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Times
6 days ago
- General
- Times
I'm safe now but my family in Gaza are starving before my eyes
For a moment, I could not recognise her. The video call had finally gone through after days of failed attempts. The connection crackled, the image was grainy, but then her face appeared and I froze. It took me a few seconds to realise it was my mother. Her face had changed. The woman I knew — strong, warm, composed — now looked frail and unfamiliar, her skin pale, her eyes sunken. Her voice, once clear and confident, had become raspy and strained. 'Look at my wrinkles,' she said, forcing a smile and pulling at the skin on her cheeks. 'I've grown old in this war.' I tried to keep the tone light. 'You're still the most beautiful woman I know,' I said. 'What's your skincare secret?' She replied: 'We haven't had proper food in days.' My parents are among many from the town of Khan Yunis in central Gaza who fled west to al-Mawasi — a narrow, overcrowded strip of land by the sea that Israel declared a 'safe zone', though it offers neither safety nor food. Like everyone else here, they live in a tent, surviving on lentils and rice, if they're lucky. Sometimes they grind lentils into bread. These are not poor people. My mother was a director at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) Gaza Training Centre. My father worked in public relations at the University of Palestine. Today, they boil water and throw in whatever food they can find to keep hunger at bay. My younger brother Mohammed, 18, should be in his second year of university. Instead, he often queues for hours in the hope of getting a bag of flour. I worry every time he leaves home not just because of airstrikes: stories abound of young men being stabbed to death and robbed of their flour or trampled in the chaos of the food lines. This is the worst phase of the war. Not only because the bombings have not stopped — the air rumbles almost constantly with Israel's airstrikes — but because people are also dying slowly. Starvation doesn't scream like missiles. It doesn't flash across headlines. It kills quietly. In December, I was forced to flee our home in Khan Yunis with my husband and our two children, Maryam, seven, and Wajih, six. I didn't want to leave. I told the children again and again: 'We'll come back soon.' But we never have. Before that, our home had already become a shelter. My parents, siblings and their children had all taken refuge in our building. My husband's family lived on the first floor. We were upstairs. We sheltered about 100 people in that home. When the strikes intensified in December 2023, my family moved to the Khan Yunis Training Centre, where we were crammed into a single room. I took our children to Rafah, where we ended up living in a basement with 17 others. There was no running water or toilets, let alone electricity. Then, in January, an Israeli airstrike hit an apartment next to us in Tel al-Sultan, a neighbourhood we thought was safe. Eleven people were killed, most of them children. That night, I fled again with my children, this time to my sister's home in east Rafah. Even that area was marked in red on Israeli digital maps, meaning it could be targeted. But we had no choice. Eventually, The Times helped to arrange an evacuation for myself and the children. My husband had to stay behind. Friday, July 25, was our wedding anniversary — the second we have spent apart. I wish more than anything that he could be with us. After seven long months in Egypt, I received a Safe Haven fellowship from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, allowing me to continue my work as a journalist in safety in Amsterdam. Here I have shelter, warmth and food — unlike my family. Communicating with them when they live in a land without electricity can be complicated. Some people in Gaza with access to solar panels charge a fee for an internet password and signal strong enough to allow video calls. My husband is working as a journalist for NBC and living in Khan Yunis. He tells me that hunger has changed how people look at each other. 'We stare longer,' he said. 'Sometimes we don't recognise faces we once knew. War and hunger have reshaped them.' My mother, for her part, tells me that she recently went to the market hoping to find something to cook. She came back with one courgette — just one — for 40 shekels (£9). It had to feed ten people. She told me how she tried to stretch a kilo of flour into enough dough, how she spent hours trying to find something to use as fuel — bits of wood, cardboard, anything that would catch fire, how she eventually managed to bake 12 loaves — one for each person. My aunt fainted from hunger one day and had to be taken to hospital and fed on a glucose drip. My diabetic uncle, who needs a strict diet, is now at constant risk. My sister, Riham, also lives in a tent with her husband and children in al-Mawasi after being displaced four times. Her husband spends his days waiting near the main road where aid trucks might pass. After waiting every day for hours, he came back with a 25-kilo bag of flour on Wednesday night. Riham sent me a joyful message — not just because they finally had food, but because her husband had returned alive. Their children greeted him as if he had brought home a rare treasure. The family stayed up baking late that night outside their tent. Riham sent me a photo of Baraa, her ten-year-old son, carefully watching the flames as he flipped dough on a blackened metal tray balanced over bricks. With no oven or gas, people rely on open fires like this built from scraps of debris and wood. Baraa helps to make bread after his father managed to get a bag of flour 'But many nights, all I can give them is soup,' said Riham. 