Gaza's starving men and women chase trucks, willing to die to feed families

Al Jazeera

07-07-2025

Gaza City – I only recently witnessed what it's like for the crowds waiting desperately for aid in Gaza.
I don't see them in Deir el-Balah, but we travel north to Gaza to visit my family, and on the coastal al-Rashid Street, I saw something that made my heart uneasy about the much-discussed ceasefire in Gaza – what if it doesn't address the aid crisis?
This crisis prompted Hamas to request amendments to the proposed ceasefire, on the entry of aid and ending the United States- and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), at whose gates Israel kills dozens waiting for aid every day.
On al-Rashid Street
Since Israel broke the last ceasefire in March, our visits to the north have become highly calculated, less about planning and more about reading the escalation levels of Israeli air strikes.
The intention to go north, formed before sleeping, is cancelled when we hear bombs.
Conversely, waking up to relative quiet could spur a snap decision. We quickly dress and pack clothes, supplies, and documents, always under one lingering fear: that tanks will cut the road off again and trap us in the north.
By the first day of Eid al-Adha, June 6, we had been avoiding visiting my family for three weeks.
Israel's ground assault, 'Operation Gideon's Chariots', was at its peak, and my husband and I decided to stay put in hopes of avoiding the violence.
But eventually, the longing to see family outweighed fear and our daughter Banias really wanted to see her grandfather for Eid, so we made the trip.
The journeys reveal the dysfunction of Gaza's current transport system.
A trip that used to take just over 20 minutes in a private car – door to door from Deir el-Balah to my family's home in Gaza City – now requires multiple stops, long walks, and long waits for unreliable transport.
To reach Gaza City, we take three 'internal rides' within central Gaza, short trips between neighbourhoods or towns like az-Zawayda, Deir el-Balah, and Nuseirat, often on shared donkey carts or old cars dragging open carts behind them.
Waiting for these rides can take an hour or more, the donkey carts holding up to 12 people, and car-cart combinations carrying six in the car, plus 10 to 12 in the cart.
Then comes the 'external ride', longer, riskier travel between governorates usually involving a crowded tuk-tuk carrying 10 passengers or more along bombed-out roads.
Since the January truce – broken by Israel in March – Israel has allowed only pedestrian and cart movement, with vehicles prohibited.
The entire trip can take up to two hours, depending on road conditions. Exhausting journeys have become my new normal, especially when travelling with children.
The 'aid seekers'
My last two trips north brought me face-to-face with the 'aid seekers'.
That harsh label has dominated news headlines recently, but witnessing their journey up close defies all imagination. It belongs to another world entirely.
On June 6, to fulfil Banias's Eid wish to see her grandfather, we boarded a tuk-tuk as evening fell.
Near the western edge of what people in Gaza call al-Shari al-Jadeed ('the new road'), the 7km Netzarim Corridor that the Israeli army built to bisect the enclave, I saw hundreds of people on sand dunes on both sides of the street. Some had lit fires and gathered around them.
It's a barren, ghostly stretch of sand and rubble, filled with the living shadows of Gaza's most desperate.
I started filming with my phone as the other passengers explained that these 'aid seekers' were waiting to intercept aid trucks and grab whatever they could.
Some of them are also waiting for an 'American GHF' distribution point on the parallel Salah al-Din Street, which is supposed to open at dawn.
A bitter discussion ensued about the US-run aid point that had 'caused so many deaths'. The aid system, they said, had turned survival into a lottery and dignity into a casualty.
I sank into thought, seeing this was entirely different from reading about it or watching the news.
Banias snapped me out of my thoughts: 'Mama, what are these people doing here? Camping?'
Oh God! This child lives in her own, rosy world.
My mind reeled from her cheerful interpretation of one of the bleakest scenes I'd ever witnessed: black smoke, emaciated bodies, hunger, dust-filled roads.
I was silent, unable to answer.
Men and boys passed by, some with backpacks, others with empty white bags like flour sacks, for whatever they might find. Cardboard boxes are too hard to carry.
The aid seekers walk from all over Gaza, gathering in the thousands to wait all night until 4, 5, or 6am, fearing that Israeli soldiers will kill them before they can get into the 'American GHF'.
According to reports, they rush in to grab whatever they can, a chaotic stampede where the strong devour the weak.
These men were death projects in waiting; they know, but they go anyway.
