‘Now There’s Barely Anything’: Gazans Describe Life on the Verge of Famine (2024)

For hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, each day brings a struggle to find food.

But in a Gaza devastated by almost nine months of war between Israel and Hamas, that can seem like a distinction without a difference.

“We are living in a famine that is more extreme than ever before,” Ms. Abu Jaljum said.

Each day brings a new struggle to find food. Fresh vegetables are scarce and meat scarcer still. And at those food markets that are still functioning, the shortages have sent prices skyrocketing, including for staples like flour and rice.

The last time that Iyad al-Sapti, a 30-year-old father of six in Gaza City, was able to get a bag of flour was nearly two months ago — and that required waiting in line for three hours, he said. A single bell pepper, he said, now costs more than $2.

“Who could possibly afford that?” he asked.

One of his daughters, Mr. al-Sapti said, asked for eggs, but there were none to be found. “I would just tell her, ‘I swear, I wish I can provide you with eggs,’” he said.

While warning of a high risk of famine, the report on Tuesday from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, which is known as the I.P.C., noted that the amount of food reaching northern Gaza had increased in recent months. The change coincides with the Israeli reopening of border crossings — under intense international pressure — to allow more aid to enter.

An I.P.C. designation of famine depends on a combination of factors, among them the percentages of households facing extreme lack of food, children suffering from acute malnutrition and deaths from starvation or malnutrition.

But many people may die before all the criteria are met.

Since the I.P.C. standards were developed in 2004, they have been used to identify only two famines: in Somalia in 2011, and in South Sudan in 2017. In Somalia, more than 100,000 people died before famine was officially declared.

As of Sunday, the health authorities in Gaza reported, 34 people had died from malnutrition, the majority children.

“Before some simple things were available,” Ms. Abu Jaljum said, “but now there’s barely anything.”

Although the fighting in Gaza is now largely concentrated in the south, food shortages have been reported across the enclave.

In Khan Younis, the southern Gaza city where Nizar Hammad, 30, has been sheltering with his family in a tent, finding food can be less a challenge than cooking it.

“The biggest suffering is preparing the food itself, because you do not have cooking gas,” he said.

Firewood is hard to find, and expensive. But Mr. Hammad said that bread, flour, pasta, rice and lentils were available and relatively affordable in his area, and that he could buy two bags of flour for about $2.60. Chicken, beef, fruit and vegetables were another matter.

“The problem now is the lack of cash, work and income,” Mr. Hammad said.

In the north, bread has become more available as some bakeries in Gaza City reopen their doors, said Mr. al-Sapti. His family has mostly been eating bread with the herb mix za’atar. “The bakeries reopening have helped us a lot,” he said.

But Mr. al-Sapti worries that the bakeries may soon run out of fuel.

“I really hope they stay open,” he said.

An Israeli strike kills a Doctors Without Borders staff member, and other news.

Netanyahu’s coalition appears steady after a court ruling threatened to split his government.

Military service is compulsory for most Jewish Israelis, both men and women, and the exemption for the ultra-Orthodox has long been a source of resentment. That resentment has grown because of the strain placed on the Israel Defense Forces by the war in Gaza, which has entered its ninth month.

On Tuesday, judges said there was no legal basis for a military exemption given to ultra-Orthodox religious students. Without a law distinguishing between seminarians and other men of draft age, the court ruled, the country’s mandatory draft laws must similarly apply to the ultra-Orthodox minority.

Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party has criticized the Supreme Court for issuing a ruling when it said the government was planning to pass its own legislation that would render the case obsolete.

The government’s proposed law, the party said, would increase the number of ultra-Orthodox conscripts while recognizing the importance of religious study, but it was unclear whether it would ultimately hold up to judicial scrutiny. If passed by Parliament, a new law could face years of court challenges, buying the government additional time.

In reaction to the ruling on Wednesday, Rabbi Shlomo Benizri, who had served in previous governments and is an influential member of the Sephardic Shas party, a coalition member that appeals to Israelis from the Middle East and North Africa, said that the military must ensure that provisions are made for yeshiva students who are drafted as a result of the ruling.

These arrangements must “create the appropriate atmosphere and spiritual greenhouse for them, and then they can be drafted,” he said in an interview on Israel’s Kan radio, without elaborating. .

Meir Porush, the Jerusalem affairs and heritage minister, reserved his disappointment for the court, rather than the government, saying the decision left ultra-Orthodox Jews legally defenseless.

“We feel today we have no protection in the corridors of the courts,” said Mr. Porush, a member of the United Torah Judaism party, in an opinion piece in the HaMevaser newspaper, which is widely read by the ultra-Orthodox. “There is no one who understands how fundamental it is to sit and meditate on the Torah.”

Mr. Smotrich, the settler activist and ultranationalist who serves as finance minister in the government, had no immediate comment on the ruling, a spokesman said.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews have been exempt from military service since the founding of Israel in 1948, when the country’s leadership promised them autonomy in exchange for their support in creating a largely secular state. At the time, there were only a few hundred yeshiva students.

There are now more than a million ultra-Orthodox in Israel, roughly 13 percent of the population. They wield considerable political clout and their elected leaders have become kingmakers, featuring in most Israeli coalition governments. But as the power of the ultra-Orthodox grew, so did anger over their lack of participation in the military and their relatively small contribution to the economy.

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

A U.N. official called on Israel to offer more protection for aid workers.

Israeli authorities have resisted blame. On social media on Tuesday, in a post directed at the U.N.’s World Food Program, the Israeli agency overseeing aid in Gaza displayed a photo of supplies that it said were waiting at an offloading area. “Stop making excuses and start playing your role as a humanitarian food organization and the head of the logistic cluster,” it said.

Monday’s I.P.C. report found that the amount of food reaching northern Gaza had increased in recent months, but it underscored the dire conditions people in the enclave were facing and the need for much more aid to be delivered.

Aid groups say they fear for the safety of their workers. The U.N.’s World Food Program suspended deliveries of assistance from the U.S.-built pier off the coast of Gaza this month after it said that its warehouses had been struck in an Israeli hostage rescue mission that killed scores of Palestinians, including women and children.

Last week the U.N. said that Gaza had become the most dangerous place in the world for aid workers. About 250 aid workers have been killed since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 set off this war, the U.N. said. That figure includes nearly 200 who worked for UNRWA, the main U.N. agency for Palestinians.

That temporary suspension of deliveries from the pier has left aid sitting ever since and prompted concerns that the U.N. might halt other operations.

Mr. Dujarric noted the dangers to aid workers and said that humanitarian operations had repeatedly been targeted, pointing to Israeli strikes on hospitals and other areas that were supposed to be “de-conflicted.” The Israeli military said those locations were being used by Hamas militants.

“The risks, frankly, are becoming increasingly intolerable,” Mr. Dujarric said. He added that the need to support millions of Palestinian civilians dependent on humanitarian aid to survive was a priority and that the U.N. assessed the security situation daily to try to operate safely.

Juliette Touma, a spokeswoman for UNRWA, said that the humanitarian operation in Gaza had become “totally unnecessarily one of the most cumbersome and complex in the world right now.”