Six weeks since Israel imposed total Gaza blockade, last food is running out

The bombs haven’t killed Rehab Akhras and her family - yet. But as Israel’s military siege suffocates Gaza, she fears hunger will succeed where airstrikes failed.

More than six weeks into Israel’s total blockade of the Gaza Strip, home to 2.3 million Palestinians, the deliberate cutting off of aid and supplies has plunged the enclave into the depths of a man-made famine. Food that was stockpiled during a short-lived ceasefire at the start of the year is gone. Bakeries have shuttered. Markets are bare. Emergency kitchens are running on borrowed time.

In a makeshift camp of plastic and scrap in Khan Younis, 64-year-old Akhras lit a fire with scraps of cardboard to heat a single can of fava beans—the only food left for her 13-member family.

“We survived the war, we survived the airstrikes,” she said. “But we can’t survive this hunger. Neither us, nor our children.”

In the north, in Nuseirat, long queues form at outdoor kitchens where exhausted children wave empty buckets, hoping for just a scoop of rice. The World Food Programme, which once supplied 25 bakeries across Gaza, says all of them are now shut. Food parcels, already reduced to bare minimums, will soon stop altogether.

'A war on the living'

“This is a war on the living, not just the dead,” said Juliette Touma of UNRWA. “Babies and children are going to bed hungry, mothers can’t breastfeed, prices are beyond comprehension, and Gaza is falling into extreme hunger. All because of an engineered siege.”

Prices have skyrocketed beyond reach for most: a 25-kilo sack of flour now costs over $60, up from $6. Cooking oil is $10 a litre. A tin of sardines, if found, goes for $5.

The Norwegian Refugee Council warns that food distributions have almost entirely stopped. The last remaining supplies are being rationed to keep communal kitchens running for a few more days. Médecins Sans Frontières reports children and pregnant women with severe malnutrition. Nursing mothers are themselves too weak to produce milk.

Israel denies a hunger crisis exists. Its military claims the siege is necessary to prevent aid from reaching Palestinian resistance groups and accuses Hamas of exploiting humanitarian deliveries—a claim Gaza authorities deny. Israel’s foreign ministry says thousands of trucks entered Gaza during a brief ceasefire before the total shutdown in March, framing its starvation policy as a security measure.

But rights groups and Palestinian officials say this is collective punishment—an intentional, inhumane tactic designed to break the spirit and survival of an entire people.

'If not by bombs, then by hunger'

Neama Farjalla, a mother in Nuseirat, leaves her shelter at 6 a.m. daily with her children, walking across rubble and destruction from soup kitchen to soup kitchen in search of food.

“If we don’t die from bombs, we’ll die from hunger,” she said. “When my son says, ‘Mama, I want a glass of milk,’ I can’t bear it. My heart breaks.”

In Gaza today, starvation is not a consequence of war—it is a weapon of war. And the world is watching.

(Reuters)