In northern Gaza, famine sets in: ‘We will eat anything’

Searching the sky, or in the fields, even on the streets, residents of the northern Gaza Strip are constantly looking for food – and finding little.

When Ahmed Sawafiri isn’t chasing after parachuted aid packages, the photojournalist and father of seven from the war-torn neighborhood of Tal Hawa in western Gaza City scours the land for grass and wild herbs.

“We have tried everything for food: animal feed, barley, leaves,” he says. “We eat for survival. We will eat anything.”

Under pressure after the deadly strike on World Central Kitchen staff, Israel says it is allowing mass food aid into besieged Gaza via new land and sea routes. But two weeks later, Palestinians in Gaza and aid workers say little has improved on the ground.

As famine sets in, families in northern Gaza, where some 300,000 Palestinians remain, and elsewhere in the strip struggle to eat more than one meal a day. 

Hurdles range from logistical issues to a lack of safety to restrictions imposed by Israel. That means the promised wave of food aid has been little more than a trickle, aid workers say, leaving Gazans struggling to stave off malnourishment and starvation.

As of last week, Israel has begun operating a new crossing into northern Gaza, and is allowing hundreds of aid trucks to enter from Jordan through Israel to Kerem Shalom in the south.

Israel said eight trucks of flour from the World Food Programme entered southern Gaza Thursday in the first delivery of humanitarian aid to pass through the port of Ashdod since the war began. U.N. officials hailed the opening of Ashdod Port as a “potential game-changer” if sustained aid items widen beyond flour and canned goods.

Bottlenecks, restrictions

Despite an uptick in aid, only a handful of trucks are entering the new northern Gaza crossing daily, and bottlenecks snarl aid trucks entering Rafah.

While Israel said as many as 400 trucks were transferred to Gaza daily for multiple days last week, the United Nations says around half of those entered Gaza.

Aid officials cite logistical challenges created by Israel’s strict security procedure requiring sorting, offloading, and reloading of aid – a time-consuming process that severely reduces the number of trucks entering Gaza daily to well below what is permitted.

Another issue, U.N. officials say, is damaged roads in northern and central Gaza that affect teams’ ability to pick up and distribute aid.

Crucially, averting famine requires Israel permitting more types of food aid and restoring the strip’s damaged water, health, and sanitation systems, they say.  

“Children in hospital today suffering from acute malnutrition will not be saved by pita bread,” says a U.N. official not authorized to speak to the press.

Gaza has become an enclave of haves and have-nots. There are the aid-reliant, one-meal-a-day families in central and southern Gaza, while in the north, there are those foraging for leaves.

The vast majority of the 1.9 million Palestinians in central and southern Gaza, some 1.7 million of whom are displaced, say they rely on humanitarian aid for their small daily meal: flour to bake bread and canned beans or ready-cooked meals provided by charity kitchens. Most have various forms of malnourishment.

In Rafah, Sabreen Shamalakh and her six children, all suffering from hepatitis, have one meal per day despite living in an evacuee center near the hubs of humanitarian organizations in Gaza. Unable to purchase eggs, they rely on canned fava beans for their meal. 

“Food is hard to get here; nutritious food is a luxury,” she says. “When the doctor at the field hospital asked me to feed my children vegetables, I told him, ‘You have to be kidding me. Where can I find them?’”

In the north, where USAID chief Samantha Power said last week that famine is underway, there has been rare good news: the reopening of a World Food Programme-supported bakery Sunday after being closed in November due to Israeli fuel restrictions.

The bakery is able to produce 600,000 loaves of bread a day.

Yet fighting between Israel and Hamas, as well as Israeli restrictions, continues to slow food. The U.N. says 40% of attempts to deliver aid to northern Gaza last week either were denied entry by Israel or turned back due to fighting.

When to eat a lone meal

In the Shujayya neighborhood of Gaza City, Osama and his family plan their daily meal of olive oil and dried thyme and bread for 3 p.m. That's just late enough to prevent returning hunger pangs from keeping them up at night, yet just early enough to prevent him, his wife, and children from fainting for lack of food.

Some days Osama, a former laborer in Israel, and his children find wild plants such as khubaizeh, or mallow leaves, and hamasis, or rumex, to supplement a soup of tomato paste, water, and a hint of basil. A local food kitchen hands out the occasional can of lentils, but it is not enough to feed his family of 13.

“We want to feed our tired and hungry children,” he says. “We have to depend on wild plants to eat.”

The occasional arrival of aid from airdrops or handouts from the U.N. brings “better” days.

One recent day, Osama received a 6-kilogram (13-pound) bag of flour and was able to buy a half-pound of thyme, and made pastries for the children.

Another day he was able to buy a bag of potatoes, fry them up, and serve potato sandwiches – one each. “No one can have seconds,” he says.

Because of poor distribution and a lack of aid staff, most of the aid in northern Gaza can only be purchased on the gray market at inflated prices. A bag of lentils has reached $26; a 2-pound bag of rice is $30; chicken is $10 a pound.

Water, too, is scarce, with tens of thousands suffering dehydration across northern Gaza. More than two dozen children have died from dehydration or malnutrition, according to Gaza’s health ministry and the World Health Organization.

Mr. Sawafiri, the photojournalist, collects rainwater from street puddles.

“When it rains, we are happy,” he says. Yet this has not protected two of his children, ages 5 and 7, from chronic dehydration.

Mr. Sawafiri's malnourished wife is unable to breastfeed their 8-month-old daughter.

“Sometimes my daughter sleeps while crying. She puts her finger in her mouth wanting food until she sleeps,” Mr. Sawafiri says.

Recently, his daughter experienced a near miss when an airstrike hit where she was picking herbs and grass. On a recent attempt to chase after parachuted food aid drops, three people running alongside Mr. Sawafiri were gunned down by an Israeli sniper, he says.

Multiple families say they rely on rancid animal feed for their meals. They pick off insects and mold from bags of barley to find handfuls of mostly decent kernels.

“The search for food north of Wadi Gaza is beyond difficult to describe,” says Mr. Sawafiri. “It feels humiliating.”