“I’m hungry,” a message comes through from a staffer working for my charity, the International Network for Aid, Relief, and Assistance (INARA).
“I swear to you, I can barely stand or make it through the day.”
Hunger pounds the brain, louder than the Israeli drones overhead. Weakened bodies stumble through the streets with empty pots looking for a community kitchen that—at best—is doling out a broth, faces contorted in agony in a crush of bodies. Babies born relatively healthy with pinchable cheeks are wasting away, their mothers’ bodies too weak and malnourished to provide breast milk, and hospitals lack the appropriate replacement formula.
My INARA team recently sent me videos from Gaza of a distribution of fresh vegetables. This is not aid that managed to get in, but local produce from the few greenhouses that are still accessible. The prices are astronomical. The parcels, each with six kilograms (roughly thirteen pounds) of fresh vegetables, cost around $120.
I’m struck by how the little children are grinning as if it were Halloween and they are just about to dive into a major candy haul. Only it’s not a chocolate bar they pull out, it’s a cucumber. And there is nothing imagined about the horror scenes or the skeletal figures around them; it’s all real.
“Thank you, thank you, my daughter, we’re hungry all the time, all day. I didn’t eat at all yesterday,” an elderly woman says to Yousra, INARA’s Gaza program coordinator.
The reality of starvation
This is the reality across swaths of Gaza, as the Israeli government deliberately starves the Palestinian enclave, a reality just recognized by two Israeli human rights organizations. B’tselem’s report is entitled “Our Genocide,” and Physicians for Human Rights recently published its findings in “Genocide in Gaza.”
Israel has systematically denied the entry of aid, created roadblocks to ensure that the little that does get in is not safely accessible, and perpetuated false narratives intended to discredit the humanitarian community and justify its blocking of aid. This includes repeatedly stating that Hamas steals the aid and that aid organizations are working with Hamas.
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While nothing could be further from the truth, these claims led to the creation of an aid distribution mechanism—the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—that meets none of the standards recognized by the vast majority of the humanitarian sector.
Israel has manufactured the perfect insidious storm to ensure Gazans’ slow and agonizing end, even though its own military, as reported by the New York Times, “never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations,” citing two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis with knowledge of the issue.
According to a United Nations (UN) statement on July 27, “Of the seventy-four malnutrition-related deaths recorded this year, sixty-three occurred in July, including twenty-four children under five. Many died before reaching medical care, their bodies showing signs of severe wasting.”
In the twenty-four hours since that statement was released, another fourteen people, including two children, died of malnutrition.
Malnutrition means the body isn’t getting the nutrients it needs—such as proteins, vitamins, and minerals. This weakens the immune system, slows wound healing, impairs growth, and causes muscle wasting and organ dysfunction. Over time, major systems—like the heart, liver, and brain—begin to fail.
Starvation is the extreme end of malnutrition. Without enough calories, the body begins to break down its own fat, muscle, and eventually organs for energy—essentially, the body starts to “eat itself.” This leads to multi-organ failure and death if not reversed.
Since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks that launched the war in Gaza, the Gaza Health Ministry has recorded at least 147 deaths due to malnutrition, among them eighty-eight children. As horrific as that is, the number is likely much higher. This is because malnutrition not only first targets the young, but also those with pre-existing chronic or congenital conditions. And much of the time, their deaths are attributed to the condition, rather than malnutrition.
I remember a child I met last November, on my last trip to Gaza before Israel denied my entry. He was emaciated, malnourished, and living with cerebral palsy. We helped the family gain access to RTUF, or ready-to-use therapeutic food. I remember the way I smiled a few weeks later, when I received a photo of the little boy looking much healthier. Two months later, right before the cease-fire, when Israel had again tightened the aid screws, the child died. While it’s difficult to pin his death solely on malnutrition, studies show that children with cerebral palsy can live between thirty and seventy years, assuming they have the proper care.
Even those people in Gaza with a salary, for example, those in the journalism, medical, or humanitarian sectors, cannot get enough to eat without risking their lives. Hospitals in Gaza are reporting that their doctors and nurses are struggling to stay on their feet, fainting while trying to save the lives of their patients.
