Donkeys offer Gazans lifeline amid war shortages/node/2580643/middle-east
Donkeys offer Gazans lifeline amid war shortages
Displaced people use animal-drawn carts for transportation in al-Zawayda in the central Gaza Strip on November 20, 2024, as the war between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas movement continues in the besieged territory.(AFP)
Donkey-pulled carts were a fairly common sight in pre-war Gaza
Displaced Gazans fleeing fighting or air strikes pile aboard them to rush to safety with their belongings
Updated 25 November 2024
AFP
Deir el-Balah: Amina Abu Maghasib’s livelihood rests on one animal: a donkey that pulls the cart she uses to transport people around Gaza, where more than a year of war has led to a widespread shortage of fuel for cars.
“Before the war, I used to sell milk and yoghurt, and the factory used to take the milk from me,” she said from the central Gaza city of Deir el-Balah, holding reins in one hand and a rubber stick in the other that she uses to maneuver her cart.
“Now, I have no income other than the donkey and the cart.”
Donkey-pulled carts were a fairly common sight in pre-war Gaza. But the lack of fuel and destruction in the territory since the conflict began between Israel and Hamas last year have made them one of the few remaining forms of transport.
Displaced Gazans fleeing fighting or air strikes pile aboard them to rush to safety with their belongings.
For others, a donkey cart is virtually the only form of transportation.
Marwa Yess uses a donkey cart to get around with her family.
“I pay 20 shekels ($5.40) for the cart to take me from Deir el-Balah to Nuseirat. The price is outrageous, but under these circumstances, everything seems reasonable,” she said. The distance is about five kilometers (three miles).
“I used to feel embarrassed to ride a donkey cart at the beginning of the war, but now there’s no other option,” the teacher and mother of three told AFP.
Soaring prices
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 43 percent of Gaza’s working animals — a category that includes donkeys, horses and mules — had been killed in the war by August 2024, leaving only 2,627 alive.
Abu Maghasib’s only running costs are fodder, she told AFP sitting on her cart, a few planks of wood held together by a metal frame and mounted on four wheels.
But the price of food for people and animals has soared.
After costs, Abu Maghasib has made a profit of 20 shekels at the end of the day from the clients who hop on and off from the roadside.
“I bought this donkey on credit, and the first donkey died in the war in Deir el-Balah after being hit by shrapnel,” she said.
The new one cost her 2,500 shekels.
Abdel Misbah, a 32-year-old man displaced with his family of 20 from Gaza City to the territory’s south, also made the livelihood switch to donkey transportation.
“I used to sell vegetables on a cart before the war. Now, I work in delivery,” he said, lamenting that “the donkey panics when the bombing gets too close.”
He too feels the pain of skyrocketing fodder prices.
“I make sure to feed it well, even though the price of barley (per sack) has gone up from three shekels to 50 shekels,” he said.
'More valuable than gold'
Israel imposed a near-total siege on Gaza in the early stages of the war last year, complicating aid and goods distribution.
The lack of fuel, war-damaged roads and looting, as well as fighting in densely populated areas and the repeated displacement of much of Gaza’s 2.4 million people, also contribute to the shortages.
A UN-backed assessment this month said famine looms in northern Gaza, and the United Nations agency supporting Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said aid entering the territory had reached its lowest level in months.
Yusef Muhammad, a 23-year-old displaced from Gaza’s north to Khan Yunis in the south, said his donkey has become a “lifeline” for his family.
“When the war started, car fares were too expensive. I had no choice but to rely on a donkey. Thank God I had it when we were forced to evacuate.”
Beyond the widespread destruction, Israel’s military campaign has killed at least 44,211 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas government’s health ministry, which the UN considers reliable.
Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that sparked the war resulted in 1,206 deaths, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
When Israeli military evacuation orders, which usually precede fighting and bombing, send thousands of people and their belongings onto the road in an instant, donkey carts can be one of the only ways out of danger.
Hosni Abu Warda, 62, said his home was destroyed in the northern area of Jabalia, the scene of an intense Israeli military operation since early October.
When he fled, Abu Warda said he had no choice but to turn to four-hoofed transportation. He waited 14 hours for a cart before escaping with his family “packed like sardines.”
In times like these, “the donkey is more valuable than gold and even more valuable than modern cars,” Abu Warda said.
