 The month of Ramadan marked by Muslims across the world with fasting has begun. In Gaza, the month commences amid concerns over a looming famine. UN agencies have time and again warned of the impact of hunger on people, especially children. We already have reports of children dying due to hunger and the number of that is likely to increase. The situation has been made worse by Israel's active blocking of aid trucks. We go to Abdul for more details. Abdul, thank you so much for joining us as Ramadan begins a very difficult situation in Gaza. There is of course a question of the attacks, the continuous attacks that take place. But the hunger situation is what is on the minds of a lot of people. Could you talk a bit about that first? Well Prashant, the hunger situation has been highlighted by United Nations agencies, several of them. Of course, in the last few months at least, particularly pointing out how the humanitarian aid which should have increased in the, as per the international code of justice instructions, as per the Israel's own commitments, Israel has made, as per US claims and so on and so forth, as per the United Nations Security Council resolutions. All those international moves basically assure increased humanitarian aid. But on the ground, none of those assurances have been taken a concrete shape. And what has happened that humanitarian aid, particularly food has gone and the availability of it has gone down tremendously. All the attempts to kind of portray that some of the countries are air dropping food and other essential commodities have also not helped in kind of improving the situation and that basically is reflected in the number of kids. Palestinian children dying of hunger has increased to 25 as per the latest count. And if you include all the people who have died because of the reported starvation, that number has increased to 28. And as per the UN agencies claim, international, sorry, World Food Program and other people, other groups have claimed that out of every six children inside Gaza, at least one of them is basically in a very, basically on the verge of famine. It shows that the overall situation when it comes to humanitarian condition, availability of food, particularly at the time of Ramadan, as you rightly pointed out, is kind of has in a very critical situation. And that basically questions the overall commitment which several agencies and the United Nations and the US has basically talking about. So overall situation in terms of humanitarian aid, in terms of food, in terms of other essential commodity is basically every day becoming bad to us. And it is as agencies were saying, any day, any minute, famine will be a reality. This is already the numbers are increasing and reports are coming from all over Gaza. And this is going to be beyond anybody's control if this condition continues the way it is at this moment. The key point also, I guess, is that Israel has been deliberately blocking aid. Could you maybe talk a bit about that and also how the international community, so to speak, is responding to the situation? Well, Prashant, ever since International Court of Justice asked specifically that there should be increased access to humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza, from that moment onward instead of kind of increasing the availability of humanitarian aid. What Israel has done that has, it has bureaucratized whatever process was available before for the reach for the humanitarian aid. Earlier there were around 200 trucks reaching on a daily basis on an average to Gaza from different crossing, particularly for crossing. But the number of trucks going to Gaza has come down almost less than 100 as per the latest comments, claims made by the UNRWA and other agencies in working in Gaza. And that has primarily happened because, as I said, bureaucratization, Israel has imposed different barriers, multiple checks for the trucks have been introduced. Some of the borders which were, which basically supplies the aid to Gaza has been blocked. Some of the trucks which basically were about to reach Gaza were looted by there are reports from the extremist settlers from Israel. There are reports also that Israel has basically kind of denied permission to some of the agencies to kind of basically carry the delivery of aid while introducing one mechanism or another. And because the war continues inside Gaza, even if whatever aid is reaching to the territory, it is difficult to distribute them to different parts of Gaza because of the bombings and because of the ground offensive, because of the roadblocks created by the Israeli forces at different points. So also, of course, when we talk about in the nature of the humanitarian aid, of course, as I said, the food availability of food items is precarious. But at the same time, the fuel, which basically makes it possible to distribute the food into different parts of Gaza through vehicles and all, that is also not available adequately. So all of this combined basically and all of this, of course, because of the Israeli war has kind of led to a very bad situation in terms of the availability of all basic commodities, but particularly the food inside Gaza. Thank you so much for that update. The latest round of negotiations on the controversial pandemic treaty has concluded, even as another round is set to begin in about a week. The upcoming discussions will be the final round before the text is discussed at the World Health Assembly in May. Now, as regular viewers of this show would know, the pandemic treaty is supposed to be a response from our lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its aim is to prepare humanity for further pandemics in the future maybe. However, from the very beginning, critics have said it does not address many concerns raised by countries of the global south. So did the latest round of discussions manage to do that? What is in the new draft? We go to Joel's now for the details. Joel, thanks so much for joining us. So discussions on the pandemic treaty, at least one round of discussions. Having come to an end, another round I think coming up soon before it comes up for discussion finally in May. So what were the highlights of this round of discussions? Yeah, hi Prashant. So the most importantly, the latest text of the pandemic treaty, which will be discussed from March 18th to 28th came out on Friday. And it is for the first time that the negotiations will be text based negotiations. So just to explain briefly, usually when in the World Health Organizations an important accord or treaty like this is being discussed, usually the secretary or the bureau for the negotiations, they prepare a text and countries come and they specify things that they don't like or they want additions or deletions and improvements, etc. And that starts after a couple of negotiating meetings already which have happened. But in this particular case, eight rounds of negotiations have already happened and there has been no text based negotiations so far. So just for