As aid embargo on Strip enters third month, hunger is stalking Gazans again
After a ceasefire shrank malnutrition figures, stores of assistance are now dwindling and food for sale — which may come from Hamas’s stolen hoards — is priced exorbitantly
Nurit Yohanan is The Times of Israel's Palestinian and Arab world correspondent
More than 60 days have passed since Israel imposed a full ban on the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, including food, water, medical supplies, fuel, and material for shelters.
The period marks the longest time in which no aid has entered the Palestinian territory since war broke out with Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Israeli officials say enough aid entered the Strip during a two-month ceasefire at the beginning to allow Gazans to survive the months-long halt as it seeks to ramp up pressure on Hamas for the return of 59 hostages remaining captive in the enclave.
But data and testimony from inside the Strip point to a worsening hunger crisis and rising rates of malnutrition, as Israel explores ways to resume aid deliveries without allowing the goods to wind up in the hands of Hamas or allied terror groups, who may be exploiting the crisis to fund the ongoing war.
In late April, the World Food Programme announced that it had completed its final delivery of supplies to kitchens distributing hot meals from the organization’s warehouses.
Weeks earlier, the WFP declared the closure of the last functioning bakeries in Gaza and halted food distributions to individuals to prioritize supplies for communal kitchens.
In recent days, footage shared online has shown heavy crowding and long lines at kitchens distributing hot meals.
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“Hunger is extreme, it’s reached unnatural levels,” a resident of Gaza told The Times of Israel via text message, speaking on condition of anonymity due to fears for his safety.
Even before Israel halted aid deliveries on March 2, many in Gaza were failing to receive humanitarian assistance.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, a survey of 256 displacement sites within Gaza carried out from March 2 to March 20 found that representatives in 68 percent of the camps reported that families living there had not received aid in the 30 days prior. The 256 camps are thought to house upwards of 40,000 Palestinian families.
The Gazan man noted that he had been forced to buy food at inflated market prices due to the lack of aid, which is provided free of charge.
“I had to sell personal belongings to afford food,” he said.
According to a WFP market survey, food prices in April were on average 50% higher than in March, and up to 740% higher than during the ceasefire in February.
Several staple food items, including dairy products, eggs, fruits, and meat, were unavailable altogether.
The price hikes have rendered much of the food unaffordable for the vast majority of Gazans, who have been without a steady income since the start of the war.
“There are vegetables and canned goods in the markets, but at very high prices,” a resident of Gaza City told The Times of Israel via a messaging app, speaking on condition of anonymity for safety reasons. “A kilogram of sugar costs 70 shekels, a kilogram of tomatoes 25 shekels, and a kilogram of cucumbers 20 shekels.”
“Yesterday, I cooked a meal of just okra, without any meat,” they added.
Videos on social media, including from recent days, have shown Gazans preparing meals or eating out at the few restaurants that remain open in the Strip, and can be seen as belying the reports of food shortages.
But those videos could also reflect the direness of the situation in Gaza: What aid is in the Strip is not being distributed evenly, with some able to keep their bellies full — whether through political connections or abundant financial resources — while others starve.
Seized aid
It remains unclear where the food offered on the market is being sourced from, but it is plausible that goods are coming from aid stockpiles commandeered by Hamas after entering Gaza. Under renewed assault, the terror group, which has previously been accused of diverting humanitarian aid for its own use, may be price-gauging Gazans to pay fighters and fund its operations.
Throughout the war, there have been dozens of documented cases showing armed figures associated with terrorist organizations in Gaza taking control of aid trucks. In September 2024, Israel’s Channel 12 published recordings of Hamas operatives discussing the transportation of humanitarian aid from warehouses stocked with supplies to the group’s leaders in Khan Younis.
On March 30, Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled that humanitarian organizations petitioning for the resumption of aid deliveries to Gaza “had not proven that Israel was starving the population of the Strip,” though, the judges noted that the decision did not cover the period following Israel’s complete halt of aid into Gaza.
In its verdict, the court noted that Israel, as a rule, does not itself supply humanitarian goods to Gaza, but had allowed their entry into the territory during the relevant period as per instructions from the political leadership.
In his decision, Chief Justice Isaac Amit wrote that terrorist organizations were embedded within the civilian population and seizing humanitarian aid. Israel’s obligations to assist Gaza’s civilian population must be balanced against operational needs, including preventing assistance from reaching terror groups, he said.
Israel is expected to resume aid deliveries in the coming weeks, but how that happens has become a point of contention within the political leadership and between the government and the Israel Defense Forces.