Why treating Palestine Action supporters as terrorists alarms UK civil rights defenders
Hundreds of British citizens have been arrested for peacefully protesting in support of Palestine Action, deemed a terrorist organization
The group targets UK arms companies supplying the Israeli military, but the government has accused it of violence and intimidation
Updated 20 sec ago
Jonathan Gornall
LONDON: Eighty-year-old Deborah Hinton, a retired English magistrate, does not look like most people’s idea of a terrorist.
But she is currently on bail awaiting trial under the UK’s Terrorism Act for supporting a proscribed terrorist organization. If convicted, she faces a possible sentence of up to 14 years in jail.
Hinton is just one of hundreds of British people from all walks of life who have taken to the streets in peaceful protest against what they see as their government’s cynical and disproportionate decision to label the activist group Palestine Action as a terror organization.
She is not even the oldest protester scooped up by police. In July, Sue Parfitt, an 83-year-old retired vicar, was arrested in London.
Caption
Palestine Action, founded in 2020, is a direct-action organization committed to “non-violent yet disruptive” targeting of British arms companies it accuses of supporting the Israeli military.
On Aug. 9, during a protest in support of the organization, 532 people were arrested in central London. Of those, 65 percent were over the age of 50, including 147 between the ages of 60 and 69, almost 100 between 70 and 79, and 15 between 80 and 89.
That evening, TV news channels broadcast extraordinary footage of embarrassed-looking Metropolitan Police officers handcuffing dozens of old age pensioners and taking them into custody. Their alleged crime was protesting peacefully while carrying signs proclaiming: “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”
Protesters sit with placards supporting of Palestine Action at a "Lift The Ban" demonstration in support of the proscribed group Palestine Action, calling for the recently imposed ban to be lifted, in Parliament Square, central London, on August 9, 2025. (AFP)
Anyone in the UK who even posts a message on social media in support of the group now risks arrest. On Aug. 17, Irish novelist Sally Rooney joined the clamor of voices raised in protest against the “alarming attack on free speech.” She pledged to “go on supporting Palestine Action and direct action against genocide,” and to provide funding for the group through royalties from her book.
She might now face arrest, a situation that highlights the moral and legal quagmire into which the British government has stumbled over Gaza.
A protester is carried away by police officers at a "Lift The Ban" demonstration in support of the proscribed group Palestine Action, calling for the recently imposed ban to be lifted, in Parliament Square, central London, on August 9, 2025. (AFP)
The protesters arrested so far “have tended to be people in the later stages of their life,” said Katie McFadden, a senior associate with the law firm Hodge Jones and Allen, which is representing many of those arrested.
“They are retired. They don’t have to worry about things like losing their jobs, or whether a bank will approve them for a mortgage if they’ve been deemed a terrorist. And they see the danger of society moving in this direction and they really want to stand up to protect freedom of speech.”
What they are doing, she added, “is incredibly brave. What they are going through is terrifying, and yet they are willing to take this action because they believe it’s the right thing to do, to protect the rights of all of us.”
Police officers detain a protester during a rally organised by Defend Our Juries, challenging the British government's proscription of "Palestine Action" under anti-terrorism laws, in Parliament Square, in London, Britain, August 9, 2025. (REUTERS)
Alongside other members of the specialist protests team from her law firm, McFadden has been on hand to observe the arrests and processing of several clients. The police officers, she said, “look mortified, and frankly they should be because this isn’t why they went into this job, to arrest someone who looks like their grandmother.”
Members of Palestine Action, she said, could have been prosecuted for their actions under normal criminal law.
“But to designate them as terrorists is a step way too far and that has resulted in the extraordinary scenes that we’ve seen of people being arrested and carried and dragged away by the police simply for holding a sign,” she added.
Palestine Action, responsible for a series of direct action activities intended to highlight Britain’s role in the war in Gaza, was banned in July after some of its members broke into a Royal Air Force base and sprayed red paint on two transport aircraft. The designation of the group as a terrorist organization also means that anyone who expresses support for it in public can be charged under Section 13 of the Terrorism Act.
RAF aircraft that the activists sprayed with red paint at RAF Brize Norton on June 20. (Supplied)
The ban drew widespread criticism, even from the UN. On July 25, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, said the action taken by the UK government “misuses the gravity and impact of terrorism to expand it beyond those clear boundaries, to encompass further conduct that is already criminal under the law.”
The decision, he added, “appears disproportionate and unnecessary” and is “an impermissible restriction (on) freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association … at odds with the UK’s obligations under international human rights law.”
