Palestinian Children in Crisis
Reports Show Malnutrition Levels Among World's Highest

By Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 6, 2002

JERUSALEM, Aug. 5 -- Reports released today by the U.S. Agency for International Development and CARE International found that malnutrition among Palestinian children under 5 in the Gaza Strip and West Bank has reached emergency levels and ranks among the highest in the world as a result of security measures imposed by the Israeli military.

The surveys also found that more than half of the Palestinians in the two occupied territories have been forced to decrease food consumption in recent weeks because of a lack of money and military curfews that have kept families confined to their homes for days at a time and restricted commerce and the transport of food supplies.

"We're seeing malnutrition rates that are unacceptably high," said Gregg Greenough of Johns Hopkins University schools of medicine and public health in Baltimore, one of the participants in the research.

Greenough said 22.5 percent of Palestinian children suffer from acute or chronic malnutrition. That, he said, is equivalent to levels found in Chad and Nigeria and higher than rates in Bangladesh and Somalia. The assessment said that the overall malnutrition level for the West Bank and Gaza Strip "is considered an emergency by most humanitarians and public health officials."

The results of the studies, released at news conferences in Jerusalem and Gaza City, buttressed wide-ranging anecdotal accounts of the economic hardship Palestinians have endured in the face of attacks, crackdowns and curfews that Israel has imposed on the West Bank and Gaza Strip in recent months as part of its effort to curb suicide bombings and other attacks against civilians in Israel and Jewish settlers in the West Bank.

The studies were funded by USAID and CARE International. In addition to Johns Hopkins, they were carried out by Al-Quds University in Jerusalem, American Near East Refugee Aid and Global Management Consulting Group.

The Israeli government, which offered its own medical experts in a separate news conference, did not contest the findings. But it said Palestinians have rejected its offers of medical and health assistance in recent months. In addition, it stressed that although many Palestinians suffer from malnutrition because of inadequate diets, they are not going hungry.

"Israel is doing everything it can to fight terror without harming the general population," said Daniel Seaman, a government spokesman.

Israeli officials have consistently denied any intention of making life hard for civilians, but have insisted that occupation of Palestinian towns and checkpoints on Palestinian roads are necessary to reduce the chances of Palestinian suicide bombers reaching Israeli territory to carry out attacks.

Israeli authorities said a potential attack was averted today when a bomb in the car of a Palestinian would-be assailant detonated prematurely about 100 yards from its apparent target, a bus station outside the Israeli Arab town of Umm el-Fahm, in northern Israel. The explosion killed the would-be assailant and injured the driver.

Israeli military officials also said today they had captured Mazan Fukha, who they alleged belongs to the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, and was responsible for dispatching the bomber who blew up a passenger bus near the northern Israeli city of Safed on Sunday, killing himself and nine passengers and injuring more than 40 others.

Israeli helicopters tonight fired several missiles at a building on the southern edge of Gaza City they said was being used as a weapons factory. At the same time, Israeli Army radio and Palestinian sources reported, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer met with Palestinian Interior Minister Abdel Razak Yehiyeh in an effort to renew security talks.

One of the nutrition surveys released today found that 9.3 percent of children in the Gaza Strip and West Bank suffer from acute malnutrition and 13.2 percent show indications of chronic malnutrition. Levels of acute malnutrition were slightly more than 13 percent in the Gaza Strip and just over 4 percent in the West Bank; chronic malnutrition rates were 17.5 percent in Gaza compared with 3.5 percent in the West Bank.

Acute malnutrition is an indication of inadequate nutrition in a short-term period just before the survey, while chronic malnutrition reflects poor nutritional levels over weeks, months or years.

Another survey, measuring families' ability to buy adequate food supplies, found that 53 percent of Gaza and West Bank households reported they have been forced to borrow money to pay for food in recent weeks and 17 percent of households said they had to sell possessions or assets to buy food. The study also showed that food deliveries and availability have been severely curtailed by the security situation, with more than half of wholesalers and just under half of retailers reporting shortages of infant formula and powdered milk.

Although the investigators said they believe conditions are worse today than in the past, they said there was no reliable baseline to measure the decline. They said a precise comparison could not be made, but that the malnutrition rates found in the survey are considerably worse than those in a study two years ago by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.