‘We're Trying to Do the Best We Can Before We Die'

The Atlantic

6 days ago

George Anton is hungry, but he's become used to the sensation—the urgent, aching feeling in his stomach, the heaviness of his limbs. He hardly has time to acknowledge the discomfort, given all the work he has to do. He is the operations manager for an aid-distribution program operating through the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City, the sole remaining Catholic church in Gaza.
Anton lives at the church in a single room that he shares with his wife and three daughters. Four hundred people are sheltering there, he told me; it was once a sanctuary from the war. Recently, however, the fighting has come to encircle it. An Israeli tank shell struck the church early last month, killing three people there, according to a statement by the patriarchate.
This week, daily pauses in the fighting have calmed the neighborhood somewhat, but not enough for the church to resume aid programs: food hampers, a communal laundry, psychosocial support programs and clinics. Some of these functioned even before the current war. But these days, the church has nothing to distribute. Its food pantry is empty, and supplies have run out. When I reached Anton by phone on Wednesday, he was busy looking for a way to bring more food to the church's pantry.
Anton is one of hundreds of Gazan aid workers—affiliated with religious, international, and local organizations—who are trying to find and distribute supplies to keep others alive. Complicating their work is their own hunger and exhaustion, as well as the paucity of food coming into the territory altogether. An alert on Tuesday from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, an organization made up of United Nations agencies and aid groups, noted that the 'latest data indicates that famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.'
The people sheltering at the church have, in the absence of communal supplies, begun to ration their own small stashes of food items, mostly gathered from the markets when the situation was stable enough for them to venture out. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has become the official mechanism for dispensing food aid, has very few distribution points, all in areas far from the church. Many Gazans fear visiting these sites: According to the UN, more than 1,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces while seeking assistance from GHF, the UN, and other aid convoys. (GHF has called these numbers 'false and exaggerated statistics.')
I spoke with one Palestinian aid worker who did try to get food from GHF. In early June, Youssef Alwikhery, an occupational therapist with Medical Aid for Palestinians, hadn't eaten for close to a week. Several of his brothers, uncles, and cousins had tried to get food from GHF before—30 attempts altogether, he estimated—but only one had succeeded in bringing a box back. So Alwikhery rose one morning at 3 a.m. and made his way to Salah al-Din Street in central Gaza, a main thoroughfare leading to a distribution point that was a little over a mile from his home. He saw thousands of people. Some started running toward the distribution point, and he ran too. 'It was like a game, like a death game,' he told me. Soon came the sound of shots and explosions. Alwikhery turned back. 'It's not help. It's like Russian roulette,' he said. 'If you want to run, you might die, or you might get injured. You might get a box. This is the formula. This is the point.'
Alwikhery now pays exorbitant prices for small amounts of food at the market, and he eats just one meal a day. He lives with his parents and his brothers' families, including 9- and 11-year-old children. They, too, eat only one meal a day, usually around four or five in the evening, and if a family member needs to cook, they burn whatever they can, because the price of fuel is high. One photo Alwikhery sent me shows his occupational-therapy textbook being used as kindling.
I first met Alwikhery in the summer of 2022, at Al-Awda Hospital in the Jabalia refugee camp in the northernmost part of Gaza, when we worked with the same international medical organization. He specialized in helping patients with congenital disabilities carry out their daily activities. Israel ordered the closure of Al-Awda in May, and now Alwikhery works in Medical Aid for Palestinians' emergency clinic in central Gaza. He told me that he finds the state of his pediatric patients disturbing; he described children with cerebral palsy who couldn't move their bodies to do simple exercises because they were so calorically deprived.
My call with Anton was at 9 p.m. on Wednesday, and so far that day, he told me, he had consumed nothing but coffee and tea. He rises early, at 6 a.m. The first thing he does is check to make sure the church's solar panels, water tanks, and piping are still functioning and did not sustain any damage overnight. Then he reads the news, goes to morning prayers, and calls his colleagues in Jerusalem for updates on when food trucks might reach Gaza and how they will be secured.
Around 4 p.m. the day we spoke, his wife and three daughters, ages 9, 11, and 14, had shared one can of tuna with some bread. In recent weeks, his girls have taken to spending much of their time in the family's room, sleeping and reading to conserve their energy. The oldest and youngest used to enjoy soccer and basketball, but now they don't feel safe going out, and anyway, they're too tired. Anton told me he encourages them to pretend they're fasting, as though for Lent.
Photos: Starvation and chaos in Gaza
Sometimes, fellow aid workers or journalists tell Anton about families on the brink, and he gathers any extra supplies he can from the families sheltering in the church to deliver by foot. Recently, a journalist told him about a father of six who used a wheelchair and could not access income or aid. This man had no extended family nearby to share resources. Anton was able to gather only enough food to last the family approximately one week. When conditions were safe enough last Saturday, he delivered the food to the family's tent. The children, two boys and two girls, were 'really suffering,' he told me. 'They're like skeletons, you know.'
Families such as that one, where one or more members have a disability, or whose kinship networks are small or nonexistent, are among those hardest hit by starvation, both Anton and Alwikhery told me.
Anton's day would not finish after we spoke. He said he would try to find himself some bread later in the night. He and some other people sheltering at the church would stay up to monitor the hostilities in the neighborhood, tend to anyone needing help or comfort, and assist some of the elderly to use the communal bathrooms in the dark.
'We're trying to do the best we can before we die, you know,' he told me. 'Because I'm telling you, if this situation will last for a longer time, all of us will die hungry.'