Rotten Aid and Toxic Flour: Gaza Families Expose Contaminated Food Deliveries
One family recently documented the contents of an aid parcel: flour infested with mold, insects, and weevils. With no other option, they sat on the floor, picking through the filth by hand, not to cook a meal, but to salvage something vaguely edible for their children.
Al Jazeera correspondent Hind Khoudary, reporting from Deir el-Balah in central Gaza, described the aid packages as inadequate and deeply insufficient.
'The parcels I've seen from the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation contain only a meager amount of food that will not feed a family for long and is not nutritious enough,' she said. A typical box, she noted, included just 4 kg of flour, a couple of bags of pasta, two cans of fava beans, tea bags, some biscuits, and small portions of lentils and soup.
'This is not enough,' Khoudary added. 'And it is not worth the humiliation that Palestinians are enduring just to receive these parcels. We're talking about nearly three months without chicken, without meat, without nutritious food, and that's why most people coming to the hospital now are malnourished Palestinian children.'
The crisis deepened further after Gaza's government media office announced that narcotic pills were discovered inside bags of flour distributed through so-called 'American-Israeli aid centers.' Authorities described the discovery as a deliberate attempt to destabilize Palestinian society from within.
'What happened is not a mere violation, but an organized crime,' the statement read. 'This is a psychological and moral war, targeting the resilience of Gaza's population and seeking to sow addiction in a society already under siege.' The statement held Israel fully responsible for what it called a 'calculated insertion of toxic substances into humanitarian aid' and urged residents to exercise extreme caution when handling any incoming foodstuffs.
Gaza's media office has called on international bodies to investigate and act, warning that the systematic degradation of aid into a tool of psychological warfare constitutes a grave breach of humanitarian norms.
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