Hanadi Gamal Saed El Jamara, 38, says sleep is all that can distract her children from the aching hunger gnawing at their bellies.
These days, the mother-of-seven finds herself begging for food on the mud-caked streets of Rafah, in southern Gaza.
She tries to feed her kids at least once a day, she says, while tending to her husband, a cancer and diabetes patient.
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“They are weak now, they always have diarrhoea, their faces are yellow,” El Jamara, whose family was displaced from northern Gaza, told CNN on January 9.
“My 17-year-old daughter tells me she feels dizziness, my husband is not eating.”
As Gaza spirals toward full-scale famine, displaced civilians and health workers said they go hungry so their children can eat what little is available.
If Palestinians find water, it is likely undrinkable. When relief trucks trickle into the strip, people clamber over each other to grab aid.
Children living on the streets, after being forced from their homes by Israel’s bombardment, cry and fight over stale bread. Others reportedly walk for hours in the cold searching for food, risking exposure to Israeli strikes.
Even before the war, two out of three people in Gaza relied on food support, Arif Husain, the chief economist at the World Food Program (WFP) said.
Palestinians have lived through 17 years of partial blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt.
Israel’s bombardment and siege since October 7 has drastically diminished vital supplies in Gaza, leaving the entire population of some 2.2 million exposed to high levels of acute food insecurity or worse, according to the Integrated Food Security and Nutrition Phase Classification (IPC), which assesses global food insecurity and malnutrition.
Martin Griffiths, the UN’s emergency relief chief, said the “great majority” of 400,000 Gazans characterised by UN agencies as at risk of starving “are actually in famine”.
UN human rights experts have warned “Israel is destroying Gaza’s food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people”.
Over more than 100 days, Palestinians in Gaza have seen mass displacement, neighbourhoods turned to ash and rubble, entire families erased by war, a surge in deadly disease and the medical system wrecked by bombardment.
Now starvation and dehydration are major threats to their survival.
“We are dying slowly,” reflected El Jamara, the mother in Rafah. “I think it’s even better to die from the bombs, at least we will be martyrs. But now we are dying out of hunger and thirst.”
Israel’s strikes on Gaza since the October 7 Hamas attacks have killed at least 26,637 people and injured 65,387 others, according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health.
The Israeli military launched its campaign after the militant group killed more than 1200 people in unprecedented attacks on Israel and says it is targeting Hamas.
People in northern Gaza ‘eat grass’ to survive
Mohammed Hamouda, a physical therapist displaced to Rafah, remembers the day his colleague, Odeh Al-Haw, was killed trying to get water for his family.
Al-Haw was queuing at a water station in Jabalya refugee camp, in northern Gaza, when he and dozens of others were struck by Israeli bombardment, Hamouda said.
“Unfortunately, many relatives and friends are still in the northern Gaza Strip, suffering a lot,” Hamouda, a father-of-three, told CNN. “They eat grass and drink polluted water.”
“Unfortunately, many relatives and friends are still in the northern Gaza Strip, suffering a lot,” Hamouda, a father-of-three, told CNN. “They eat grass and drink polluted water.”
Israel’s blockade and restrictions on aid deliveries mean stocks are desperately low, driving up prices and making food inaccessible to people across Gaza.
Shortages are even worse in the northern parts of the strip, according to the UN, where Israel concentrated its military offensive in the early days of the war. Communication blackouts stifle efforts to report on starvation and dehydration in the region.
“People butchered a donkey to eat its meat,” Hamouda says friends in Jabalya told him earlier this month as shortages worsened.
In what could be a serious blow to humanitarian efforts, several Western countries have suspended funding to the main UN agency in Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in recent days over explosive allegations by Israel that several of its staffers participated in the October 7 attacks.
The UN fired several employees in the wake of the allegations.
Jordan’s foreign minister urged those countries suspending funding to reconsider, saying UNRWA was a “lifeline” for more than two million Palestinians in Gaza and that the agency shouldn’t be “collectively punished” over allegations against a dozen of its 13,000 staff.
‘No clean water’
Gihan El Baz cradles a toddler on her knee while comforting her children and grandchildren, who she says wake each day “screaming” for food.
“In the shelters, there is not enough food, the sun sets on us, and we haven’t even had any lunch,” El Baz, who lives with 10 relatives inside a weather-worn tent in Rafah, said.
She nurses her husband, who she says fell and broke his arm while dizzy from exhaustion.
“There are no drinks, no clean water, no clean bathrooms, the kid cries for a biscuit and we can’t even find any to give her.”
Displaced parents in Rafah, where OCHA reported that more than 1.3 million residents of Gaza have been forced to flee, say the stress of being unable to protect their children from bombardment is compounded by their inability to provide enough food.
Limited access to electricity makes perishable goods impossible to refrigerate. Living conditions are overcrowded and unsanitary.
“People are forced to cut down trees to get firewood for heating and preparing food. Smoke is everywhere and flies spread widely and transmit diseases,” said Hazem Saeed Al-Naizi, the director of an orphanage in Gaza City who fled south with the 40 people under his care – most of whom are children and infants living with disabilities.
Hamouda, the displaced health worker, used to feed his children — aged six, four and two — a mixture of fruits and vegetables, biscuits, fresh juices, meat and seafood.
This year, he said, the family has barely eaten one meal a day, living on dried bread and canned meat or legumes.
“Children are being violent towards each other to get food and water,” said Hamouda, who works at Abu Youssef Al-Najjar Hospital and volunteers at a nearby shelter.
“I can’t stop my tears from falling when I talk about these things, because it’s very hurtful seeing your kids and other kids hungry.”
All 350,000 children under the age of five in Gaza are especially vulnerable to severe malnutrition, UNICEF reported last month.