In Gaza, nearly every conversation these days starts with the same question.
When did you eat last? Relatives, friends, and neighbors ask one another. What did you manage to find?
A third of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million residents are not eating for multiple days in a row, according to the United Nations, which says its own staff members are now routinely fainting from hunger. Hospitals are inundated with malnourished children, and the doctors treating them are skipping meals, too.
Why We Wrote This
Our correspondent in Gaza has been covering hunger for months. But this week the world seems to be paying attention in a new way – including media outlets worried about starvation of their staff.
This week, with ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas stalled in Qatar, global condemnation of Gaza’s hunger crisis crescendoed. Thirty mostly European countries said in a joint statement that “the suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths,” while the head of the World Health Organization described the situation as “man-made” “mass starvation.”
Over 100 humanitarian organizations reported that their own colleagues were “wast[ing] away before their eyes,” and the French news agency AFP, with just two Gazan journalists left reporting, stated that while they’ve lost employees covering conflicts since their founding in 1944, “none of us can ever remember seeing colleagues die of hunger.” Amid the global outrage France pledged Thursday to recognize Palestinian statehood.
The Israeli military acknowledged in a press briefing this week that there was a “lack of food security inside Gaza,” but blamed the United Nations for not bringing in sufficient aid.
Still, neither side denies one fact: There is simply not enough to eat in Gaza.
Rotten figs
In the central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah, Merhan Abu Qinas kneels over a makeshift stove, flattening dough. Gathered around her, beside their tattered tent, her six children wait in exhausted silence.
Recently, Ms. Qinas’ mother managed to send a rare, precious bag of flour from Gaza City, which means there is enough for each of them to have a plain, crisp flatbread the size of a dinner plate. It will be the only thing they eat today.
That, now, is what passes as a good day for the family. Recently, when there was no food at all, Ms. Qinas caught her 6-year-old son Mohammad and his toddler sister Taqwa eating a burnt clump of rice and lentils that a neighbor had left on the ground for his cat. “That broke me,” she says. As a reporter was speaking to her earlier this week, the children appeared with fistfuls of plump figs they picked from a nearby sycamore tree, black with rot.
“Mom,” they asked, “can we eat these?”
“Go ahead,” she said.
In a temporary camp for the displaced, the family spends most of their days lying still, too exhausted to move.
“It’s worse than death,” Ms. Qinas says.
The risks for food
The costs of goods in Gaza, the subject of some controversy, have fluctuated wildly during the war but are now at unsustainable highs. At a nearby market, a kilogram of sugar sells for around $180, a kilogram of tomatoes or peppers for $29. There is no oil, no eggs, no milk.
Many families no longer bother to go there at all. “There’s nothing we can afford,” says Nuha Iddina, a mother of five in her mid-40s. Instead, Ms. Iddina’s family, like many Gazans, relies on provisions doled out by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a controversial Israeli- and U.S.-backed private aid group that began operating in late May.
Since then, at least 766 Palestinians have been killed approaching its four Israeli military-controlled distribution sites, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. Every time Ms. Iddina sends her 17-year-old son Amjad to collect food, she fears he will be one of them.
To reach the closest distribution site in Rafah, Amjad takes a taxi, and then, because food is handed out around dawn, walks the final four miles in the dark. At the site, his mother says, he tries to press to the front of the crowd, because “you have to run if you want to get food.” He has told his mother that he has seen people shot at by Israeli soldiers guarding the site.
“And yet, I still send him,” Ms. Iddina says. “What choice do we have?”
Since the start of the war in October 2023, Israel has severely restricted food and other aid from entering Gaza, alleging that Hamas routinely looted the aid, reselling some for profit. Most recently, from March to May of this year, Israel barred all aid from entering the territory.
Today, the blockade is lifted, but a tight hold on aid distribution remains. The GHF is now one of the primary sources of food in the country, and says that since it began operations, it has distributed more than 90 million meals in over 1.5 million boxes.
But international humanitarian organizations refuse to work with the group, arguing its militarized distribution model violates humanitarian neutrality and puts hungry Gazans at needless risk.
Israel says these groups are also welcome to bring aid in, and that their “lack of cooperation” is the reason food supply in Gaza remains so restricted. It points to queues of aid trucks backed up at the border, which the U.N. says are there because Israel regularly denies its requests for entry and has failed to provide safe passage for its convoys through active war zones.
Whatever the reason, the Iddina family, which lives in a tent in Deir al-Balah, recently had nothing to eat for three days except one pot of thin soup. Still, when new evacuees flooded the area after evacuation orders Sunday, Ms. Iddina saw they were even more desperate.
“If we had anything, we shared,” she says. “But most of the time, we didn’t.”
Salt water as sustenance
On a nearby street, Randa Abu Amra says she is worried she is watching her 10 children die.
A week ago, in the middle of the night, on the side of the road where they now live after being displaced from their home, the family was woken by the sound of Israeli tanks crunching over the ground.
They hadn’t received an evacuation order, but “we knew we had to run,” she says. As a result of displacement orders and Israeli military zones, nearly the entirety of Gaza’s 2.3 million people is now crowded into 12% of the coastal enclave’s total area, about 17 square miles.
With at least 70% of buildings in Gaza damaged or destroyed, most people now live in tents, or the ruins of their homes. But Ms. Amra and her children don’t even have the supplies to build a shelter, and so they sleep outside. They also have not had a single proper meal since they fled. “We fill our stomachs with salt water, just to feel something inside,” she says.