'They fall asleep hungry and wake up the same.' Even those who still have money, like my husband, cannot find anything to buy. 'We eat olive oil with dry bread,' he said. But even if you can afford the food when it exists it doesn't mean you can get it. There's a severe cash crisis, too. Many shops and vendors no longer accept banknotes because they are worn out and torn. Israel hasn't allowed any new currency into Gaza since the war began, so most of the remaining bills are damaged beyond use. This has given rise to a new job in Gaza: banknote repairers. They charge a fee to 'laminate' old banknotes, which is meant to keep them usable. Cash machines have long since ceased functioning. So 'cash brokers' are charging huge commissions to help people access their own money in banks. My mother recently paid them 1,000 shekels (£220) via a banking app. She was given only 600 shekels (£130) in cash. People have turned to bartering. Several of my friends now use Facebook groups to exchange basic goods — a bag of lentils for a bag of rice, or sugar for flour. A can of fava beans costs 25 shekels (£5.50). A kilo of lentils is 60 (£13). Tomatoes and cucumbers go for 100 shekels (£20) per kilo if they can be found at all, onions for 120 (£26.50). As for flour, it is gold: 'Before the war, a kilo of flour cost no more than three shekels (65p),' said my sister. 'Now a 25-kilo sack costs up to 2,000 shekels (£440) if you can find it.' I now live in the Netherlands, far from Gaza. But the hunger is never far. It's in my phone calls, in the words I hear every day: 'We're hungry … there is no food … we are waiting to die.' ABED RAHIM KHATIB/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES Since I left, I've learnt how heavy a full plate can feel. I look at food and see faces: my husband, my mother's, my father's, those of my nieces and nephews. I eat only once a day, not because I'm fasting, but because I can't bear to eat when they have nothing. And beyond the hunger, there's the fear. My husband is still there, still documenting, still surviving. He's come close to death more times than I can count. Our days revolve around short messages, unstable signals and constant dread.
The Guardian
23-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Eleven-minute race for food: how aid points in Gaza became ‘death traps'
Raed Jamal sends the message shortly after he returns, empty-handed, from an aid distribution point to his tent in the al-Mawasi displacement camp in south-west Gaza. 'The tanks came and started firing. Three boys near me were martyred,' says the 36-year-old, who has four children. 'I didn't even get anything, just two empty boxes.' Jamal's journey involved a long walk to and from a former residential neighbourhood bulldozed by Israeli forces and turned into one of four militarised aid distribution centres run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which is based in Delaware in the US. The GHF sites – Tal al-Sultan, Saudi neighbourhood, Khan Younis and Wadi Gaza – are located in evacuation zones, which means civilians seeking food have to enter areas they have been ordered to leave. According to GHF's Facebook page, the sites remain open for as little as eight minutes at a time, and in June the average for the Saudi site was 11 minutes. These factors have led to accusations from NGOs that the system is dangerous by design. The Unrwa chief, Philippe Lazzarini, has said 'the so-called mechanism … is a death trap costing more lives than it saves.' The system favours the strongest, so it is mostly men who travel along the designated routes. Then they wait – often for hours – for a centre to open. Finally, there is a dash into the centre of the zones and a scramble to grab a box. At every stage, those seeking aid pass Israeli tanks and troops, as quadcopters fly above. In another clip shared by Jamal he ducks as bullets pass overhead. 'We have purged our hearts of fear,' Jamal says of his near daily walks to the site. 