Gaza’s Families Fight Hunger and Despair Amid Ongoing Starvation

In the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, Ayman Radwan, a father of three, sits at the door of his makeshift tent. His pale face reveals his desperation after being displaced multiple times over the past year by Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza.

The recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has brought an eerie silence to Gaza, but for families like Ayman’s, it offers no respite from the struggles of daily survival. The bombs may have stopped falling, but hunger and despair linger as a constant reminder of the ongoing blockade and devastation. To Ayman, like many others in Gaza, the ceasefire feels like a hollow promise in the face of his ongoing suffering.

The tent Ayman lives in offers his family minimal protection against the freezing winter. The tent is small, made of thin fabric stretched over sticks. Thin mattresses lay on the ground, serving as both a bed and a place to sit.

Ayman wakes up in the very early hours of the day and waits for hours in long, crowded lines at the bakery, in search of bread for his hungry children. Unable to find steady work, he has had to borrow money from friends and relatives. He always fears returning home to his children empty-handed, and of seeing his little ones cry from hunger. When I spoke with him in late December, he had not eaten any bread in eleven days. 

“As a father, it is not only about hunger—it’s watching my children suffer without being able to help,” Ayman explains. “I have been looking for flour for three days and I have found nothing. And even if there is, I cannot afford it.”

Israel’s unending siege has had devastating consequences, including destruction of the enclave’s infrastructure, rapid spread of infectious diseases, and widespread hunger among the Gaza Strip’s population. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), acute malnutrition in Gaza is at levels ten times higher than before the escalation of hostilities following October 7, 2023. 

In October 2024, IPC reported that about 1.84 million people across the Gaza Strip are experiencing high levels of “crisis or worse” food insecurity. The IPC warned that, between November 2024 and April 2025, 90 percent of the population will face these levels of food insecurity and Gaza will continue to be at risk of famine as long as the conflict continues and humanitarian access is restricted. 

While aid organizations, including the World Food Programme and the United Nations, have supplies at the ready, Israel is blocking most of them from entering Gaza. In September, aid organizations found that 83 percent of required food aid was not making it into Gaza, meaning people in Gaza were eating an average of just one meal every other day. The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, voted in October to ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from operating in Israel and Palestinian territories—a decision that Palestinian refugees and human rights advocates have called devastating.

UNRWA plays a singular role in the Gaza Strip that will all but disappear once the ban goes into effect. Especially crucial is the agency’s role in providing food to Palestinians in Gaza during the war. UNRWA’s distribution network accounts for 60 percent of food entering the territory each month. But even while UNRWA continues to operate, hunger is widespread throughout the Gaza Strip.

Earlier this month, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that Israeli authorities have blocked or impeded every aid shipment to North Gaza since October. 

“Of the multitude of unacceptable measures Israel is using, starving the population of Gaza is particularly horrifying,” Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem wrote in a report last April on Israel’s blockade of Gaza. “For months, Israel has pursued a policy of total blockade, complete destruction of the possibility of local food production through farming or fishing, and restrictions on the delivery of aid. The result of this policy is millions of starving people.”

U.N. experts warn that, without action to end the blockade, Gaza’s food crisis will worsen. U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed said aid to Gaza is struggling to reach Palestinians, violating international law. In December, Mohammed delivered U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’ remarks on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, noting that the disaster in Gaza is a “dystopian humanitarian landscape in which respect for basic principles of humanity is being shredded.”

“Let’s be clear,” Mohammed said. “The nightmare in Gaza is not a crisis of logistics. It’s a crisis of political will and of respect for fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.”

With all border crossings closed and nearly no aid entering Gaza, a flour sack costs 700 shekels, the equivalent of about 200 US dollars—a price most people in Gaza cannot afford. Over two-thirds of Gaza’s population lives in poverty. Many families survive on minimal rations, if any at all.

“My priority as a father is to provide for my children, even before myself,” Ayman explains, adding that the famine in Gaza has been especially difficult for his daughter, who hasDown syndrome. She doesn’t understand why food has become so scarce, he says, and a lack of sufficient nutrition has had a negative impact on her health and energy levels. Her specific nutritional requirements are nearly impossible to follow under these conditions.

After fleeing Deir al-Balah, a governorate about five miles south of Nuseirat, many times, Ayman has been caring for both his and his sister’s families. When we spoke in late December, he had just shared his last sack of flour with his sister, who has six children. With no solution in sight, Ayman’s uncertainty grows, making it hard for him to stay strong for his children.

“I’ve left all my needs to the heavens,” Ayman says. “It breaks me to see my children hungry while I stand powerless.”