Save the Children CEO from Gaza: “Starvation Is Already Happening”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: And more now on the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. A senior U.S. defense official says that there has been a “significant increase in the amount of aid flowing into the enclave,” with an average of 200 trucks entering a day, almost double what it was in February. But, as at least 12 people drowned off the coast of Northern Gaza while trying to receive aid-drop parcels that had fallen into the sea on Monday, obviously the situation is clearly still desperate. Janti Soeripto, the head of Save the Children U.S., tells Hari Sreenivasan now what it’s like where she is in Rafah.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, CORRESPONDENT: Janti Soeripto, thanks so much for joining us. You are in Rafah right now. For people who’ve just been watching this through their TVs, give us an idea of what you’ve walked through today, what you’ve seen.

JANTI SOERIPTO, PRESIDENT AND CEO, SAVE THE CHILDREN U.S.: Thank you, Hari, for having me. Look, what I’ve walked through today was essentially what we’ve also seen on our television screens, but there’s nothing like being sort of up close and personal and viscerally seeing it here. I mean, in Rafah, there are literally people everywhere. There are tents everywhere. There are children everywhere running around, many of them without shoes on. Some are playing, some are trying to find food, some are just, you know, running around as children do, but it is an unbelievable sight to have so many people in such a small space together. It is difficult to literally make our way through by car. It’s certainly difficult for aid organizations to get their supplies through if you’re driving trucks. And it is just a massive scene of essentially people in humanitarian need.

SREENIVASAN: So, what is the infrastructure there? Is it straining under the wake of all of these people? I mean, is there power or water or light and how are people getting food?

SOERIPTO: All of the above. So, massive, of course, lack of clean drinking water, which is, of course, one of the biggest issues, particularly in terms of health and disease. I saw many kids today with rashes. There’s lots of coughing, respiratory diseases. There’s kids presenting with hepatitis, diarrhea, et cetera. So, you see kids who are really undernourished, malnourished. There’s not enough food. You know, the IPC numbers that came out last week were shocking and record- breaking in the worst sense of the word. Those numbers have not been recorded ever anywhere to that extent. Essentially, everybody in Gaza currently is skipping meals. And in particular, of course, mothers will skip meals and mothers always eat last because they are trying to save some of the food for their children.

SREENIVASAN: So, you know, you’re starting to talk a little bit about those choices. What are the choices that families are having to make now to keep their kids fed?

SOERIPTO: So, they’re skipping meals. You know, you also hear horrific stories about the choices that doctors have to make. I was talking to a few doctors earlier today in one of the field hospitals. And, you know, they see — they have babies in incubators three to four at a time, because there’s not enough space for them. Doctors have to make really difficult choices to say, which baby shall we save and which one are we sending home, knowing that the baby will die. 180 babies are born per day in Gaza. There’s not enough — of course many of them are prematurely born as well because mothers are in distress, are undernourished. So, that happens more often. And a lot of their babies get sent home to die. Mothers forgoing food to save them for their children. They’re spending hours and hours to find a way to go to the bathroom, because there’s only one bathroom for roughly 800 to a thousand people. They have to find wood in order to find something to cook with, if they are lucky enough to actually find some ingredients. So, that is, you know, daily life in Gaza at this point in county.

SREENIVASAN: Janti, what do the children say to the aid workers that they see?

SOERIPTO: They — look, kids always want to be children. I saw, you know, amazing bunch of kids today. On the one, they want someone to choose, because they had none and it was still pretty cold. They were — literally, we were standing on this road outside. They had no shoes. So, someone choose — somewhat — all of them want food or water. And they are also missing school, right. And that is sometimes seen as sort of a secondary priority, which in our mind it is not, because education is also a fantastic intervention to help children process trauma. It is, in a way, also a mental health intervention. I was talking to this mom earlier today and she said to me — and it was really striking. She said to me, I need mental health support more than I need food. And she said that in a context where essentially everybody is hungry, starvation is already happening, particularly in the north, and yet she still said she felt that she needed mental health support more.

SREENIVASAN: Now, I see the definition of famine by the integrated food security phase classification, the IPC, as at least 20 percent of households are facing a lack of food. Would you say that’s there?

SOERIPTO: Yes.

SREENIVASAN: OK. 30 percent of children are suffering from malnutrition. Were — did three out of 10 of the kids that you saw today, did they look malnourished?

