The small, dark-brown patties serve as meals. In the north of the Gaza Strip, after four and a half months of Israeli siege, the inhabitants now knead this ersatz bread with seeds or ground animal feed – just enough to keep them alive. "We have no other choice, there's no white flour," said Mohamed Siam, a nurse with the NGO Doctors Without Borders at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, over the phone. "We can't withdraw any money either, all the banks have been destroyed. Prices have skyrocketed. Some products are available and then, a few days later, you can't find them anymore." In this area where some 300,000 Palestinians still live, according to the United States, one child in six under the age of 2 suffers from acute malnutrition, reported the World Food Program (WFP) on February 19.
"We need an urgent ceasefire. People are going hungry and have lost a lot of weight. Every day, elderly people are losing their lives because they can't get enough nutrients because the food isn't healthy. We're surviving without natural proteins, fruit, vegetables, nothing," said Siam. In the Jabalia refugee camp north of Gaza City, the inhabitants "collect herbs, seeds of all kinds, and use that to survive. But, mostly, people don't eat. Often, they go several days without a meal," said Caitlin Procter, a researcher at the Geneva Graduate Institute who has spent several years in the enclave and has been collecting daily testimonies from Gazans since October 7, 2023.
In the southern city of Rafah, where over a million displaced Gazans are concentrated and where aid has been most widely distributed since November 2023, "there's only canned food," she said. Crops have been wiped out in fields devastated by Israeli bulldozers and bombardments. For months now, farmed chickens and fish have been killed and gobbled up. The port of Gaza and most of the boats have been pulverized by the bombardments. The NGOs Human Rights Watch and Oxfam have condemned Israel's use of famine in Gaza as a weapon of war. "Starvation will be the easiest war crime to prosecute because it is directly linked to the siege," said Procter.
"No electricity, no food, no water, no gas, everything is closed," said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9, 2023. Four and a half months later, despite international talk, aid is still in short supply, stuck at the gates of the enclave. On February 20, Cogat, an Israeli Ministry of Defense body overseeing civilian activities in the occupied Palestinian territories, reported that 98 trucks containing food, water, medical supplies and equipment, as well as four gas tanks, had arrived that day – enough to meet the needs of some 2.3 million Gazans.
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