the first time in the ninth round of the meeting that we will actually have the text based negotiations. So what has happened so far is asking the countries to actually talk at the level of concepts and not talking about a specific clauses. So it will be interesting to see what kind of additions and deletions we will be seeing in the text during those 10 days. But also to mention this is only the penultimate round of negotiations because the idea is by the time it is World Health Assembly in the month of May, the text which is going to be accepted should be ready. So countries have been pushed to really negotiate and ask about their real demands only in a very, very limited period. So that is the thing. Now talking about the text itself, there is a feeling that it does not really reflect the concerns of developing countries so much that have been raised from the very beginning when the negotiations started two years ago. There are some improvements from the initial text too, which I can talk about. For example, regarding intellectual property clauses, there were, it was very, very diluted there were as of the intellectual property barriers are the norm to go about. But we are seeing some language which makes it compulsory or mandatory on the parties to share to limit the intellectual property barriers. But there also there is one major issue which we faced a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is the parties, especially the big pharmaceutical companies, it will boil down to that are not really, it is not mandatory for them to share the know how of making the drugs etc. Till you do not have this the other forms of better clauses become null and void almost because till you do not share, do not have technology transfer etc. It doesn't help. So the, but the language is slightly better. That is one thing. And there are a couple of other clauses in which you similar things. But if you see the two major concerns which in our show also we have talked about before where the developed countries are not letting go of their demands and not accepting what developing countries have said. And unfortunately, it seems that the WHO secretariat and the Bureau which prepared the text have succumbed to what developed countries wants is access and benefit sharing. There is a lot of focus. There is a very strong language which will ask the countries and mostly developing countries to share information about emerging pathogens and pathogens which can be of concern to stop the pandemic from a pandemic like situation happening. I mean, sharing that so that from beforehand the medical tools can be prepared. They're also supposed to contain any disease spread of disease at the local level. And again, in developing countries that will have a lot of impact. But there is no obligation to ensure that the kind of loss, livelihood loss and economic loss that the country will face because of this prevention. How will that be mitigated? What will the international community do about that because it is a very big responsibility to put. So surveillance of pathogens and it actually the kind of surveillance which is being expected has not been seen before because there have been those mechanisms. There is monitoring that happens, but this is a different level of monitoring. So that has been made obligatory. But on the other hand, once after using this information that after seeing the genetic material which the countries are supposed to put in the public domain, by the way. How will the country's benefit in terms of or share the benefits that pharmaceutical companies will be able to make by actually producing vaccines and medicines after taking this information. Now that reverse in terms of getting benefited after sharing this information does not exist. It is absolutely voluntary. So this is a major issue. This leads to another level of inequality rather than equality which the preamble of pandemic treaty talks about. So that's one. The other is financing. There is no mechanism for sustainable financing that has been charted out. There is some language, but it says it talks about a financial pool that has to be created. But again, it does not put any obligation on the developed countries to put the money in that pool. Now, where will the money come from? And we do and it also goes against the entire idea of common but differentiated responsibilities where the people with the kind of capacities that country have to pool in developed countries will should be pooling in more money. So we have references from before the CBD the convention on biological diversity that does talk about it where the developed countries are supposed to put in more money for the developing countries to use. So we are not seeing any of that. And I believe if these two things are not fixed, then we will be very close to seeing the same devastation as we saw during covid because I can share all the information. But if I do not get the vaccines, I need my livelihood and everything is gone. And there is no support financially also because that mechanism is also in problem. So yeah, that is where we are. Let's see what happens from 18 to 28. The on these issues that developing countries have talked about before. I would say we just hope that if these issues are not solved, then the text should not come in place. It is better to not have a text than a bad text, which will lead to similar problems that we faced earlier. But also what is the scope for developing countries to push back both in the coming round as well as the discussions at the World Health Assembly where I presume once again these might come up. Yes, I mean, I mean, there you have positive signs in terms of solidarity of the countries. In fact, on the second last or last day of the air throne which just finished on 1st of March, we actually saw that developing countries, they walked out of the negotiations because they were not being heard and they realize they are. So the meeting was suspended for a few hours and then they came back and started these discussions again. So the, the solidarity if it is maintained and African group is leading these negotiations really well. And they are saying that we will stand by our demands and we won't give in at least as far as the access and benefit sharing proposal is concerned. If they go forward with this solidarity and not allow this text to continue the way it is, then we do have hopes, but so far what we see, and that is why certain provisions in intellectual property. There is, there are better clauses of things which are voluntary some have been made obligatory and mandatory. So they have been certain. So if they stick together, we hope to have a better text. And that's the only hope at the moment. Thank you so much Joseph for that update. And that's all we have in this daily deep briefing. We will be back with a fresh episode tomorrow. Meanwhile, do visit our website peoplesdispatch.org, follow us on all the social media platforms. And if you are watching this on YouTube, please hit the subscribe button.