Food, water, shelter: Gazans navigate dire shortages as war rages
| Deir al-Balah, Gaza Strip; and Amman, Jordan
A flood of refugees has inundated the southern Gaza Strip following an Israeli warning to vacate the combat zone around Gaza City. Abla Musabh’s family reached Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah after a seven-hour trek southwestward from Gaza City on foot and on empty stomachs, their third displacement in a week.
They, like many, now sleep outside the hospital, believing it will be spared missile strikes and fighting. “It’s cold at night,” she says. “For the past week we have been sleeping on cardboard boxes. There is nothing here.”
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onBefore the war, Gaza was already overcrowded, and power, water, and food were in chronic short supply. Now, with Gazans under siege and displaced in search of safety, a humanitarian crisis is intensifying.
Food, shelters, medical supplies, and clean water all are in short supply. The international community pledged to get aid into the besieged strip, but at the Egyptian border, hundreds of metric tons of aid remained in trucks, awaiting a safe corridor to enter. As of Monday evening, the crossing remained closed, despite intense U.S. diplomacy led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Mohammed and his family, who evacuated their home in east Khan Yunis moments before a missile strike destroyed it last week, now live in a furniture shop-turned-shelter with four other families, a total of 29 people including 14 children sharing one room.
“Despite the difficult circumstances, I consider myself fortunate to have found any shelter at all,” he says.
As the international community pledged to get humanitarian aid into the besieged Gaza Strip Monday, the enclave’s lone border crossing with Egypt remained closed, Israeli missile strikes continued, and Gazans reported a “dire situation.”
There's minimal food, overflowing makeshift shelters, no medical supplies, and little access to clean water.
“There’s no bread, no food; my children haven’t eaten today,” says Abla Musabh, 67, whose family reached Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah late Sunday after a seven-hour, 10-mile trek southwestward from Gaza City on foot and on empty stomachs. It was their third displacement in a week.
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onBefore the war, Gaza was already overcrowded, and power, water, and food were in chronic short supply. Now, with Gazans under siege and displaced in search of safety, a humanitarian crisis is intensifying.
They, like many, now sleep outside the hospital, believing it will be spared missile strikes and fighting.
“It’s cold at night,” she says. “For the past week we have been sleeping on cardboard boxes. There is nothing here.”
The flood of Palestinian refugees from northern Gaza inundated the southern part of the strip following an Israeli warning to some 1.1 million people to leave the combat zone around Gaza City, the focus of an anticipated Israeli ground offensive against Gaza’s rulers, Hamas.
Israeli shelling and airstrikes have killed 2,750 Palestinians, including 1,000 children, and wounded 9,700, the Gaza Health Ministry said, after marauding Hamas militants killed more than 1,400 people in southern Israel, most of them civilians. Late Monday, Hamas fired more rockets toward Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
In southern Gaza, where the United Nations says more than 600,000 Gazans have relocated in less than 72 hours following Israeli instructions and amid intensified bombing, evacuees and local communities are straining to make ends meet. Supplies are dwindling in what the U.N. describes as “increasingly dire conditions.”
Backup at border
Meanwhile, hundreds of metric tons of aid, food, and medicines remained in trucks lined up at the Egyptian border town of Arish near the Rafah crossing, awaiting an Israeli-Hamas cease-fire, a political agreement between Egypt and Israel, and a safe corridor to enter.
As of Monday evening, a deal had not been struck and Rafah remained closed, despite intense U.S. diplomacy led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Egypt and Israel failed to reach an agreement over the search of the convoys entering Rafah and their safety, while the lack of a cease-fire made the entry and distribution of aid impossible, according to the U.N.
“We literally have nothing to eat. The shelves in the shops are all empty; there are no diapers, food, or even snacks. Clean drinking water is nonexistent,” says Mohammed, who evacuated with his family from their home in east Khan Yunis moments before a missile strike destroyed it last week. “I have to tell my children to ration the little food we have left.”
He, his wife, and three children now live in a furniture shop-turned-shelter with four other families, a total of 29 people including 14 children sharing one room.
“Despite the difficult circumstances, I consider myself fortunate to have found any shelter at all,” says Mohammed, whose parents and extended family have sought shelter in the hallways of overfull United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools.
Fortunate families who do find food are subsisting on canned beans, processed cheese, and, if they are fortunate and risk waiting in line for hours, bread.
