Two hundred and fifty calories represents two slices of supermarket wholemeal bread sold in the UK. Twelve per cent of recommended nutrition intake. Today in northern Gaza, already in the grip of a “catastrophic” level of hunger as defined by the UN, it represents an entire day’s calorific intake.
Six months into Israel’s war against Gaza, which followed Hamas’s brutal surprise attack on southern Israel’s border communities on 7 October last year which killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and saw almost 250 others taken hostage, acute hunger has become pervasive in the coastal strip.
For those who have money, food is in perilously short supply. For those with none – and with Israel, according to UN officials and other agencies, having obstructed the delivery of humanitarian aid for months – finding sustenance has become a matter of life and death.
According to the IPC, the UN-backed hunger-monitoring mechanism, 1.1 million people, half of Gaza’s population, are expected to live with catastrophic hunger within three months if the violence does not escalate.
“Before the war we were in good health and had strong bodies,” one mother recently told the British-based aid agency Oxfam. “Now, when I look at my children and myself, we have lost so much weight. We try to eat whatever we find, edible plants or herbs, just to survive.”
Another mother of six echoed this account to the World Health Organisation, explaining that in the markets wild plants are mainly available at high prices with “no vegetables, no fruits, no juice… no lentils, no rice, no potatoes or eggplants, nothing”, leaving many to survive by eating mallow, a common leafy weed. In a ruined and besieged Gaza, threatened constantly by bombs, artillery and drones, life is defined by a refrain repeated by many. “I’m still alive. I’m still breathing.”
“I don’t know if I still feel anything other than fear, sadness and frustration,” says Mohammed Mortaja, one of hundreds of thousands who have been displaced to the southern city of Rafah, even now a place under threat of a new Israeli offensive.
“Every morning the sun rises and you are alive. Your daily journey is to remain alive – between the search for water and food and escaping from the bombing and occupation.”
Mortaja says he is completely focused on survival and no longer pays attention to the news. After six long months, hope, too, has been set aside, replaced by a numb sense of dislocation.
“I’m no longer tempted by words like truce or ceasefire. I don’t care about anything – I just search for what can satisfy my hunger and my thirst and I wait anxiously for my death.”
More than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including more than 13,000 children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
In half a year of violent conflict, that in turn followed years of an Israeli blockade of the coastal strip which served more to strengthen Hamas than to undermine it, Gaza is defined today more by what has been lost than what remains of a once-vibrant society.
Apartment blocks and whole neighbourhoods have been flattened. Hospitals have been reduced to ruins, now roamed by dogs and stinking of sewage. Universities have been blown up and agriculture destroyed. Electricity and with it the ability to process potable and waste water has been fatally disrupted, contributing to the rampant spread of disease.
As of last month, satellite images analysed by the United Nations Satellite Centre concluded that 35% of the Gaza Strip’s buildings have been destroyed or damaged in the offensive. Life itself has been atomised as the war has driven over 80 percent of the population of 2.3 million out of their homes to seek shelter mainly in the south in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions.
Aid deliveries have been throttled by Israel’s closure of land crossings into Gaza, while recent air drop operations are limited in scale and have on several occasions led to deaths after problems with parachute failures and aid dropping into the sea.
The question for Gaza is where the war goes from here. An avalanche of international condemnation of Israel for its killing of seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen charity last week in a protracted drone strike that hit their cars, one after the other, follows anger at the high and escalating death toll and a growing famine.
And while Israel, under US pressure following the aid worker deaths, has agreed to open more border crossings to allow in more aid, some international officials, including the EU foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, believe it is too little and too late to prevent starvation.
“Israel and its allies must ensure that aid can now flow freely to avert a famine, and that there will be a protection system for humanitarian workers that guarantees our security. Most of all we need protection for Palestinian civilians, who have been indiscriminately killed during these last six months,” said Jan Egeland, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s secretary general.
Alongside the threat of famine, the biggest question is what happens to Rafah, home to 1.5 million people, which Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that he plans to attack despite the objections of Washington and other allies.
Ahmed Masoud, a Gazan human rights activist now living in Rafah after being displaced six times over the past six months – a typical experience – says he has lost 40 of his friends, his home and his job. Now he fears losing his mental health.
“All we think about is how to stay alive and struggling to get water and food. Once the night comes, we think more about being killed - especially because we hear 24/7 the sound of Israeli warplanes, especially the drones,” says Masoud, who describes a constant battle to keep his mental health which he fears may not survive the war.
“I’m so lucky that I still have my mind and I haven’t lost it yet.”
But Rafah now is no longer a safe zone – though it has never been exempted from airstrikes – and the population says rumours have built of a looming Israeli invasion.
“Everything is destroyed around us. We feel that at any moment now they will enter Rafah,” said another Palestinian living in the city, who did not want to be named. “We are waiting to evacuate Rafah at any moment. We will probably go towards the sea, to the beach.”
Masoud says everyone in Rafah is waiting for an invasion but they do not know where to go.
The corrosive and all-pervading sense of fear has driven those with contacts abroad to issue desperate pleas to borrow money to pay the heavy bribes required by Egyptian “brokers” – sometimes amounting to tens of thousands of dollars for a single family – to escape across the border.
“The American administration wants a clear plan to evacuate people to safety. To be honest, I don’t know what ‘safe area’ they’re talking about,” he says. “It’s a really big fear but we’ve got used to being killed, to hearing sad news, so we have nothing to lose. So here we are, waiting for our destiny.”
Despite the growing international pressure to stop the fighting, including the recent passage of a resolution to that effect in the UN Security Council, ceasefire negotiations centred on a release of the dozens of Israeli hostages held by Hamas – many of whom are believed to have died in captivity – remain stuck despite the scale of the suffering.
Hamas says Israel’s forces must leave Gaza. Israel says it must finish its destruction of Hamas.
Yet despite Israel’s claims to have killed around 13,000 Hamas fighters and dismantled the group’s military capabilities across most of Gaza there is no sign that Hamas is finished, with its fighters regrouping in areas where Israel previously declared victory.
Michael Milshtein, a former high-ranking Israeli military intelligence officer who is an expert in Palestinian studies at Tel Aviv University, says Israel faces two unappealing choices: accept a hostage and ceasefire deal that acknowledges Hamas has survived, or step up the military campaign and conquer Gaza in the hope that Hamas will eventually be destroyed.
He said expectations that the Israeli military’s current approach can destroy Hamas or force it to surrender are “wishful thinking”.
Amos Harel in Israeli newspaper Haaretz was even more blunt, describing a stagnated war, burnt-out troops and an ever-increasing insensitivity to Palestinian lives where “the notion that ‘there are no innocents in Gaza’” is rife among the combat troops.
“Today it is clear to everyone – other than blind followers – that the promises of ‘total victory’ that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu made every other day are totally worthless,” he wrote.
For now, all that can be said with any certainty is that a war launched with unrealistic expectations will drag on longer yet amid Israel’s growing international isolation.
And that those paying the heaviest price are Gaza’s Palestinian civilians.
