Ruwaida Kamal Amer
+972 Magazine / December 4, 2024
Israel’s siege of the north and ‘benevolence’ toward gangs looting aid trucks has led to severe food shortages and skyrocketing prices across Gaza.
Mustafa al-Darsh, a 35-year-old father of three from Gaza City, spends hours every day searching for food for his family. Some days, he manages to secure a few canned goods; other days, his family has to settle for plain rice. “In the north, we yearn to eat bread with some thyme,” he told +972. He hasn’t been able to find flour for months.
Since the start of October, when the Israeli army encircled northern Gaza and began subjecting it to a campaign of expulsion and extermination, no goods — including humanitarian supplies — have entered the area. In early November, a UN panel warned that famine was imminent in the besieged area in the north of the Strip, where around 75,000 Palestinians were estimated to still remain. Local organizations have since urged the UN and international bodies to formally declare a famine. Now, with the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) forced to pause aid deliveries through the Kerem Shalom crossing in the south, hunger and malnutrition across the enclave are set to intensify.
As a father, Al-Darsh usually forgoes his own meals to ensure that his wife and children eat. “Our bodies are exhausted from the lack of food — we’re unable to do anything,” he explained. When night falls, he is usually too hungry to sleep. “Sometimes I feel that I will lose my mind because of what we are living through,” he added.
More often than not, Al-Darsh cannot find any food at all, and his children go without meals for several days at a time. “Every day, I cry because they miss food,” he said. “They constantly ask me about food, telling me what they want to eat.”
“In the north of the Strip, there is a real famine,” Adnan Abu Hasna, an UNRWA spokesman, told +972. “The situation is very dangerous: there is no food, potable water, or any supplies. All health facilities have collapsed, and there are dozens of bodies lying in the streets and under the rubble.” Without international pressure to surge aid into the Strip, Abu Hasna warned, “famine will spread in the north and south.”
But what Al-Darsh described as a “harsh war of starvation” only appears to be escalating by the day. “They treat us as people who do not deserve to live, with the continuous bombing, destruction, and starvation,” he lamented. “We want to die full, not hungry. This is all we hope for.”
‘In the north and south, we live through the same crisis’
Before the war, Khaled Al-Attar told +972, it was shameful to speak about hunger. For the 40-year-old from the northern city of Beit Hanoun, the word still carries that same sense of shame today, even after living through two months of siege that has blocked the entry of any food. “We are not used to hunger,” he explained, “but we are being subjected to it — a great injustice carried out by an immoral and inhumane occupation, supported by the United States.”
Some days, Al-Attar tries to control his hunger by consuming salt and water. His wife was recently bedridden for several days, unable to move from the lack of food. For most of the past year, he noted, “we relied on legumes and canned food. Now, there is nothing available; [here] in the north we have not seen food at all since the beginning of the siege.”
Even as northern Gaza bears the brunt of Israel’s policy of starvation, Palestinians throughout Gaza are going hungry. “In the north and the south we are living through the same crisis: we all have no food in our homes,” Al-Attar said, based on conversations with his relatives in the south.
According to the UN, food security conditions are “alarmingly deteriorating” in the central and southern areas of the Strip — with wheat flour shortages forcing bakeries to close, and only 16 percent of the population able to receive reduced monthly food rations. According to Abu Hasna of UNRWA, only 30 to 35 aid trucks are entering Gaza every day, “and this number is not even enough to serve a residential neighborhood or a single street. How can it be enough for the 2.3 million citizens of the Gaza Strip?”
The severe shortages have led to tragic incidents as people desperately search for food. On Nov. 23, three women were killed after what Palestinian media described as “security forces” opened fire during a stampede for bread at a bakery in Deir al-Balah. A few days later, two children and a 50-year-old woman were crushed to death outside another overcrowded bakery in the same city.
Osama Abu Laban, whose 13-year-old daughter Rahaf was one of the victims, warned her against going to the bakery that day. “I told her not to go; the place was severely crowded,” he told +972. “Thousands were rushing to obtain bread, and there was no police to maintain order.” That was the last time Abu Laban saw his daughter alive. “She entered the crowd of people, and moments later they brought her out to me as a dead body.”
The tragedy left Abu Laban and his wife in a state of shock. “We lived through unbearable circumstances and are still suffering, but no one cares,” he lamented. “I lost my daughter for a loaf of bread. I don’t know what else is left for us to endure.”
Salwa Khreis, a 50-year-old from Beit Lahiya, fled the north last December for what Israeli authorities promised would be a “humanitarian zone” in Al-Mawasi, near Khan Younis. “I was afraid that my 10 grandchildren would die of hunger,” she told +972, “but now I am looking for food to feed them.” Sometimes she scavenges for edible plants in nearby fields, while her three sons go out each morning looking for food. “Some of them return with canned food, and some return with nothing,” she said.
None of Khreis’ sons are able to find any work, and with the exorbitant rise in food costs, what remains of dry goods or fresh vegetables has become too expensive for them to afford. “Bags of flour are very scarce, and if I find a 25-kilo bag it costs $60,” she explained. “A kilo of tomatoes costs $20, a kilo of eggplants goes for $10. Where can I find money to buy this?”