Milk and infant formula have disappeared from the shelves of the corner stores that have survived the airstrikes. Pharmacies report having run out of medical supplies.
With most shops now bare, Gaza City resident Bahaa Bahhour, like many Gazans, races from shop to shop amid bombings looking for canned beans and cartons of milk.
“I find myself moving from one supermarket to another under the buzzing of Israeli drones hovering overhead,” Mr. Bahhour says. “When I finally find food items, the prices are exorbitant.”
“If we do not succumb to airstrikes, we will succumb to hunger,” Mr. Bahhour warns.
Apartments overflow
Apartments in southern Gaza that only two days ago were hosting two evacuee families are now housing dozens as the migration of displaced families from northern Gaza continues, with many families spilling out of apartment buildings and staying in makeshift tents, exposed to the elements.
More than 1 million Gazans have left their homes, and within the last 24 hours a quarter of a million have sought refuge at UNRWA schools, where the U.N. agency said “clean water has actually run out.”
Amid Israeli pledges to resume water services to the south, Gazans and the U.N. report water flowing only in parts of Khan Yunis, leaving the vast majority of 2.2 million Gazans still without access.
Since being displaced from their home in Gaza City to a makeshift shelter in an UNRWA-run school in Khan Yunis, Mohammed Mady and his family have been relying on a public water spring normally reserved for those who are disadvantaged and livestock.
“We are currently relying on the generosity of others,” Mr. Mady says. “I could have never imagined this. But if God will grant us life, my first act will be to build a public water well. I cannot even fathom a situation in which people are denied water.”
The few food items left in Gaza have skyrocketed in price.
A 6.6-pound bag of bread used to cost 8 shekels ($2), enough to feed a family of 10 for the day. The few bakeries still churning out bread are now selling 4.4 pounds of bread for the same price. Families are trying to make a pita loaf last longer and feed more than one family member.
It is both a humanitarian and economic crisis for the besieged coastal enclave, where prior to the war 50% of people were unemployed and 53% were below the international poverty line, according to the World Bank.
At the Kholy bakery on once-bustling Al Nasser Street in Gaza City, customers wait from six to 10 hours for a chance at bread, standing outside exposed to a potential missile strike. The line becomes so long that most customers take a number, return to their shelter, and wait for hours to check in to see if it’s their turn.
The smell of freshly baked bread briefly covers the scent of dust and rubble, but despite hunger setting in, few have an appetite.
“We have no stomach for eating,” one customer says while waiting for his turn, “but I have seven children and evacuees in my house who I must feed.”
The topic while waiting
The conversation in the bread line is, inevitably, of death.
“Did you hear about the family who was killed today?”
“A whole family was killed?”
“I feel like if I evacuate I will lose everything.”
“What will happen to us?”
“My relative was killed. They did not find his body.”
Other bread-seekers were not so fortunate. The cashier at Al Baladi Bakery in Deir al-Balah, after running out of flour midday, announced to customers, “I am sorry, no more bread today.”
Yet communities are also pitching in. Slightly better-off Gazans are donating bags of rice and scraps of wood to encampments at UNRWA schools so that evacuees can cook plain rice on campfires and feed dozens.
With the electricity cut, and with very few Gazans having fuel left for private generators, the entire strip goes dark at night. The only source of electricity for Gazans is at hospitals. Thousands rely on them to charge their phones and, if they have contacts, access a rare Wi-Fi hot spot.
Yet with less than 24 hours of reserves, fuel and electricity at all hospitals across Gaza were expected to run out as of Tuesday morning, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned early Monday.
Four hospitals in northern Gaza had ceased operation as of this writing, while 21 others have been ordered to evacuate, even as they struggle to maintain services to thousands of wounded people.
The number of wounded Gazans far exceeds the number of beds in hospitals, with most new patients lying on hospital floors. Dr. Khalil Degran, a surgeon at Deir al-Balah’s Al-Aqsa Hospital, describes the surgery department as “a catastrophe.”
“Al-Aqsa Hospital is witnessing a crisis in medical supplies,” he says.
In a statement posted on social media early Monday, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres noted that “the U.N. has stocks available of food, water, medical supplies and fuel in Egypt, Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel.
“They can be dispatched within hours,” he said. “To ensure safety, our staff need to be able to bring these supplies into and throughout Gaza safely, and without impediment.”
