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“Usually before Ramadan everyone asks others: ‘are you fasting?'”, he wrote are Republic Gaza journalist Sami al Ajrami on March 7, referring to the precept not to drink or eat from dawn to dusk during the holy month for Muslim people: this year, however, “the answer is ‘I’m already fasting'”. Food shortages have long been a very serious emergency in the Gaza Strip, especially in the north, where deliveries of humanitarian aid during Israel’s military operation are much less frequent than in the south, where they continue to arrive through the border crossing. Rafah, on the border with Egypt, albeit irregularly and amidst enormous difficulties. Food is either missing or expensive, and therefore many cannot afford it.
In these circumstances, the civilian population is making do as best it can: walking for hours to look for leftovers, gathering wild herbs to boil on improvised outdoor stoves or using animal feed, but now that too is running out.
Already at the beginning of February a health worker active in Beit Lahia, in the north of the Strip, He said a BBC News that supplies of canned food were a rarity and that girls and boys went without food for days. “What we had came from the six or seven days of truce” in November, she said, but the aid has now run out and people “in fact eat rice, and only rice”. Some had already started grinding animal feed to make bread. More recently other media have collected similar testimonies. Three families heard from New York Times in these days they said who every day don’t know if they will be able to eat and what.
Humanitarian teams distribute soup in the northern region of the Gaza Strip, where scenes capture the plight of hungry Palestinians. According to an Al Jazeera reporter, people have been actively searching for food for several days amidst a lack of basic necessities pic.twitter.com/GiNGPjoG7B
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) March 5, 2024
In a item published March 4, the news agency New Humanitarian interviewed two men who live in Beit Hanon, near Beit Lahia. One of them, unable to find milk for her little daughter, had given her bread made with animal feed, but she had been ill and had vomited blood; the little girl now weighs six kilos, half her weight before the start of the war, which began last October 7 with violent Hamas attacks on Israeli territory. The man’s brother-in-law said that his family began to eat the grass and that Israeli soldiers had shot at him on several occasions while he was picking it: “These are our alternatives,” he said, “if we don’t get killed, we will die of hunger.”
Il New York Times instead he spoke to Aseel Mutair, who is 21 years old, lives in Beit Lahia and was studying at university until five months ago. Mutair he said that last week she and her family twice shared a pot of soup they managed to get from a kitchen distributing humanitarian aid. One day she had eaten five dates and had finished the jar of instant coffee that she had left over from when she was studying; another day she had shared with her father and brother some lentils that her aunt had given her and yet another they had only drunk some tea.
Most of the shops in the Strip are destroyed or damaged, and those who had one are selling the last supplies, even expired ones, in the markets set up in the streets. The cheapest things that Mutair’s family can find are ground barley, which is used as feed, and more rarely corn flour, which however is more expensive. His mother uses them to make a kind of pita the size of the palm of her hand that “I can’t even explain how disgusting it is”, she says. Sometimes his family collects the leaves of a variety of local mallow to make soup. If he finds something to eat in the middle of the day, he still waits for dinner time to sleep better.
This is what some Palestinians in Gaza have been eating in the first days of Ramaḍān. Barley mixed with animal feed.
There have been many cases of children dying after eating animal feed, due to the lack of food available for human consumption.
The Israeli occupation forces… pic.twitter.com/EFkgRWwYKy
— • (@Alhamdhulillaah) March 12, 2024
Hossam Masoud, who is 35 and lives in Jabalia, told New Humanitarian who usually looks for food scraps in garbage containers and under destroyed or abandoned houses. “It has become difficult to even find cereals for the animals,” he says, saying he walks around for several hours in the hope of finding even just a kilo, falling to the ground on several occasions because he lacks strength. Amany Mteir, 52, lives in the same area and looks for food in the markets where people sell or barter what they have: at the moment her family, made up of seven adults, is eating only broth made with chicken stock cubes.
Another man who also lives in the northern Gaza Strip says that the only thing left for him and his family to eat are prickly pear blades. “Now we still find them, but in a week there won’t be any more,” he had said to Reuters about ten days ago, adding that he had lost 30 kilos in a month.
Masoud said that in January he had managed to get a bag of flour from a UNRWA truck, the United Nations agency that provides humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees, but it was now almost finished. He had also managed to take rice, oil and sugar, but they had been taken away by some armed men in civilian clothes with their faces covered, according to whom he had taken more than he needed.
The people interviewed by New Humanitarian they said they don’t know who these men are. In recent months, Israel had accused Hamas members of stealing humanitarian aid intended for the civilian population, but according to some humanitarian workers they could just be people who steal food to resell it on the black market at higher prices: a phenomenon that has also raised ten times that of the most requested products, with the result that many families cannot afford them.
Il New York Times observes that before the war a kilo of rice cost around 2 euros and now 22. A kilo of white flour has gone from around 0.77 to 18 euros, a pack of long-life milk from 1.3 to 4.62 and a can of beans from 0.39 to 1.54.
Israel’s systematic dismantling of healthcare in #Gaza means:
🚨180 women a day are giving birth in cars, tents or in rubble
🚨Women are having C-sections without anaesthetic
🚨Pregnant women, new mothers and babies are struggling to survive without food, water and healthcare pic.twitter.com/E0G0bU0byA
— Medical Aid for Palestinians (@MedicalAidPal) March 8, 2024
The situation is a little better in the south of the Strip, although still disastrous. Nizar Hammad, who is 30 and lives in a tent in Rafah with eleven other people, including four children, said he had not received help for two weeks. The bag of flour and boxes of beans distributed to each family from time to time are not enough, and what Hammad earned in two weeks of work in a market he spent on buying two bags of rice from a vendor on the street.
This is also why the Strip’s Interior Ministry, controlled by Hamas, has set up a corps of armed men to patrol Rafah and control prices on the black market, given that the local police are not operational due to the Israeli attacks, writes Al Jazeera.
A family displaced as a result of the Israeli war on Gaza prepare their food in the street in Khan Yunis. pic.twitter.com/gLYtRPbV1Q
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) March 12, 2024
In Gaza, fishing is impossible, given that since last October 7 it has been forbidden to use boats at sea, and growing crops is also impracticable. With the shortage of feed, livestock also die, and often it is not even easy to get water. Then there are those who note that sometimes the food delivered with humanitarian aid is gone bador that the canned meat It’s so bad that not even cats eat it.
All this aggravates the humanitarian situation of the Palestinian population, which has already been collapsing for some time. The United Nations Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) he said that a quarter of the population of the Strip, around 570 thousand people, “is one step away from famine”. Again according to OCHA, among children under two years of age, one in six is severely malnourished and wasted.
In northern Gaza, children pick up scattered food to avoid starvation pic.twitter.com/evuLFusFFp
— Volkan Albistan 🇵🇸 (@valbistan) March 12, 2024
As al Ajrami, who was born in the Jabalia refugee camp, began working as a correspondent in 2004 and writes from the south of the Strip, also wrote, inside each package of humanitarian aid «there are three small meals for one person, like those used for the military: a breakfast with bread and cheese, rice and chicken.” The aid is not enough for the entire population, furthermore there is a lack of medicines and “the shops, the few that are open, are attacked”.
“Usually at this time of year people were shopping for Ramadan,” continues al Ajrami, but this year “none of this will happen” because in Rafah the prices “are completely crazy.”
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