SOERIPTO: Yes.

SREENIVASAN: And then, at least two people per 10,000 are dying each day from starvation or disease. That’s a harder number to quantify. But what do you hear from the health officials that are working on the ground?

SOERIPTO: Yes, that is a hard one to quantify because tracking of the data is hard here currently. How people classify deaths, are they, you know, trauma-related, non-trauma-related? So, that one is a harder one to crack. If you look — if you really read that IPC report carefully, and I’ve read all 44 pages of it, there is a — you know, they — it’s a really technical, you know, well-established, well-experienced format and mechanism.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

SOERIPTO: They’ve been very conservative, I would say, in how they phrase it. So, all kinds of caveats about, you know, the difficulty of actually confirming the data, you know, in person. But they say there’s a reasonable — you know, there’s a very reasonable evidence that famine is occurring. So, I think that that is a very strong statement. It’s also — you know, the kids I saw today were in the south and we know that the situation in the north is still much, much worse because they’ve had much less aid come through there.

SREENIVASAN: My question, I guess, is even if we cross those thresholds into the state of famine, does that change anything?

SOERIPTO: No. So, from our point of view, we need to respond now and get much, much more aid in, start malnutrition treatment for children now, because no matter when this threshold, this technical threshold is crossed, as you say, it doesn’t matter, they’re starving now, you have to start now. People will still die in a few weeks’ time, even if you start now, because for some it will be too late.

SREENIVASAN: What are the longer-term challenges that happen after something like this? I mean, I want to hope, like everybody else, that the actual immediate conflict subsides. But when you look around at these kids who — you know, some of them who have physical injuries and rashes from close quarters and unhygienic conditions to the ones who have not had school and the ones — as you said, the mom who was asking for mental health, what are the kind of structural and longer-term problems that arise when you have this kind of massive displacement and internal migration and starvation?

SOERIPTO: Yes, look, these kids have seen things that no child should ever see. And it’s not just — you know, the numbers the numbers here are so staggering, right? This is a million children. 13,000 kids have died. Many thousands more have life-changing injuries. I was really shocked by the fact that over a thousand kids are reported to have lost one or two limbs. When I speak to doctors about that, you know, that in and of itself is life-changing injury. It’s often, you know, difficult to treat it appropriately, et cetera. So, we see that. We see the mental health impact. We see, you know, kids who are malnourished, particularly very young children under the age of two, that has a lifetime impact on their mental development and their physical development as well. So, it will take an enormous amount of, you know, manpower funding to clear the streets of rubble, the amount of rubble that’s over here. And the north is, according to report, much, much worse. Get the rubble out of the way, rebuild, rebuild the schools, rebuild the water infrastructure, rebuild homes. It will take many, many years. And at the same time, we also need to rebuild this civilian population, particularly the younger ones, to help them recover from trauma, to process it, to catch up their lives, their — yes, their education and their way of interacting.

SREENIVASAN: The report last week said that even in Northern Gaza there is an opportunity here to try and stop famine from spreading if we can try to get water and nutrition products, medicines, health, sanitation there. I’m wondering, seeing what you’ve seen, is it possible to stand up that infrastructure fast enough before this gets worse?

SOERIPTO: Yes. If everybody makes the right choices, absolutely. There is a road. There are various roads into the north of Gaza. We need to flood the north of Gaza with food, with water, with basic necessities. There are thousands of trucks waiting, just literally 20 kilometers down the road here that can go in and actually make those deliveries into Northern Gaza. There are community leaders there who can help with the distribution. So, it is absolutely possible to get that level of supplies in that are needed to make the best effort to stave off famine and starvation.

SREENIVASAN: Is there a coordinated coalition? Are you working with different agencies, different governments to try to get food in?

SOERIPTO: Yes. I mean, there is coordination here. We — actually, I met some of them this morning, U.N. agencies, the World Food Programme, U.N. OCHA, and there is a real effort from everybody to share information, to share supplies, to help each other out, to combine trucks and supplies, to combine, you know, wreckies (ph) into the north so that it’s safer, people go together. So, there is a real — you know, there is a collaboration. There’s also sometimes a scramble for that information because it is very unpredictable. The level of violence and bombing is still unpredictable, notwithstanding the resolution. So, there is coordination, but it is still unbelievably hard. We would like to see 40 trucks per day go into the north of Gaza. We were super happy earlier this week to find out that we got seven trucks in. So, that gives you a sense of the gap that still exists if we really want to stave of famine.