'I need to bring food for my children so they don't die of hunger.' GHF, a startup organisation with no experience of distributing food in complex conflict zones, employs US mercenaries at the sites, which opened in May. They replaced 400 non-militarised aid points run under a UN system that Israel claimed had to be shut down because Hamas was diverting aid from it. No evidence for this has been provided. Since May, more than 1,000 people have died while seeking food from the centres and other humanitarian convoys, according to the UN. The sites' opening times are usually announced in posts on a Facebook account and, more recently, messages sent through a Telegram channel. A WhatsApp channel was also set up in the first weeks. People have been warned not to approach the centres until they open. As the chart below shows, for the site Jamal visited, the amount of time between the site's opening time being announced and the opening itself decreased dramatically in June. Mahmoud Alareer, a 27-year-old living in a tent in western Gaza City, says the opening time announcements for the aid site he uses – Wadi Gaza – have become useless, because of the distance from where he is living. Instead, he travels to the edges of the site in the middle of the night and gambles on it opening at 2am, as it has on every visit so far. First he climbs on to the back of a truck for the long ride south from Gaza City through the militarised Netzarim corridor. Then he waits in the dark until Israeli forces allow him to enter. 'You get there and you slowly, slowly advance,' he says. 'You always know that it could be you who gets shot, or it might be someone next to you.' Alareer says chaos always ensues when the aid point opens, as people start running towards the packages, which are left in the middle of the distribution zone. People trip over craters and tangled wires. GHF has faced severe criticism from the humanitarian community due to the dangers posed to Palestinians both at the sites and on the roads around them. In early July, more than 170 NGOs called for GHF to be shut down, accusing it of violating the principles of humanitarian aid, and calling for the resumption of non-militarised aid in Gaza. Médecins Sans Frontières' (MSF) emergency coordinator in Gaza, Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, says night-time distributions are particularly dangerous because so many roads in southern Gaza have been made unrecognisable by Israeli bombing, making it hard for Palestinians to stick to routes designated by GHF. Zabalgogeazkoa is scathing about the GHF system. 'This is not humanitarian aid,' he says. 'We can only think that it was designed to cause damage to the people seeking aid.' A GHF spokesperson denied that their system was unsafe, claiming that the danger was outside their distribution zones. They also accused the UN of using 'exaggerated' casualty figures. The IDF have been contacted for comment. GHF has previously defended its operations and accused its critics of engaging in a 'turf war' over humanitarian supplies. It says it bears no responsibility for deaths outside the perimeters of its sites. The Israeli military has previously acknowledged firing warning shots at Palestinians who it says have approached its forces in a suspicious manner. It has also disputed some of the death tolls provided by the Palestinian authorities. GHF runs only four sites to feed 2 million people, in a territory where extreme hunger is widespread and food security experts have warned of looming famine. According to figures released by Gaza's health ministry 33 people have died due to starvation and malnutrition since Sunday. It says it has delivered more than 85 million meals 'via roughly 1,422,712 boxes' since its operations began. According to these figures, each box would provide a family with about 60 meals. The organisation has posted photos of GHF-marked boxes that have items such as flour, potatoes, beans and oil. However, Palestinians in Gaza have shared pictures showing open boxes at GHF sites containing a smaller range of items. Olga Cherevko, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, says she could not comment on the specific logistics of GHF, but that aid should go beyond food and should include water, cooking gas or other cooking facilities. 'If you look at Gaza now … people have been deprived of everything that sustains life: shelter materials, fuel, cooking gas, hygiene materials, everything that one needs to feel dignified, to have some sort of semblance of normality,' she says. According to the World Food Programme (WFP), nearly a third of Gaza's population is going several days without food, and 470,000 people are expected to face the most severe levels of hunger between May and September this year. The WFP has also warned that dietary diversity declined sharply in May and continued to worsen in June. Damage to farmland over the course of the war has only increased Palestinians' reliance on aid. A study published this year using satellite imagery to assess damage to farmland found up to 70% of tree crops had been damaged. A Unosat assessment from April found that 71.2% of Gaza's greenhouses had been damaged. This sequence shows damage to greenhouses and orchards in Beit Lahiya. In late March, dozens of bakeries supported by the WFP halted production due to the Israeli blockade. A handful briefly resumed bread production in May when some trucks were allowed into the territory, as this timeline shows. Jamal reiterates that he has no choice but to return to his nearest GHF site, despite the dangers. 'I have gone four days in a row and not brought anything back, not even flour – nothing,' he says. 'Sometimes you just can't beat the others. But what else can we do, our life is a struggle.' This article was amended on 22 July 2025. An earlier version said the price of flour in Gaza had risen by 31 May to $420 per kg. This was based on a published UN figure that had later been corrected to $420 for a 25kg bag.
