12-04-2025
Six weeks into Israel's Gaza blockade, last food is running out
STORY: It's been six weeks since Israel blockaded Gaza and this is all Rehab Akhras has left for her family of 13 to eat.
She and many others live in this camp of plastic sheets in Khan Younis.
The bombs haven't killed them but hunger will, she says, if Israel doesn't open the checkpoints it has sealed off since the start of March.
"We have survived the war and we survived the airstrikes as we wake up and go to sleep. But we can't survive the hunger, neither us nor our children. Open the crossings and let the children eat and we eat, the sick people and the patients need food.'
In Nuseirat, an outdoor emergency kitchen is on its last legs.
Emergency meal distributions like this are ending.
Israel has cut off all supplies to Gaza's 2.3 million residents. Food stockpiled during a ceasefire at the start of the year has all but run out.
Aid agencies who supply the emergency meals ksay they will have to stop within days unless they can bring in more food.
Neama Farjalla says she treks through the war zone every day, leaving at 6 a.m. in the hope of a plate of rice for her children.
The World Food Programme used to provide bread to 25 bakeries across the Gaza Strip. All are now shut and it says it will soon have to halt food parcel distribution.
Juliette Touma of the U.N.'s UNRWA agency:
"All basic supplies are running out. The markets are also running out of basics. There was a black market in Gaza. Now it's a very, very black market. And what I mean by that is that the prices of commodities have exponentially increased over the past one month plus... WHITE FLASH Babies, children are going to bed hungry. Every day without these basic supplies, Gaza inches closer towards very, very deep hunger.'
Every Gazan can now quote the fantastical prices for the little food left: a 55 pound sack of flour that used to sell for $6 now costs ten times as much.
A quarter gallon of cooking oil, if you can find it, costs $10 instead of $1.50.
Medical charity Medicins sans Frontiers says it is encountering children and pregnant women with severe malnutrition. Lactating mothers are too hungry to be able to breast feed.
Israel denies that Gaza is facing a hunger crisis. The military accuses Hamas militants of exploiting aid, and says it must keep supplies out to prevent the fighters from getting it.
Hamas denies this.
Back in Khan Younis, Akhras says she believes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu means to kill them.
"We are being humiliated. He wants to kill us slowly and we will die slowly.'