The British government justified the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organization primarily on the grounds that the group had orchestrated and carried out aggressive and intimidatory attacks against businesses, institutions and members of the public which, according to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, crossed the legal thresholds set out in the Terrorism Act 2000.
“Anyone who wants to protest against the catastrophic humanitarian situation and crimes against humanity in Gaza, to oppose Israel’s military offensive, or to criticize the actions of any and every government, including our own, has the freedom to do so,” Cooper said in an op-ed for The Observer newspaper on Aug. 17.
“The recent proscription of the group Palestine Action does not prevent those protests, and to claim otherwise is nonsense.
“That proscription concerns one specific organization alone — a group that has conducted an escalating campaign involving not just sustained criminal damage, including to Britain’s national security infrastructure, but also intimidation, violence, weapons, and serious injuries to individuals.”
Cooper said she was unable to provide specific details of this so as to avoid prejudicing forthcoming criminal trials.
According to Declassified UK, an investigative media organization that focuses on the effects of Britain’s military activities on human rights, there is evidence to suggest that the decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organization might have been the result of lobbying by Elbit Systems, an Israeli arms company whose facilities in the UK have been targeted by the group.
Through Freedom of Information applications, Declassified UK discovered that three senior representatives of the company met Home Office officials in December 2024, but no details of their discussions have been made public.
The meeting followed an attack on an Elbit Systems facility in Filton, near Bristol, on Aug. 6 last year when, even before Palestine Action was proscribed, 24 members of the group were arrested and detained under the Terrorism Act.
The group claimed the company was supplying the Israeli military with drones and other equipment being used against civilians in Gaza, an allegation the firm denied.
On Aug. 11, Bezhalel Machlis, the president and CEO of Elbit Systems in Israel, announced the company had won two new contracts, worth $260 million, for the supply of unspecified “advanced airborne munitions” to Israel’s Ministry of Defense. Machlis, a former artillery officer with the Israel Defense Forces, is also a director of the company’s UK operation.
Meanwhile, the Filton 24, as the arrested protesters became known, have been in custody for an entire year, denied bail and held without trial.
Zoe Rogers, who was 20 when she was arrested, was interrogated by counterterrorism police for days and still does not have a trial date, having pleaded not guilty to charges of violent disorder, criminal damage and aggravated burglary.
During her time in a high-security prison in Surrey she wrote a poem, which her mother, a devout Christian, shared with the media last week.
“When they ask why,” part of it read, “I tell them about the children … I tell them about the boy found carrying his brother’s body inside his bloody backpack.
“I tell them about the girl whose hanging corpse ended at the knees. I tell them about the father holding up his headless toddler.
“It was love, not hate, that called me.”
It seems likely that Zoe, and more than 700 other Britons arrested so far for supporting Palestine Action, will soon be joined by more. Another protest is planned for Sept. 6, at which organizers hope at least 1,000 people will defy the law.
There is no doubt that many British companies are supporting Israel’s military operations in Gaza. In July 2024, the British government suspended about 30 licenses for the export of arms to Israel because of a “clear risk” that the weaponry “might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law.”
But the Campaign Against Arms Trade later discovered that licenses for the export of parts for F-35 fighter jets, “currently being used in the bombardment of Gaza,” were exempt from the ban.
Through Freedom of Information requests, it found that the 15 percent of F-35 components made in Britain had earned UK companies at least £360 million ($485 million) since 2016, and that scores of UK-based companies were profiting from the sale of the parts and other military exports to Israel.
Since April 2015, about 1,331 licenses have been issued to 174 British companies for military exports to Israel worth more than £630 million, along with 73 unspecified “open” licenses, the value of which is unknown.
“There’s a huge lack of transparency and the government’s basically lying about what’s going on,” said Emily Apple, the media coordinator for CAAT.
Elbit Systems UK Ltd., one of the companies most targeted by Palestine Action, tops the list of British arms exporters to Israel. The company, and UAV Tactical Systems Ltd., a joint drone-manufacturing operation with a French arms company, were awarded 28 military export licenses for Israel between 2021 and the end of last year.
In May, the UK government issued a joint statement with France and Canada condemning Israel’s response to the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, as “wholly disproportionate” and bemoaning the “intolerable … level of human suffering in Gaza.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy recently said the UK would officially recognize a Palestinian state during the UN General Assembly in September unless Israel acts to end the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza.
