Humanitarian groups scramble to provide aid in Gaza as famine is ‘imminent’

NPR’s Ari Shapiro talks with Médecins Sans Frontières Secretary General Chris Lockyear about the view from Gaza, and how the organization is operating there.

ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:

Famine is imminent in northern Gaza – that’s just one of the findings of a U.N.-backed report out this week. Humanitarian organizations are struggling to get aid in, as they have been since the war began, after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. Christopher Lockyear is the secretary general of Doctors Without Borders, and he is in Gaza right now. Thank you so much for joining us.

CHRISTOPHER LOCKYEAR: Thank you for having me on.

SHAPIRO: You entered Gaza through the Rafah border a couple of days ago. What have you seen since you arrived?

LOCKYEAR: Well, honestly, it’s hard to put in words the things that I’ve seen over the last couple of days. One moment that stuck out was yesterday morning – I visited the Al-Aqsa Hospital in the middle area of Gaza. And, really, the pressure on that hospital was just incredible. There were people lining the corridors, waiting for their wounds to be redressed, waiting to go into surgery. There was a room of dialysis machines that was running round the clock with people queuing to have their treatment. There’s a morgue on the hospital grounds. And I walked past, and there were bodies lying there everywhere.

One of the most distressing things that I heard were some of the impossible choices that our teams and the teams of the Ministry of Health are facing. For example, they’re having to weigh out the use of hospital beds between trauma cases after surgery with the need for creating space for the rising number of malnutrition cases that we’re getting. And so there’s horrible, horrible trade-off between malnutrition and trauma.

SHAPIRO: I suppose it goes without saying that there are people who are dying who, under different circumstances – if there were the supplies, the beds, the resources, the medical staff -…