As Israel blocks aid, Gaza’s mothers watch their children starve

In a small, dimly lit tent, Maha Aziza sits on the edge of her mattress, thinking of her wedding day. She remembers the vows she and her husband exchanged, the dreams they whispered to each other. It feels like a moment from another lifetime. Earlier that day, Ms. Aziza pried off the wedding ring that tethered her to that joyful moment, and sold it to a local jeweler.

“I’ll buy it back or we shall buy a new one,” she whispers to herself. But right now, she has a far bigger concern. Each day when she bathes her three boys, she is alarmed by how brittle their bodies feel. In particular, her youngest, 6-year-old Ahmed, seems to be shrinking before her eyes. “I’m afraid he might die in front of me,” she says.

She hopes the money from the ring will buy them time, something few here have. It has now been more than two months since Israel halted all humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip, sharply escalating an already-devastating hunger crisis. Nine in every 10 residents of Gaza do not have enough to eat, and nearly 20% are facing famine conditions, according to the United Nations.

This crisis is by design. Last month, Defense Minister Israel Katz explained that “blocking this aid is one of the main pressure levers” Israel has to force the release of the remaining hostages captured on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel has maintained this position even as international pressure against it mounts.

“Blocking aid starves civilians,” explained Tom Fletcher, U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, in a statement last week. “It strips them of dignity and hope. Blocking aid kills.”

Ghada Abdulfattah

Amid dire shortages of food and humanitarian aid, Maha Aziza says she is alarmed at how brittle her sons' bodies feel.

“No kitchen came”

Every day, Aya Shehada awakes with a single purpose, to make sure this is not the day her four children starve to death.

On a recent morning, she surveys what they have in their tent in Deir al-Balah. “No rice. No flour. No pasta. No vegetables. Nothing,” she says. So she tells her daughters to go and get something from one of the mobile community kitchens that rove the area on tuk-tuks, delivering hot meals. The U.N. estimates that some 80% of Gaza’s population relies on these kitchens, supplied by the World Food Programme and other organizations, for survival.

But last week, the WFP confirmed it had run out of food in its warehouses, and on this day, the rail-thin girls return home with an empty pot. “No kitchen came,” they tell her.

A wave of despair crashes over Ms. Shehada. Feeding her children feels like the most basic task of being their mother, and now she can’t even do that. “I cannot imagine that they ask me for this and they cannot have it,” she says. Recently, she learned she is pregnant again. The doctors urge her to eat more. But how can she do that, she wonders, when there is nothing left to eat.

The WFP says that it has 116,000 metric tons of food assistance – enough to feed 1 million people for up to four months – in position and waiting to enter Gaza as soon as Israel reopens the borders.

For now, though, Ms. Shehada uses the last of her flour to bake a small amount of bread, and opens a precious can of beans. It cost her about $4, nearly eight times what she paid two years ago. As night settles over their tent, she feeds her children the small meal.

The timing is tactical. “They’ll eat and go to bed right away,” she explains. If they stay awake, they might ask for something more to eat. And she will have to tell them, as she has done so many times before, that there is nothing else.

Ghada Abdulfattah

Sent to find food at a mobile community kitchen, Aya Shehada's daughters reported back to their tent in Deir al-Balah that "no kitchen came." They are given their small meal shortly before bedtime so they don't ask for more food, their mother says.

“Becoming ... a ghost”

At the end of a recent shift, Raed Baba hurries out of his clinic at Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza, where he spends his days treating some of Gaza’s estimated 60,000 severely malnourished children.

They arrive in Dr. Baba’s clinic worryingly skinny and sick with infections their bodies struggle to fight off, like pneumonia, hepatitis, and meningitis. Often, the best he can do is instruct a nurse to give them fluids and electrolytes to fight dehydration. “We are only addressing the symptoms, not the root causes,” says the head of the hospital’s pediatrics department. “I feel helpless and unable to make a real difference.”

And that feeling doesn’t end when he leaves work. He also has his own children to feed, six of them, ranging in age from 9 to 21. On this day, he rushes to a market in Gaza City to see if there is anything left to buy.

Food prices have risen more than 500% since the war began, and most markets in the Strip no longer sell dairy products, fish, or meat. All that is available are a few vegetables and cans of food. From his work, Dr. Baba knows that his family is lucky even to have that. “I never expected to see children starving,” he says.

Ms. Aziza didn’t either. Often these days, her eldest son, 10-year-old Yousuf, complains that he is tired and dizzy, and she tells him to stop running around with his friends and lie down to rest. It’s something she couldn’t have imagined before the war – forbidding her child from playing. But she feels she has no other choice. “He’s becoming like a ghost,” she says.

Before the war, Ms. Aziza loved to cook, and recently, she and her sister-in-law found themselves reminiscing about their favorite meals. There was musakhan, a dish of tender chicken roasted in sumac and served with caramelized onion flatbread, and maqluba, a kind of layer cake of fried rice, meat, and vegetables.

Listening to the conversation, Yousuf’s mouth began to fill with saliva. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. He begged the two women to stop talking about food.