The Guardian
22-07-2025
- The Guardian
First Thing: Gaza food points called a ‘death trap' as hundreds of civilians killed seeking aid
Good morning. Raed Jamal sends the message shortly after he returns, empty-handed, from a food distribution point to his tent in the al-Mawasi displacement camp in south-west Gaza. 'The tanks came and started firing. Three boys near me were martyred,' says the 36-year-old, who has four children. 'I didn't even get anything, just two empty boxes.' Jamal's journey involved a long walk to and from a former residential neighbourhood bulldozed by Israeli forces and turned into one of four militarised food distribution centres run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which is based in Delaware in the US. In a new visual investigation, the Guardian has examined these food points. Since May, more than 1,000 people have died while seeking aid from the centres and other humanitarian convoys, according to the UN. The GHF sites – Tal al-Sultan, Saudi neighbourhood, Khan Younis and Wadi Gaza – are located in evacuation zones, which means civilians seeking food have to enter areas they have been ordered to leave. According to GHF's Facebook page, the sites remain open for as little as eight minutes at a time, and in June the average for the Saudi site was 11 minutes. These factors have led to accusations from NGOs that the system is dangerous by design. The head of Unrwa, Philippe Lazzarini, has said 'the so-called mechanism … is a death trap costing more lives than it saves'. What is the GHF and what happened to the former aid sites? GHF, a startup organisation with no experience of distributing food in complex conflict zones, employs US mercenaries at the sites, which opened in May. They replaced 400 non-militarised aid points run under a UN system that Israel claimed had to be shut down because Hamas was diverting aid from it. No evidence for this has been provided. A woman who first accused Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell of sexual assault almost three decades ago has told the New York Times that she had urged law enforcement officials at the time to investigate powerful people in the couple's orbit, including Donald Trump. Maria Farmer was among the first women to report Epstein and his partner, Maxwell, of sexual crimes back in 1996 when, according to a new interview with the Times, she also identified Trump among those close to Epstein as worthy of attention. She told the Times she repeated that message when she was re-interviewed by the FBI about Epstein in 2006. She raised Trump's name specifically because of an unsettling encounter with him late one night in 1995 in Epstein's offices, which she said she told law enforcement agents at the time and has since recounted publicly. Has Trump been accused of anything? Law enforcement agencies have not accused the president of any wrongdoing related to Epstein, and he has never been named as a target of any investigation. The Trump administration is targeting so-called sanctuary cities in the next phase of its deportation drive, after labelling them 'sanctuaries for criminals' after the shooting of an off-duty law enforcement officer in New York City, allegedly by an undocumented person with a criminal record. Tom Homan, Donald Trump's border chief, vowed to 'flood the zone' with Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents, in an all-out attempt to overcome the lack of cooperation he said the government faced from Democrat-run municipalities in its quest to arrest and detain undocumented people. What did he say about New York? 'What we're going to do [is deploy] more agents in New York City to look for that bad guy so sanctuary cities get exactly what they don't want – more agents in the community and more agents in the work site.' A federal judge sentenced an ex-Kentucky police officer to nearly three years in prison for using excessive force during the 2020 deadly raid on Breonna Taylor's home, declining a justice department recommendation that he should not be jailed. A man who wore a large weight-training chain around his neck and approached his wife while a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine scanned her knee at a clinic in New York died after the device forcefully pulled him, police and media reported. Chinese authorities have arrested six people and launched disciplinary investigations into almost 30 others after more than 230 kindergarten children were poisoned by food coloured with industrial-grade lead paint. Economic inequality has reached a staggering milestone in Silicon Valley: just nine households hold 15% of the region's wealth, according to new research from San Jose State University. A mere 0.1% of residents hold 71% of the tech hub's wealth. Twenty-five-year-old Bijan Ghaisar was unarmed when he was shot in his car by two officers. Charges against the men were dismissed – but seven years on his mother, Kelly, is still fighting for her boy. The family lost more than their son that day: 'We lost our faith in our country, our government. We saw that nothing, absolutely nothing we had believed about our country was true,' she said. Twenty-seven blue, pink and purple trunks were placed within view of the White House yesterday, each representing a child who perished when Camp Mystic in Texas was overwhelmed by a devastating flood. The campaigners held signs that said, 'Flood warnings came late, budget cuts came fir$t' and 'No more kids lost to climate disasters'. A 16th-century Madonna and Child painting that ended up with a woman in the UK after it was stolen from a museum in Italy half a century ago is to be returned to its rightful owner. As the Guardian reported in March, she had refused to return the artwork, even though it is on the most-wanted lists of various police forces, including Interpol and the Italian carabinieri. First Thing is delivered to thousands of inboxes every weekday. If you're not already signed up, subscribe now. If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email newsletters@