Seeking to get assistance to Gazan civilians while preventing it from falling into the hands of Hamas, a plan has taken shape that would do away with wholesale distribution and warehousing of aid.
Instead, international organizations and private security contractors will hand out boxes of food to individual Gazan families from within an IDF-secured zone inside Gaza, an Israeli and Arab official familiar with the matter told The Times of Israel last week.
At a recent cabinet meeting, Defense Minister Israel Katz pressed the issue, suggesting that aid distribution be managed by civilian American companies under military supervision, or directly by the IDF.
IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir rejected the prospect of the IDF being directly involved in handing out assistance, echoing the position of his predecessor Herzi Halevi.
According to reports, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich snapped at Zamir, telling him, “We have instructed you to prepare for this. We tell you what [to do] and you will figure out how. If you can’t, we’ll find someone who can.”
In the meantime, Hamas’s stockpiles of hoarded food are shrinking, and estimates of how long its supplies may last vary from two months to half a year. With its stores dissipating, according to the Wall Street Journal, the terror group’s difficulties in raising money and recruiting new fighters and support are only expected to compound.
Child malnutrition rising again
Experts worry that the hunger woes will be felt most acutely by Gaza’s most vulnerable. In the first two weeks of April, 64 children in the Strip were diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, or SAM. Another 641 were found to have moderate acute malnutrition, according to OCHA, the UN humanitarian affairs agency, citing data from aid organizations that screened 21,000 children.
At one hospital in the relatively well-off Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, 3-5 children were diagnosed with SAM and related medical complications weekly over the past month, more than double the average rate in February.
Just over 2,000 children were diagnosed with acute malnutrition in February, the lowest number since reliable data began being collected eight months earlier, likely thanks to the ceasefire and aid flooding into the Strip.
By March, the number had risen to over 3,700, according to the UN, relying on data collected by a number of humanitarian organizations in Gaza, including UN agencies and non-governmental organizations. (Screenings also rose from 84,000 in February to 92,000 in March.)
Dr. Iyas al-Bursh, a physician at Shifa Hospital in the Gaza Strip, said he had seen the number of children arriving at the hospital with nutrition-related health issues rise over the previous two months, including malnutrition and physical weakness.
“There is currently no food in the hospital, such as dairy products or fruits, which wounded patients need to regain strength and replenish their blood supply,” he told The Times of Israel by phone. “This delays recovery and weakens patients’ ability to fight infections.”
The famine that wasn’t
When Israel halted aid into Gaza on March 2, it marked the end of what had been nearly 15 months of aid being let into the Strip. On October 21, 2023, deliveries of food and other types of assistance began entering the enclave via the Rafah crossing with Egypt, following a two-week total siege on the Strip sparked by the October 7 Hamas attack, in which some 1,200 people were slaughtered across southern Israel and 251 kidnapped into Gaza.
Despite the deliveries, Israel has been hounded by accusations throughout the war that it has not allowed enough assistance into the Strip, quickly leading to a deluge of reports of rising hunger and rocketing food prices in the enclave, which were later echoed by humanitarian organizations and the UN.
The claims seemed to climax in March 2024, when the Famine Review Committee of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification system, a committee composed of international famine experts operating under the auspices of the UN, warned that famine was “projected and imminent,” particularly in northern Gaza. Some 677,000 people were already under a food insecurity “catastrophe,” it alleged.
But that predicted famine — as defined by the expert committee — evidently did not materialize; by June the same committee published an updated report stating that “available evidence does not indicate that famine is currently occurring.”
The effects of the alarm, however, have continued to ripple outward.
The data used by the famine review boards served as evidence by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court prosecutor in legal proceedings initiated against Israel. Today, war crimes charges hang over the head of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant, who are accused of using starvation as a method of war.
On the other side, doubts raised over the veracity of the famine claim may have resulted in some being less willing to take seriously claims of hunger in Gaza, even as food shortages appear to take hold in the Strip again.
In mid-February, the organization UK Lawyers for Israel published a review finding that not only had no famine occurred, but one may not have been imminent at that time, with even levels of acute malnutrition only marginally higher than prewar figures.
The group alleged that there had been severe problems with warnings regarding food availability issued by organizations that underpinned the famine warning, due to what it said was their use of “incomplete or inaccurate data,” inconsistent application of methodological standards, failure to take into account new data, and “potential bias.”
Two weeks after the report was issued, the trucks ferrying aid into Gaza went idle for 63 days and counting.
The Times of Israel Community.