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Keir Starmer and British Foreign Secretary David Lammy (L) attend a UN Security Council meeting on the theme of "Leadership for Peace" at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on September 25, 2024.
Now, the British government is in the awkward position of condemning Israel’s military operations in Gaza while continuing to supply it with hardware used to inflict the suffering there, and locking up its own citizens who protest against this perceived hypocrisy.
As one poster on social media platform X remarked after the mass arrests in London on Aug. 9: “Who knew that cardboard and marker pens were key instruments of terrorism? I thought it was Elbit drones and F-35s.”
Human rights groups and lawyers have condemned the mass arrests as a betrayal of fundamental British values, including the right to free speech.
“Peaceful protest is a fundamental right,” said Sacha Deshmukh, the CEO of Amnesty International UK, on the day of the latest arrests.
Supporters of the proscribed group Palestine Action demonstrated in August in London’s Parliament Square. (Getty Images)
“People are understandably outraged by the ongoing genocide being committed in Gaza and are entitled under international human rights law to express their horror.
“The protesters in Parliament Square were not inciting violence and it is entirely disproportionate to the point of absurdity to be treating them as terrorists.”
In a statement to Arab News, Peter Leary, deputy director of the London-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign, said: “Shamefully, instead of taking any meaningful action to end its complicity in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the British government seems determined to silence those speaking out for Palestinian rights.
“Rather than wasting public resources and attacking fundamental democratic freedoms, the government should immediately end all arms sales to Israel and impose wide-ranging sanctions to pressure Israel to end the genocide.”
Netanyahu rival offers political truce to help secure Gaza hostage deal
Benny Gantz proposed a temporary coalition that would side-step far-right parties and strike a hostage release deal
The former defense minister was a rival of Netanyahu who nonetheless joined his government in the early days of the war
He called on fellow opposition party leaders Yair Lapid and Avigdor Lieberman to also consider the offer
Updated 15 min 11 sec ago
AFP
TEL AVIV: Israeli former defense minister Benny Gantz on Saturday called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to forge a unity government along with members of the opposition in a bid to help release the hostages held in Gaza.
Netanyahu’s coalition government depends on support from far-right members who oppose ending the war and making any deal with Palestinian group Hamas, whose October 2023 attack on Israel sparked the Gaza war.
Gantz, a rival of Netanyahu who nonetheless joined his government in the early days of the war, proposed a temporary coalition that would side-step far-right parties and strike a hostage release deal.
“I am here on behalf of the hostages who have no voice. I am here for the soldiers who are crying out, and whom no one in this government is listening to,” Gantz told a televised press conference.
“The duty of our state is first and foremost to save the lives of Jews and all citizens,” added Gantz, calling on fellow opposition party leaders Yair Lapid and Avigdor Lieberman to also consider the offer.
Both opposition chief Lapid and Lieberman have previously rejected joining any Netanyahu-led government.
Netanyahu’s coalition faces a risk of collapse after the parliament’s summer recess ends, following the loss of support from ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties over legislation seeking to draft students of religious seminaries into the military.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, a far-right member of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition who could be sidelined if Gantz’s plan succeeds, was quick to dismiss it.
“Right-wing voters chose a right-wing policy — not Gantz’s policy, not a centrist government, not surrender deals with Hamas, but yes to absolute victory,” Ben Gvir said in a statement.
The government has faced increasing domestic pressure to secure an end to the war in Gaza, with mass protests calling for a deal that would see the hostages released.
Out of 251 hostages seized during Hamas’s 2023 attack, 49 are still held in Gaza including 27 the Israeli military says are dead.
Palestinian militants also hold the remains of an Israeli soldier killed in a 2014 war.
The demonstrations in Israel have intensified since Netanyahu’s security cabinet approved plans earlier this month to expand the offensive in Gaza and seize the Palestinian territory’s largest city.
The move has sparked fears that the onslaught would exacerbate already dire conditions on the ground after more than 22 months of war.
Jordanian field hospital in Gaza performs life-saving surgery on Palestinian teenager
The attending neurosurgeon said the patient’s injury was caused by shrapnel that penetrated the skull
Updated 23 August 2025
Arab News
AMMAN: Doctors at the Jordanian Field Hospital South Gaza/7 successfully performed a complex surgery on a 19-year-old patient who sustained a head injury and was suffering from a severe subdural hemorrhage, it was revealed on Saturday.