The Guardian
22-07-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Eleven minute race for food: how aid points in Gaza became ‘death traps'
Raed Jamal sends the message shortly after he returns, empty-handed, from an aid distribution point to his tent in the al-Mawasi displacement camp in south-west Gaza. 'The tanks came and started firing. Three boys near me were martyred,' says the 36-year-old, who has four children. 'I didn't even get anything, just two empty boxes.' Jamal's journey involved a long walk to and from a former residential neighbourhood bulldozed by Israeli forces and turned into one of four militarised aid distribution centres run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which is based in Delaware in the US. The GHF sites – Tal al-Sultan, Saudi neighbourhood, Khan Younis and Wadi Gaza – are located in evacuation zones, which means civilians seeking food have to enter areas they have been ordered to leave. According to GHF's Facebook page, the sites remain open for as little as eight minutes at a time, and in June the average for the Saudi site was 11 minutes. These factors have led to accusations from NGOs that the system is dangerous by design. The Unrwa chief, Philippe Lazzarini, has said 'the so-called mechanism … is a death trap costing more lives than it saves.' The system favours the strongest, so it is mostly men who travel along the designated routes. Then they wait – often for hours – for a centre to open. Finally, there is a dash into the centre of the zones and a scramble to grab a box. At every stage, those seeking aid pass Israeli tanks and troops, as quadcopters fly above. In another clip shared by Jamal he ducks as bullets pass overhead. 'We have purged our hearts of fear,' Jamal says of his near daily walks to the site. 'I need to bring food for my children so they don't die of hunger.' GHF, a startup organisation with no experience of distributing food in complex conflict zones, employs US mercenaries at the sites, which opened in May. They replaced 400 non-militarised aid points run under a UN system that Israel claimed had to be shut down because Hamas was diverting aid from it. No evidence for this has been provided. Since May, more than 1,000 people have died while seeking food from the centres and other humanitarian convoys, according to the UN. The sites' opening times are usually announced in posts on a Facebook account and, more recently, messages sent through a Telegram channel. A WhatsApp channel was also set up in the first weeks. People have been warned not to approach the centres until they open. As the chart below shows, for the site Jamal visited, the amount of time between the site's opening time being announced and the opening itself decreased dramatically in June. Mahmoud Alareer, a 27-year-old living in a tent in western Gaza City, says the opening time announcements for the aid site he uses – Wadi Gaza – have become useless, because of the distance from where he is living. Instead, he travels to the edges of the site in the middle of the night and gambles on it opening at 2am, as it has on every visit so far. First he climbs on to the back of a truck for the long ride south from Gaza City through the militarised Netzarim corridor. Then he waits in the dark until Israeli forces allow him to enter. 'You get there and you slowly, slowly advance,' he says. 'You always know that it could be you who gets shot, or it might be someone next to you.' Alareer says chaos always ensues when the aid point opens, as people start running towards the packages, which are left in the middle of the distribution zone. People trip over craters and tangled wires. GHF has faced severe criticism from the humanitarian community due to the dangers posed to Palestinians both at the sites and on the roads around them. In early July, more than 170 NGOs called for GHF to be shut down, accusing it of violating the principles of humanitarian aid, and calling for the resumption of non-militarised aid in Gaza. Médecins Sans Frontières' (MSF) emergency coordinator in Gaza, Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, says night-time distributions are particularly dangerous because so many roads in southern Gaza have been made unrecognisable by Israeli bombing, making it hard for Palestinians to stick to routes designated by GHF. Zabalgogeazkoa is scathing about the GHF system. 'This is not humanitarian aid,' he says. 'We can only think that it was designed to cause damage to the people seeking aid.' GHF and the IDF have been approached for comment. GHF has previously said the UN figures for deaths around distribution sites are 'false and misleading'. It has also defended its operations more generally and accused its critics of engaging in a 'turf war' over humanitarian supplies. It says it bears no responsibility for deaths outside the perimeters of its sites. The Israeli military has previously acknowledged firing warning shots at Palestinians who it says have approached its forces in a suspicious manner. It has also disputed some of the death tolls provided by the Palestinian authorities. GHF runs only four sites to feed 2 million people, in a territory where extreme hunger is widespread and food security experts have warned of looming famine. It says it has delivered more than 85 million meals 'via roughly 1,422,712 boxes' since its operations began. According to these figures, each box would provide a family with about 60 meals. The organisation has posted photos of GHF-marked boxes that have items such as flour, potatoes, beans and oil. However, Palestinians in Gaza have shared pictures showing open boxes at GHF sites containing a smaller range of items. Olga Cherevko, a spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, says she could not comment on the specific logistics of GHF, but that aid should go beyond food and should include water, cooking gas or other cooking facilities. 