As a diabetic, Khreis now suffers from daily attacks due to the lack of food. Most nights, her grandchildren are unable to sleep, crying from the pangs of hunger. “I lie to them and tell them that tomorrow, we will eat a lot of food. But then tomorrow comes, and I don’t know what to feed them. Sometimes I feel that my heart will stop from this sadness.”
Other Gazans who spoke to +972 described similar shortages of food across the Strip. “We are experiencing a real famine in southern Gaza,” said 23-year-old Reem al-Ghazal from Gaza City, who is currently displaced in Al-Mawasi. ”We don’t have flour; one bag costs about $100 dollars. We rely on bread with a little thyme and canned food, which have also become unavailable. What is the purpose of starving us in this way?” Her relatives in the north, she added, have not eaten “in many days.”
Louay Saqr, a 38-year-old residing in Deir al-Balah after being displaced from Gaza City, described similar hardships. “We adults may be more tolerant of this suffering, but we have children and elderly people,” he said. “My mother fell ill due to malnutrition and was forced to go to the hospital and stay there for a whole week. I call my friends in Khan Younis or Al-Mawasi to ask them if they have food for sale in the markets, but their situation is as difficult as ours.”
Protecting the looters
On November 16, a 109-truck aid convoy passed through the Kerem Shalom crossing, transporting food into southern Gaza — only for 98 of the trucks to be violently looted by armed men inside the Strip, injuring the drivers and causing extensive damage. The incident, although unusual in its scale, exemplified how the breakdown of security inside Gaza has deepened the food crisis: of the meager amount of aid that enters the Gaza, up to 30 percent is looted and stolen, mostly by organized criminal gangs.
The UN has claimed that these armed groups operate in areas under Israeli military control, and “may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence” or “protection” by Israeli forces. A group of 29 major international NGOs, including Save the Children, Oxfam, and the Norwegian Refugee Council, accused the Israeli army of encouraging the looting of humanitarian aid by attacking the Palestinian police forces that are trying to combat it, or standing by as gangs loot trucks and extort their drivers.
Palestinian political analyst Muhammad Shehada believes that Israel is supporting these criminal organizations as part of an effort to find an alternative to Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and UNRWA to control Gaza. The looting and breakdown of order inside the Strip, he argued, also serves a political interest for Israel. “The army has found a justification for preventing the entry of trucks, saying that they are allowed to enter but that Palestinians steal and loot them,” he told +972.
Jihad Islim, secretary-general of the Private Transport Association in Gaza, also holds Israel responsible for these thefts. “If Israel wanted to protect this aid, it could have done so, but it aims to spread chaos and instability in the Gaza Strip,” he argued. “These gangs have already shot and killed nine drivers.”
Islim estimated the value of the stolen goods from the trucks at millions of dollars, warning that this phenomenon will exacerbate the already extreme hunger across Gaza. Because of the widespread looting, much of the aid no longer reaches those who need it most in northern Gaza, and instead ends up in markets where boxes labelled “assistance provided by the United Nations” are sold at up to 700 percent of their original price.
The looting is most systematic between the Kerem Shalom crossing and the southern city of Rafah, an area of Gaza the gangs effectively control. But it also occurs along Salah Al-Din Street, the Strip’s main north-south corridor. Mohammed, a 45-year-old Palestinian truck driver, spoke to +972 about the experience of delivering aid during the war, which he described as the “most difficult and dangerous” period of his 20-year career.
At the beginning of the war, he noted, the Israeli army posed the main threat to aid trucks, often targeting those heading north. “We were risking our lives, but the humanitarian motive inside us was pushing us to continue delivering aid to our people,” he said. For the past four months, however, drivers fear being exposed to theft by different gangs that operate along Salah al-Din Street.
“It starts in eastern Rafah, then the Miraj area [in northern Rafah], and sometimes near the European Hospital [in Khan Younis]; then there is the Bani Suheila roundabout, and the entrance to Deir al-Balah: these are the areas most crowded with theft gangs,” Mohammed explained.
The armed men normally start by shooting at the trucks’ wheels, or at the drivers directly. “We try as much as possible to speed up to pass these gangs,” Mohammed said, “but their numbers are large. The heavy shooting could cost us our lives. [In October,] a colleague of mine was wounded by this gunfire, and another colleague left the truck when his wheels exploded.”
Saeed Daqqa, a 32-year-old Palestinian from Al-Fukhari, east of Salah Al-Din Street near Khan Younis, told +972 that he hears gunfire whenever aid trucks enter the area. “We know that this is gunfire from the gangs who control Salah Al-Din Street. We all feel upset about this: we need aid, and when it is stolen, we [can only] find it in the market at very high prices.”
On November 18, Gaza’s Interior Ministry announced that 20 gang members had been killed in a heavy exchange of gunfire with the police. “The police announced an operation to pursue the thieves who steal the trucks,” Daqqa said. “This may be the beginning of hope for us to stop the famine that is pervading the south.”
In response to allegations that the Israeli army is turning a blind eye to looting of aid convoys by armed gangs, a spokesperson claimed that the army “takes all operationally feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians, including aid convoys and workers,” adding that it was “facilitating and easing the entry of humanitarian aid into the northern Gaza Strip, both through the Erez Crossing and by enabling aid convoys from the south to the north.”
Ruwaida Kamal Amer is a freelance journalist from Khan Younis