Why? Because hunger persists and there's no other solution. It's either die of hunger or die trying to survive it.
We reached Gaza City. Dust, darkness, and congestion surrounded us as the tuk-tuk drove through completely destroyed roads.
As each jolt shot through our backs, a passenger remarked: 'We'll all have back pain and disc issues from this tuk-tuk.'
A silence fell, broken by Banias, our little reporter from the pink world: 'Mama, Baba, look at the moon behind you! It's completely full.
'I think I see Aunt Mayar in the sky next to the moon,' Banias said, about my sister who travelled during the war to Egypt, then Qatar.
When we asked how, she explained: 'She said her name means the star that lives beside the moon. Look!'
We smiled despite the misery, too drained to respond. The other passengers listened in to her dreamlike observations.
'Baba, when will we study astronomy in school?' she asked. 'I want to learn about the moon and stars.'
We didn't have time to answer. We had arrived, and the curtain fell on another exhausting day.
The return
I told my family what I saw on al-Rashid, and they listened, shocked and intrigued, to their 'field correspondent'.
They, too, were preoccupied with food shortages, discussing mixing their last kilo of flour with pasta to stretch it further – conversations ruled by fear of hunger and the unknown.
We didn't stay long, just two days before heading back along a road filled with fear of bombing and aid seekers.
Only this time it was daylight, and I could see women sitting by the road, ready to spend the night waiting for aid.
About two weeks later, on June 26, we made the trip again.
I travelled with my two children, my sister – who had come back with us on the last trip – and my brother's wife and her two young children: four-year-old Salam and two-year-old Teeb. My husband came the next day.
We were seven in a small, worn-out minibus, and we had nine others crammed in with us: three men beside the driver, a young man with his wife and sister, and a woman with her husband and child.
Sixteen people in a van, clearly not built for that!
Although vehicles are banned from al-Rashid, some do manage to pass. Tired and worried about the young children with us, we took the risk and, that day, we made it.
I don't know whether it was fate or misfortune, but as our van neared the area around the Netzarim Corridor, World Food Programme trucks arrived.
Two trucks stopped on the road, waiting to be 'looted'.
People in Gaza will tell you this is a new policy under Israeli terms: no organised distribution, no lists. Just let the trucks in, let whoever can take aid, take it, and let the rest die.
On a nearby street, three others also stopped. People began climbing the trucks, grabbing what they could.
Within moments, all vehicles, tuk-tuks, and carts, including our van, stopped. Everyone around us – men, women, and children – started running towards the trucks.
A commotion erupted in our car. The young man travelling with his wife and sister insisted on going despite their pleas not to. He jumped out and two other men followed.
I was most shocked when a woman behind us shoved past, telling her husband and son: 'I'm going. You stay.'
She ran like the wind. Other women and girls left nearby vehicles and sprinted to the trucks.
I wondered: Would she be able to climb up the side of a truck and wrestle men for food?
Human waves surged around us, seemingly from nowhere, and I begged our driver to move on. The scene felt like a battle for survival, well past thoughts of dignity, justice, and humanity.
The driver moved slowly; he had to keep stopping to avoid the crowds of people running in the opposite direction. My anxiety spiked. The kids sensed it too.
None of us could comprehend what we were seeing, not even me, a journalist who claims to be informed. The truth: reality is entirely different.
As we drove, I saw young men clutching bags, standing by the roadside. One had a knife, fearing he'd be attacked.
Other men carried blades or tools because being attacked by fellow hungry people is not unlikely.
'We've become thieves just to eat and feed our children,' is the new phase Israel is imposing through its 'humanitarian' US-run foundation and its 'distribution policy'.
And here we are, in this collapsing social order, where only the cries of empty stomachs are heard.
How can we blame people for their misery? Did they choose this war?
The car wound its way through until the flood of aid seekers finally dissipated. It felt like emerging from another world.
We reached an intersection downtown, completely drained. I silently unpacked the car, wondering: How many sorrowful worlds are buried within you, Gaza?
That day, I saw the world of the aid seekers after spending 20 months immersed in the worlds of the displaced, the wounded, the dead, the hungry, and the thirsty.
How many more worlds of suffering must Gaza endure before the world finally sees us – and we finally earn a lasting ceasefire?