition, and most of the patients that I see are suffering from moderate to severe forms of malnutrition.<\/p>\n Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Ambassador Mike Huckabee just made an unprecedented trip into Gaza, supporting the claim that the Gaza Humanitarian Fund has had 100 million meals served in just two months. Based on what you\u2019ve been seeing, do you find that to be an accurate estimate?<\/strong><\/p>\n The idea that a hundred million meals have been served is laughable. \u200aIt would mean that there wouldn\u2019t be such a level of famine, which is clearly not the case.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Palestinians are literally in a death run every single time that the GHF opens. \u200aEverything that my patients tell me is that they have to cross Israeli lines while under fire. They have to bunker down, wait until the GHF opens, and some days they don\u2019t.\u00a0<\/p>\n On the issue of starvation in Gaza, President Trump told<\/a> Axios that \u201cwe want to help people. We want to help them live. We want to get people fed. It is something that should have happened [a] long time ago.\u201d What would you say to President Trump?<\/strong><\/p>\n \u200aPresident Trump and everybody around him belongs in jail. \u200aWhat they have done is to actively support and perpetuate a genocide. Words with no actions are completely meaningless. President Trump can, with quite literally one phone call, as we saw in January, end this thing; the American government can literally end this thing.<\/p>\n \u200aThese statements don\u2019t bother me in the sense that I don\u2019t think about them. I don\u2019t wonder about the veracity. I see how fake this kind of news is and how much these people are lying. If Trump genuinely cared about Palestinians, then he wouldn\u2019t be behaving as he\u2019s behaving now.<\/p>\n \u200aThere is no sane human being who can look at the situation and not see a pile of war crimes and evidence of genocide everywhere that they look at this point. Anyone who doesn\u2019t recognize what\u2019s happening in Gaza as war crimes and a genocide is not serious. They are propagandists and that is it.<\/p>\n\n