Help deliveries do little to alleviate the hunger crisis of Gaza

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Sudarsan Raghavan, The Wall Street Journal 4 min Read May 22, 2025, 07:28 am Ist Gaza faces serious food crisis, as limited help goes on, very short of desperate needs amid ongoing conflict. (AFP) Summary Ordinary Palestinians and international agencies say that there is not enough food in Gaza, despite the fact that Israel allows a limited amount of help in the enclave. Inside their small apartment in Gaza City this week, Marah Zant and 12 of her family members had very little food left to eat, just a little rice, lentils and a single tin of fava beans that they were trying to stick out for three days. The plan: Eat one, very small meal a day. Then they heard that several trucks carrying food aid entered Gaza for the first time in more than two months. But the news also became disappointment. “We haven’t seen a single thing,” said Zant, 21, who lives in the City of the Sheikh Radwan area. “No one around us also received anything.” After erecting US and global pressure, Israel on Monday forced a limited amount of food aid in the war affected by the war since the beginning of March. But ordinary Palestinians and international aid agencies do not say enough about it. On Tuesday, Israel allowed another 100 trucks to enter. The United Nations says at least 500 a day is needed if a worse humanitarian disaster is to be prevented. Palestinian children are waiting for a hot meal in a refugee camp in central Gaza. Help groups have warned for weeks that the approximately two million Gaza residents are facing serious food, fuel, medicine and clean water shortages, as stock brought in during a fragile ceasefire earlier this year. Nearly three out of every five families cannot find bread or fresh food, and malnutrition for children is rising sharply, says the International Rescue Committee. Nearly half a million people in Gaza are already hungry, the integrated food security phase classification partnership, a global hunger watchdog, said last week. “The decision to allow limited food aid to enter Gaza is hardly scratching the surface of what is needed,” says Zoe Daniels, the IRC’s Gaza head. She said Gazans needed ‘consistent, sustained access to all essential supplies – not just food and medicine, but also water, fuel and hygiene items. Without it, humanitarian operations cannot function. ‘ At the beginning of March, Israel banned the entry of all help, medicine and other goods in the Gaza Strip after talks to stop the ceasefire. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government says Hamas steals help and uses it to support his war effort, which denies the US designated terror group. A US-supported aid distribution plan, supported by Israel, has been in the works to resume to provide assistance from distribution sites across Gaza. Eden Bar Tal, director of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters on Monday that these distribution sites should work within a few days. The task of assisting the people who need it is hampered by Israel’s latest land and air push, which adds the pressure on Hamas and ordinary Gazane. After air strikes killed by the number of people, Israel on Monday ordered residents in the southern city of Khan Younis to evacuate before an ‘unprecedented attack’. This caused hundreds of residents to go to the streets to set Hamas and end an end to the war. It was the latest sign of a grassroots movement that disregarded Hamas. In other areas, many of their shelters have fled. Sharif Al-Sheikh, a 42-year-old father of two, has been displaced for the fifth time since the war began after the deadly attack of Hamas on Israel on October 7, 2023. Hundreds of people have died in air strikes since Friday and more than 53,000 Palestinians have died since the beginning of the war, according to the Gazan health authorities, although they did not say that they did not. On Tuesday, Sheikh and his family, including ten family members, were hungry and again without shelter. “My wife and I hadn’t eaten anything for three days,” he said. “My wife gives me bread, but I refuse to eat it. I leave it to the kids. ‘ The markets have food, but prices have risen out of reach, he said. Israel’s blockade from Gaza also meant that commercial border crossings were closed for more than two months. As a result, the price of food is available in the markets that rise dramatically – a pack of pasta, for example, is now 35 times that it was before the blockade, according to residents, about almost $ 10 each. Sheikh regularly occurs some of the handful of soup kitchens that still work, which regularly stand in the queue for hours. But even the kitchens take off. At the end of April, the UN World Food Program said its food supplies for the kitchens are almost exhausted. Displaced Palestinians collect cooked food from a kitchen for community food. Every morning, in front of the building of Farah Elhelo in the tal Hawa neighborhood in Gaza, hungry crowds come to a soup kitchen, clamped pots and plastic bags. By noon, the lentils and beans ran up, the line collapsed and battles burst. Elhelo heard screams on Monday and rushed to her window. “I saw the crowd pushing, and I saw that a child first fell into one of the cooking pots,” she recalls. “Every day someone is burned … hands, feet from the chaos.” Despite their serious situation, Marah Zant feels relatively happy for the small stock of food she had. Many families in her building who will look for food every day. “Some houses around us are completely empty,” she said. “People divide pieces of bread like treasure. If someone has it, they hide it for others for fear of being envied. ‘ Children, weakened by hunger, stopped playing in her building. She saw mothers baptize bread in water to make their children feel satisfied. “Instead of working or continuing my life, I count how many meals we have left to see if we will survive this week,” she added. Write to Sudarsan Raghavan on Sudarsan.raghavan@wsj.com, catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on live currency. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Israel-Hamas War Read Next Story