Emanciated Children, A Hunger Crisis Laid Bare To Everyone to See in Gaza

  

Visuals by Saher Alghorra

Written by Vivian Yee

Saher Alghorra reported from northern Gaza, and Vivian Yee from Cairo.

The New York Times

 

The starvation of Gaza can be measured in the jutting ribs of a 6-year-old girl. In the twig-like thinness of her arms. In the pounds she and those around her have lost. In the two tomatoes, two green chili peppers and single cucumber a destitute child can buy to feed his family that day.

Until last week, Israel had blocked all food, fuel and medicine from entering the Gaza Strip for 80 days, attempting to pressure Hamas into releasing the Israeli hostages it still holds as negotiations over a cease-fire remain deadlocked.

With international alarm surging over its total blockade, Israel allowed in a drip of aid starting last week. That enabled some bakeries to reopen. But humanitarian officials said it did little to alleviate Gaza’s enormous needs and to stop the territory’s slide toward famine. Limited amounts of food began being distributed to residents on Tuesday under a much-criticized plan backed by Israel.

In northern Gaza, cut off by Israeli troops from the rest of the territory, hundreds of thousands of people are reduced to waiting for hours for charity-kitchen food that runs out too soon and to digging boreholes for water to drink, unsanitary though it might be.

There is never enough.

Najwa Hussein Hajjaj, 6, has lost 42 percent of her body weight in the last two months, going from about 34 pounds to 21 pounds. Najwa needs specially prepared meals because of an esophagus condition, but her family can barely find any food at all. Doctors have diagnosed her with severe malnutrition.

People struggle to find fuel for hospital generators, cars and cooking stoves. Families have resorted to burning wood or even trash. Here, Bashir Sami Ashour’s family cooked soup over an open fire in Gaza City, in the north.  

There is no electricity and little clean water available in Gaza, so people dig for whatever water they can find. Then, like this boy in Jabaliya camp, they lug it away in plastic containers — an ever harder task for people weakened by malnutrition.

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Vegetable markets in Gaza City were bustling before the war. 

But with nothing being imported and Gaza’s farmland mostly 

destroyed or inaccessible because of evacuation orders,

 there is now little produce for sale. 

 

With bakeries closed for lack of wheat flour and fuel, people grind pasta down into flour

 that they can bake into bread. 

Lentils, too, are being ground into flour for patties or bread. In all, people bring between 

400 and 500 kilograms of lentils, rice, pasta and other dry goods a day, some of it saved

 from when more aid was entering Gaza, to Gaza City’s Jaber Mill, which grinds it down. 

The owner, Ahmed Jaber, said some people had no choice but to grind up spoiled or rotten supplies.

Residents of the northernmost part of Gaza have fled the fighting to this school, now

 a shelter, in Gaza City. They line up their buckets to reserve a turn to fill them

 whenever the school’s water main starts pumping or when a water truck comes by.

 Those who arrive too late miss their chance. 

As bakeries closed and aid groups ran out of supplies to distribute to families, l

ocal charity kitchens, including this one in Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, 

became some of the only places many Palestinians in Gaza could find food.

 

By Sunday, with his stocks gone, he had been forced to close.