Famine in Gaza: ‘My children watch videos on the internet of roast chicken and hamburgers, but I forbid it because it only hurts them’

Bread and hummus for breakfast and for dinner. For days now. “And that’s if we’re lucky, because there have been nights when there was nothing at all,” says Islam Umm Amar, 32-year-old mother in Gaza with three children under the age of six, the youngest born at the end of 2023, just as the war in began.

“Reports may decide that famine is official as of today, but the U.N. is late, because Gaza City has been suffering for months,” she tells EL PAÍS bitterly over the phone from the old town. “I have been watching my children faint before my eyes for a long time because they are so weak. We have all lost a lot of weight. I don’t know why Israel takes revenge on us in this way,” adds Umm Amar.

A U.N. report published Friday concluded that the “man-made famine” is already afflicting 500,000 people in Gaza City, three neighboring towns and several refugee camps. It adds that the same “catastrophic conditions” will spread south, to Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis, by the end of September if nothing changes. It also warns that it has not been possible to assess famine conditions in the north of Gaza, where conditions are believed to be “as severe – or worse."

“My two little children have never eaten fruit, fresh meat, or tasted a sweet. I don’t think anyone outside Gaza can imagine what this means or how we are living,” Umm Amar laments.

It is impossible to produce or grow almost anything in a Gaza Strip devastated and battered by bombings and mass displacement, where its two million inhabitants are crammed into a small part of this tiny territory of 365 square kilometers. Its population depends more than ever on humanitarian aid that trickles in. According to the World Food Program (WFP), the territory currently needs more than 62,000 tons of vital aid per month.

In Gaza City’s Al Rimal neighborhood, Dima al-Batsh will once again serve her two teenage children a thin lentil soup. In a backpack, they keep a few cans of tuna and meat for emergencies or for a possible flight they fear may come in the next few days, as the Israeli army prepares to launch its evacuation and full-control plan for the city — a move that, if carried out, will force nearly one million people to flee.

“My children beg me to go buy something tasty to eat. They watch videos on the internet of roast chicken and hamburgers, but I forbid it because it only hurts them,” the civil servant tells this newspaper. She lost her job when Israeli bombings began in October 2023, after the attacks by the Islamist movement Hamas.

“And everything could get worse. I see people around me who are practically dying of hunger. Children cry because they don’t eat and parents are desperate because there’s nothing to give them. That is the reality. Everything else is Israeli propaganda,” she says.

‘It has taken too long’

Samir Zaqut, a senior official at the Palestinian NGO Al Mezan, also believes that famine has been a fact in Gaza for weeks or months. “The report falls short and has taken too long. When you live here, talk to people, go into homes and tents, you see it has been happening for months,” he argues. “The Israelis spread propaganda saying that food is entering Gaza and no one is hungry, so that nothing changes and no one reacts.”

Coinciding with the release of the U.N. report on famine in Gaza, the NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF) published figures from its clinic in Gaza City, which has admitted 5,570 patients for malnutrition since late May. “At the end of May, only one in seven were severe cases and the rest were moderate. By early August, one in four cases were already severe acute malnutrition,” they summarized, estimating that the overall number of patients has increased fivefold since May.

According to Zaqut, the problem is not only the lack of food, but also the quality of what people in Gaza consume. “There is no fresh food, only canned products and poor-quality items. This is destroying our health, especially that of the most vulnerable, such as the elderly, people with chronic illnesses, babies or pregnant women,” he laments.

“Today, for example, I went to the market and there were some tomatoes. A kilo cost more than 80 shekels [$23]. Who can afford that?” he asks. Zaqut estimates that 80% of people in Gaza are now extremely poor and are manipulated by small mafias trying to loot the few U.N. humanitarian aid trucks that Israel allows into Gaza.

“There are also armed groups waiting for the parachutes that drop food. That means people like me don’t go to those places out of fear, and hunger keeps spreading more and more,” he says.

Zaqut accuses Israel of “encouraging and fostering” this situation — by not allowing more trucks to enter, by denying U.N. agencies authorization to ensure their safety and proper distribution, and by promoting the idea that people in Gaza are not going hungry thanks to the Global Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which distributes food at several points in the south of the territory.

According to the U.N., from late May to mid-August at least 1,857 Palestinians have died while trying to obtain food, 1,021 of them near GHF distribution points. For this reason, the U.N. report states that the food distributions carried out by the foundation “do not meet the criteria to be classified as humanitarian assistance.” Despite this, the U.N. report has taken into account GHF shipments.

For Tirza Leibowitz, of the Israeli NGO Physicians for Human Rights (PHRI) — which last month published a report on the destruction of Gaza’s health system, concluding that what is happening in the Gaza Strip is genocide — the famine was “predictable” and is the result of “seeds of destruction that have been sown and watered, and will continue to claim lives for years.”

“What we are seeing now is the conjunction of the destruction of medical care, famine, the resurgence of disease and the collapse of treatment capacity,” she says.

Israel argued that the IPC report on famine in Gaza was “tailor-made [...] to fit Hamas’s fake campaign” and accused the institution of lowering its parameters in order to be able to declare a famine. The authors of the report rejected these accusations and provided the corresponding technical explanation.

The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a globally recognized index developed independently by experts at the request of the U.N. and other international organizations, produces this report and defines five phases in assessing food security. For famine — the most severe stage — to be officially recognized as affecting a population, three criteria must be met: one in five households must suffer extreme food shortages, 30% of children must be acutely malnourished, and at least two out of every 10,000 people (or at least four out of every 10,000 children under five) must die each day from outright starvation or from the combined effects of malnutrition and disease.

In Gaza at this moment, it is not possible to weigh and measure children to determine whether 30% fall below the percentile considered dangerous for their health. Instead, the diameter of children’s arms is used — a method applied in several places for more than a decade — which allows famine to be declared when 15% of children fall below a specific measurement.

The IPC report warns that 132,000 children between five and six years of age will suffer from acute malnutrition before June of next year.

“The IPC report is based on partial and unreliable sources, many of them affiliated with Hamas, and blatantly ignores the facts and the extensive humanitarian efforts led by the State of Israel and its international partners," insisted General Ghassan Alian, head of COGAT, the Israeli agency responsible for authorizing the entry of aid into Gaza, in a post on the social network X.

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