SREENIVASAN: In a recent joint letter by NGOs, you said, it’s our experience that the humanitarian response in Gaza, including U.S.-funded humanitarian assistance, has been consistently and arbitrarily denied, restricted, and impeded by the Israeli authorities. And I’m wondering, this group of organizations, yourself included, do you think that that effort to impede aid is intentional?

SOERIPTO: Well, I think the outcomes are certainly known, right? So, if people know what the outcome are of having 50 trucks come into Gaza instead of the 500 that there were before, of having only 30 percent of required authorizations of getting aid into the north come through, if — you know, if those — if — now, even with the U.N. resolution on the table, the bombs are still not silent, you know, that is certainly, you know, not trying to mitigate loss of civilian lives, as is evidenced by the fact that more children have died over the last six months than in all conflicts combined every year for the past five years.

SREENIVASAN: When you look at the kind of need, is the International Aid Community geared up to be able to tackle this scale of a problem this fast?

SOERIPTO: If there’s a ceasefire, and it is possible to do more things in a safe and secure manner, I think the humanitarian community plus the commercial sector could actually step up to that challenge and get stuff in. As I said, there are thousands of trucks even waiting now as we speak that could come in, that are ready, and have food and hygiene kits and shelters and incubators and generators and whatever else a hospital needs to actually operate, or what a desalination plan needs in order to be rebuilt so that actually clean water can start to flow again. So, all of those things are actually not rocket science at all. And that supply chain is there. We can do it via Egypt, we can it by Jordan, and we do via Cyprus. And I think that is what the International Community combined with the phenomenal local departments on the ground can actually do when we’re allowed to do it.

SREENIVASAN: You know, just two days ago, Save the Children, along with other organizations, put out a release saying that there is a continued closure of vital border crossings. There is still a denial of movement requests within Gaza. There have been repeated attacks on aid workers, convoys, and distributions, and even humanitarian sites that have been submitted to Israeli authorities as part of deconfliction. Are you still seeing that aid workers are in danger when they are trying to get food and supplies into Rafah or Gaza?

SOERIPTO: Absolutely, absolutely. We hear that all the time, not just from our own staff, but also from other agencies and partners, our local partners that are still operating in the north as well as south, that deconfliction mechanism is still not working enough and not predictably so. So, yes, coordinates are given, they are confirmed, and then still, sometimes attacks do happen on convoys, on offices, on warehouses, on hospitals, clearly. And that makes — you know, and at that level of complexity in the operation, how to get the trucks up to the north, how to get the number of drivers who can drive the trucks authorized to go up to the north and then to make sure that you do not get attacked while doing it, while delivering that aid, that all makes this operation incredibly complicated and dangerous.

SREENIVASAN: You’ve laid out the need and then there’s still a gap between that and what might be a political reality or a tactical reality. Prime Minister Netanyahu says that there are plans, they may be imminent, to try to, you know, push into Rafah. What would a full-scale invasion of that area do to the place that you walk through today?

SOERIPTO: Well, I’ve been saying for, you know, a number of weeks now that every time I get asked this question that it can’t get any worse, and every week I have been proven wrong. Every week it’s gotten worse. And it would be an absolutely unmitigated disaster. There’s 1.4 million people now in Rafah, a town where there were 200,000 before. So, it is completely overrun already. There is no reasonable, I think, or adequate plan you can do for mass evacuation of that many people. And by the way, where are they going to go? They can’t cross the border. They can’t run into the sea. They cannot really go back up north because it has completely destroyed, and there’s lots of unexploded orders (ph) there. So, they’re stuck here. There is no realistic evacuation plan. So, a mass incursion into Rafah would be a massacre.

SREENIVASAN: What do people there and what do children there need the most right now?

SOERIPTO: They need peace. They needed a ceasefire. They need bombs to stop falling. They need the shelling to start so that everybody can take a deep breath and then humanitarian workers and the commercial sector can start to really flood Gaza with the necessary supplies, humanitarian supplies, commercial supplies so that we can rebuild lives, treat people adequately, have people supported in their mental health and psychosocial needs, get children back into school, restart hospitals, desalination plants, essentially rebuild Gazan.

SREENIVASAN: Janti Soeripto of Save the Children, thank you so much for joining us.

SOERIPTO: Thank you for having me, Hari.