'If you look at Gaza now … people have been deprived of everything that sustains life: shelter materials, fuel, cooking gas, hygiene materials, everything that one needs to feel dignified, to have some sort of semblance of normality,' she says. According to the World Food Programme (WFP), nearly a third of Gaza's population is going several days without food, and 470,000 people are expected to face the most severe levels of hunger between May and September this year. The WFP has also warned that dietary diversity declined sharply in May and continued to worsen in June. Damage to farmland over the course of the war has only increased Palestinians' reliance on aid. A study published this year using satellite imagery to assess damage to farmland found up to 70% of tree crops had been damaged. A Unosat assessment from April found that 71.2% of Gaza's greenhouses had been damaged. This sequence shows damage to greenhouses and orchards in Beit Lahiya. In late March, dozens of bakeries supported by the WFP halted production due to the Israeli blockade. A handful briefly resumed bread production in May when some trucks were allowed into the territory, as this timeline shows. Jamal reiterates that he has no choice but to return to his nearest GHF site, despite the dangers. 'I have gone four days in a row and not brought anything back, not even flour – nothing,' he says. 'Sometimes you just can't beat the others. But what else can we do, our life is a struggle.'
Al Jazeera
20-07-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Israel issues forced displacement order in central Gaza in new campaign
The Israeli military has issued a new forced evacuation warning for the Palestinians in central Gaza, ordering them to move south to al-Mawasi, an area Israel has regularly attacked despite declaring it a 'safe zone'. Thousands of leaflets were dropped over Deir el-Balah on Sunday, telling displaced families living in tents in several densely populated parts of the city to leave immediately. The Israeli military warned of imminent action against Hamas fighters in the area as it continued its deadly attacks on unarmed and starving civilians desperately looking for food, killing dozens of Palestinians on Sunday, at least 73 of them aid seekers in northern Gaza. In a post on X, the military's Arabic-language spokesman Avichay Adraee said residents and displaced Palestinians sheltering in the Deir el-Balah area should leave immediately. Israel was 'expanding its activities' around Deir el-Balah, including 'in an area where it has not operated before', Adraee said, telling Palestinians to 'move south towards the al-Mawasi area' on the Mediterranean coast 'for your safety'. A video verified by Al Jazeera showed the Israeli army dropping vast amounts of leaflets over residential areas in Deir el-Balah, notifying Palestinians of the order. 'Nowhere else to go' Al Jazeera's Hind Khoudary, reporting from Deir el-Balah, said the area targeted by Israel is densely populated and it would be 'impossible' for the affected residents to leave on short notice. 'Palestinians here are refusing to leave and say they are going to stay in their houses because even the areas designated as safe by the Israeli army have been targeted,' she said. 'Palestinians say they have nowhere else to go, and there is no space because most western areas or even al-Mawasi are full of people and tents with no more extra space for expansion. They are left with zero options.' The Israeli military issued the warning as Israel and Hamas held indirect ceasefire talks in Qatar, but international mediators said there have been no breakthroughs. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly stressed that expanding Israeli military operations in Gaza will pressure Hamas to negotiate, but negotiations have been stalled for months. This month, the Israeli military said it controlled more than 65 percent of the Gaza Strip. Most of Gaza's population of more than two million people has been displaced at least once during the war, which is now in its 22nd month. Israel has repeatedly ordered Palestinians to leave or face attacks in large parts of the coastal enclave. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in January that more than 80 percent of the Gaza Strip was under unrevoked Israeli evacuation threats and many of their residents were living with starvation. A 35-day-old baby in Gaza City and a four-month-old child in Deir el-Balah died of malnutrition at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital this weekend. On Saturday, at least 116 Palestinians were killed, many of them aid seekers trying to get food from distribution sites run by the Israeli- and United States-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). At least 900 Palestinians desperate to find food have been killed at the sites since the GHF began operating them in late May as an Israeli blockade has prevented food and other necessities from the UN and other aid groups from coming into Gaza. The genocide has prompted Pope Leo XIV to denounce the 'barbarity' of the war as he urged against the 'indiscriminate use of force'. 'I once again ask for an immediate end to the barbarity of the war and for a peaceful resolution to the conflict,' Leo said during a prayer meeting near Rome on Sunday.