The hospital’s force commander said on Saturday that the operation came in line with royal directives to deliver the “best possible medical and humanitarian services” to people in the Gaza Strip amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
He praised the efforts of the hospital’s specialized and skilled medical staff in carrying out the delicate procedure, the Jordan News Agency reported.
According to the hospital director, the successful surgery was led by a team specializing in brain and nerve surgery, supported by anesthesiology experts.
The attending neurosurgeon said the patient’s injury was caused by shrapnel that penetrated the skull, leading to a life-threatening hemorrhage.
“The surgery took five hours, during which the skull was opened, the hemorrhage drained, and cerebral clots removed,” he explained, noting that the swift intervention was critical in saving the patient’s life and preventing serious complications.
The patient was placed under close observation in intensive care before being discharged in stable condition.
The patient’s family thanked King Abdullah II of Jordan and commended the field hospital’s staff for their tireless efforts to mitigate the humanitarian impact of the conflict on Gaza’s population, JNA added.
Doctors in Gaza say patients’ protruding ribs, bony limbs offer evidence of malnutrition
There are no protein sources, only plant-based protein from legumes. Meat and chicken are not available. Dairy products are not available, and fruits are also unavailable
Updated 23 August 2025
AP
GAZA CITY: Not long after Texas surgeon Mohammed Adeel Khaleel arrived at a Gaza City hospital in early August, a 17-year-old was brought in with gunshot wounds to both legs and one hand, sustained when he went to collect food at an aid site.
In the emergency room, Khaleel said he noted the ribs protruding from the teen’s emaciated torso, an indication of severe malnutrition.
When doctors at Al-Ahli Hospital stabilized the patient, he raised his heavily bandaged hand and pointed to his empty mouth, Khaleel said.
“The level of hunger is really what’s heartbreaking. You know, we saw malnutrition before, back in November, already starting to happen. But now the level is just, it’s beyond imagination,” Khaleel, a spinal surgeon on his third volunteer stint in Gaza, said in an interview.
On Friday, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, the leading authority on global hunger crises, said for the first time that parts of Gaza are in famine and warned that it is spreading.
For months, UN agencies, aid groups, and experts had warned that Israel’s blockade and ongoing offensive were pushing the territory to the brink.
In the 24 hours following the famine announcement, eight people in Gaza died of malnutrition-related causes, bringing the overall toll of such deaths during the war to 281, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which is part of the government and staffed by medical professionals.
A US medical nonprofit working in Gaza says one in six children under 5 is affected by acute malnutrition.
Israel rejected the famine announcement, calling it an “outright lie” and pointing to its recent efforts to allow in more food after it eased a complete 2½ month blockade in May.
It has accused Hamas of siphoning off aid — allegations disputed by the United Nations, which says Israeli restrictions and a breakdown of law and order make it extremely difficult to deliver food to the most vulnerable.
Khaleel, who spoke to The Associated Press ahead of the announcement, said the evidence of deprivation was already clear.
“Just the degree of weight loss, post-operative complications, and starvation that we’re seeing. That would not surprise me at all if it were called famine,” said Khaleel, who traveled to Gaza as an independent volunteer via the World Health Organization.
At Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital earlier in the week, nutrition director Dr. Mohammad Kuheil led an AP journalist to the bedside of a thin-limbed girl.
Aya Sbeteh, 15, was wounded in an airstrike. But her recovery has been set back by weakness from lack of food, which her family says has reduced her weight by more than a third.
“All we have are grains like lentils, sometimes,” said her father, Yousef Sbeteh, 44.
“Even flour is unaffordable.”
Another patient, Karam Akoumeh, lay with sunken cheeks, his thin skin stretched like plastic wrap across his rib cage.
His intestines were seriously damaged when he was shot while going out to collect flour, his family said, compromising his digestive system.
Now he is one of 20 people at Shifa brought in for abdominal wounds and increasingly malnourished because of a shortage of intravenous nutritional supplements, the doctor said.
Akoumeh’s father, Atef, said that the lack of supplements compounded the hunger, which reduced Karam’s weight from 62 kg to just 35 kg.
“I checked throughout all Gaza’s hospitals for it (the supplements), but I have not found any,” he said.
Israeli officials have pointed out that some of those said to have died from malnutrition had preexisting conditions.
But doctors and other experts say that is to be expected, as famine first preys on the most vulnerable, including babies and small children.
Outside the hospital, the shortage of nutrients is equally dire, doctors and civilians say.
