RAFAH:
Displaced children in southern Gaza craved chicken, but all their mother had left to feed the family for the day was a box of peas donated by a man who felt sorry for her when he saw her cry.
Left homeless by Israel’s military offensive against Hamas, like most of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million, Tahany Nasr was in a camp in Rafah, focused on just one thing: how to find enough food and water for everyone to spend another day.
She said her children had lost weight and felt dizzy because they weren’t eating enough.
“I begged to feed my children and I find nothing. I go to social affairs, they say go to the mosque. I go to the mosque, they say go to the affairs,” she said, referring to Gaza. the welfare ministry which usually organizes distributions of basic goods such as flour to people in need.
Hunger has become the most pressing of the myriad problems facing Gaza’s hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians, with aid trucks able to carry only a fraction of what they need and distribution uneven due to the chaos of war.
Some trucks have been stopped and looted by people desperate for food, while parts of the damaged area are inaccessible because the access roads are active battlefields.
Even in Rafah, which has a passage to Egypt through which aid trucks enter and is an area where the Israeli military has told civilians to seek shelter, the lack of food and clean water is so severe that people are losing weight and get sick.
“We started seeing people coming in emaciated,” said Samia Abu Salah, a primary care doctor in Rafah.
He said weight loss and anemia were common and people were so weak and dehydrated that they were more susceptible to chest infections and skin diseases. Babies and children were especially at risk and their development would be affected.
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A meal of onions
“My children just told me today that they were craving chicken. Where would I find them chicken? Where? Do I know? May Allah save us,” Nasr said, breaking down in tears as she spoke.
“We haven’t had food for two days. How can I fool my children? With some pasta? Some lentil stew? If I could find it!” she said, adding that she had sometimes resorted to making meals out of just onions.
Nasr entered her tent to bring the peas that she said a kind man had given her, even though he had bought them for himself. This is.
Not an extreme case, but the account Nasr gave echoed stories from several interviewees who spoke to Reuters in Rafah and elsewhere. People talked about eating only once a day, insufficient meals with inadequate nutrition, water rations, children getting diarrhea from drinking dirty water.
Israel has wreaked a humanitarian disaster in Gaza since October 7, when Hamas resistance fighters launched an offensive on its territory to protest their displacement and reclaim their land from Israeli settlers. Palestinians have faced displacement and settler violence at the hands of Israel for the past 75 years.
In its brutal onslaught, Israel killed 20,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in two months. About 8,000 Gazans are reported missing, buried under the rubble of structures destroyed by Israeli airstrikes.
Maha Al-Alami, a displaced woman sheltering in a school in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis with eight children and grandchildren, said they were all traumatized by the experience of hunger.
“I tell you, once the war is over, God willing, the Palestinian people will have to sit in front of psychiatrists,” he said.
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