Nobody Needs 5 kg of Blogging per Day

I know I said the starvation stuff was going to get posted on another day, but I put together a pretty good comment on it and thought I'd pop it up here too.

Ryan Grim is usually pretty good, so it's surprising he made this mistake. The capacity of a 40 foot container truck is just about 20 tons. Israeli spokesperson Eylon Levy isn't saying that they would eat the trucks - 20 tons is what each truck could theoretically haul.

That said - yes, 5 kg per day is barely subsistence. Because Israel cut off Gaza's water supply, bombed the water mains, bombed the wells, and then pumped sea water into the aquifers and ground water. Hey, a package of dried pasta weighs almost nothing! You can get loads of meals out of a measley 5 kg. Who says you need to cook it? You can probably get even more nutrition by shoving fistfuls of flour straight into your mouth!

5 kg is the weight of 5 litres of water - the UN notes that basic needs for drinking and sanitation is between 50 to 100 litres per person per day. So 5 kg is less than a tenth of the minimum required amount for basic needs. 5 kg per day assumes a continued absence of sanitation and hygiene. In Eylon Levy's opinion, Gazans don't deserve access to showers or toilets or even hand washing. They can wash their hands when they lick the flour off their fingers I guess. But don't you dare accuse him of dehumanizing the Palestinians.

Back to the trucks. Let's say they are hauling MREs. An MRE is between a pound and a pound and a half. 1 MRE is around 1,250 calories - so if you are going through 3 MREs per 2 days you will still be in calorie deficit. Here's an article with a Navy SEAL explaining what to do if you have to survive on MRE's.

"You definitely want to drink water," Smith told Military.com. "Depending on how much you weigh, anywhere from a half-gallon to a gallon a day."

So between the drinking water and the MRE, we're already closing in on 4 kg. That's assuming no packaging weight and never washing anything. Just what gets eaten and drunk on a diet that still results in calorie deficit. For a population where people are already dying of malnutrition. The current top reply to Levy is a doctor who notes that since October 7, Gaza has been short half a million tons of food - so the needs are heightened even more.

This water requirement is probably around right only because it's still winter. If it gets hotter down there in the Middle East, the water needs are going to increase substantially - and that's still assuming no showers or washing or flushable toilets - and it's already been five months of this.

TL;DR: 500 trucks per day would still result in conditions that North Americans would not tolerate in for-profit prisons. But an official spokesperson for the Israeli government wants you to believe that this is extravagant.

The average number of trucks entering Gaza in February was less than 50 per day.