“There are no protein sources, only plant-based protein from legumes. Meat and chicken are not available. Dairy products are not available, and fruits are also unavailable,” said Kuheil, the doctor in charge of nutrition at Shifa.
In Gaza City on Friday, Palestinians displaced from elsewhere recounted a desperate search for food.
“We’re starving. We eat once a day. Will we be hungrier than we are now? There’s nothing left,” said Dalia Shamali, whose family has been repeatedly displaced from their home in nearby Shijaiyah.
She said they spent most of their money over the last two years moving from one part of Gaza to another as the Israeli military issued evacuation orders.
With Israel allowing more food in recently, the price of flour and other food items has been dropping, but the family still can’t afford them, Shamali said.
In its announcement on Friday, the IPC said famine in Gaza City is likely to spread across the territory without a ceasefire and a flood of humanitarian aid.
Some of the IPC’s conclusions were echoed in a report by a group that organizes medical missions to Gaza, which described a “catastrophic rise in severe malnutrition” among children and pregnant women.
One in every six children in Gaza under 5 is now affected by acute malnutrition, said the report by US nonprofit MedGlobal, based on observations by its staff in four of Gaza’s five governorates.
The group warned that all young children in Gaza are at risk of starving without intervention.
Khaleel, the Texas doctor, said he would leave it to others with more expertise to measure exactly what constitutes famine.
But he knows what he saw in three weeks of treating patients in Gaza, most of the time at the hospital in Gaza City.
Again and again, medical workers cut open patients’ clothing to treat injuries, revealing a loss of muscle and fat caused by hunger that left skin stretched tight over protruding bones.
“These patients, a number of them that we’re seeing, are just exposed ribs, severely skinny extremities,” he said.
“And you know that they’re just not getting calories in.”
‘Far too late’: Palestinians despair after UN declares famine in Gaza
UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini urges Israeli government to admit its famine role in Palestinian enclave
Updated 23 August 2025
AFP
GAZAI CITY: Desperate Palestinians clutching pots and plastic buckets scrambled for rice at a charity kitchen in Gaza City on Saturday, a day after the UN declared a famine in the war-battered territory.
AFP footage from Gaza’s largest city, which Israel plans to seize as part of an expanded military offensive, showed women and young children among the chaotic jostle of dozens clamoring and shouting for food.
One young boy used his hands to scrape a few leftover grains from the inside of a cooking vat.
“We have no home left, no food, no income ... so we are forced to turn to charity kitchens, but they do not satisfy our hunger,” said Yousef Hamad, 58, who was displaced from the northern city of Beit Hanoun.
Further south, at a charity kitchen in Deir Al-Balah, 34-year-old Umm Mohammed said the UN’s declaration of a famine had come “far too late.”
The children are “staggering from dizziness, unable to wake up because of the lack of food and water,” she said.
The UN officially declared a famine in Gaza on Friday, blaming the “systematic obstruction” of aid by Israel during more than 22 months of war.
The Rome-based Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Initiative reported that famine was affecting around 500,000 people in the Gaza governorate, which encompasses about one-fifth of the Palestinian territory, including Gaza City.
On Saturday, the head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees said it was “time for the government of Israel to stop denying the famine it has created in Gaza.”
“All of those who have influence must use it with determination & a sense of moral duty,” UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini posted on X.
The IPC projected that the famine would expand to Deir Al-Balah and Khan Younis governorates by the end of September, covering around two-thirds of Gaza.
Israel, meanwhile, kept up its bombardment of the Palestinian territory, with news footage showing heavy smoke billowing above the Zeitoun district of Gaza City as Palestinians picked through the wreckage of buildings.
The spokesman for Gaza’s civil defense agency, Mahmoud Bassal, called the situation in the Sabra and Zeitoun neighborhoods “absolutely catastrophic,” describing the “complete leveling of entire residential blocks.”
“We are trapped here, living in fear, with nowhere to go. There’s no safety anywhere in Gaza. Movement now leads to death,” said Ahmad Jundiyeh, 35, who was displaced to the northern outskirts of Zeitoun.
“We constantly hear the sound of bombing ... we hear fighter jets, artillery shelling, and even drone explosions,” he said by telephone.
“We’re extremely afraid — it feels like the end is near.”
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz vowed on Friday to destroy Gaza City if Hamas did not agree to disarm, release all remaining hostages in the territory, and end the war on Israel’s terms.