In a recent interview, Doctors Without Borders CEO Avril Benoit spoke about how one of their own was killed trying to deliver food aid. Of their one thousand staff who are Palestinian, most are on one meal a day, if that. 25 percent of those being admitted to MSF facilities are malnourished, with the majority being between the ages of six months and five years.
“We’re twenty-one months into this and everything we’re seeing now is entirely predictable,” Benoit said.
Not only is the scale of this suffering predictable, it was preventable. Humanitarian organizations have been warning about starvation in Gaza at different points over the last nearly two years now, as Israel would strangle aid, only to loosen its grip just enough to keep the population barely alive. But nothing compares to what we have seen in the last months.
In March, Israel completely shut off all humanitarian aid access. For nearly two months, nothing entered the Gaza Strip.
In May, the United States and Israel backed GHF in starting its distributions, replacing the pre-existing and proven-to-work system of at least four hundred distribution points set up by established humanitarian organizations with just four. Access requires people to cross through Israeli red zones where both the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and guns for hire foreign GHF contractors open fire using machine guns, drones, and tanks as a means of so-called “crowd control”. According to the UN, more than one thousand people have been killed, and more than seven thousand have been injured, just trying to get food.
The IDF has issued statements strongly “rejecting the accusations” that its forces deliberately fire on civilians coming to collect aid.
Those civilians who do survive, often empty-handed, describe the process as sick and twisted.
On its second day of operation, I received a message from a friend’s cousin who had tried to collect aid. “I heard bullets whizzing past my ear,” he wrote. “Panic erupted as everyone around me started running, seeking shelter behind a broken wall. The gunfire continued to hit the wall, and we were terrified, unsure of whether to flee or stay put.”
Tens of thousands of mostly men gather at night, waiting to move forward to collect desperately needed food aid. They wait for the signal. Gunshots ring out, people freeze, and some get shot. They move forward. More shots. They freeze. They make a run for it, tearing and grabbing at the aid that has been set out.
In a recent piece by the Israeli paper Haaretz, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers themselves described how they had nicknamed it “Operation Salted Fish”—the name for the popular children’s game “Red light, Green light.” The piece chronicles how IDF soldiers and officers say they were ordered to fire at will, at unarmed crowds, even when no threat was present.
In an interview with the BBC, a former contractor delivered a scathing and incriminating similar testimony. A Green Beret veteran of the US military, he stated that “in my entire career I have never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed starving population.”
Similarly, a report by Sky News features a former GHF security guard claiming it is a “sadistic death trap” where “snipers open fire randomly on crowds.”
The GHF, and false claims about Hamas interception
The GHF was founded under the false premise repeatedly presented by Israel that humanitarian organizations are infiltrated by Hamas, and that Hamas is stealing the aid for its own financial benefit and to use aid as a means to exert control over the population. These claims were repeated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also denied that Gazans are starving.
“Israel is presented as if we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza,” he said. “What a bold-faced lie. There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza”, even as TV and social media screens show images of babies with sunken cheeks and hollowed-out eyes.
Netanyahu’s comments were followed by what appeared to be a rebuke by US President Donald Trump, who called on Israel to let in “every ounce of food” and stated that “some of those kids, that’s real starvation stuff . . . you can’t fake that.”
Earlier this month, in a briefing to the press, the European Commission spokesperson Eva Hrncirova stated that “we don’t have any reports of Hamas stealing the aid.” More recently, even a US government review found no evidence of widespread looting of aid by Hamas.
We in the humanitarian community have repeatedly stated that Hamas is not stealing our aid. That is not to say that looting has not always been a massive challenge; it has. But it was largely being carried out by armed gangs that emerged in the lawlessness and that operate in the Israeli-controlled “red zone” wastelands. I wrote about this in a CNN op-ed as far back as a year ago.
Much of that looting was taking place at the Kerem Shalom or Karam Abu Salem crossing in southern Gaza. We had long speculated that the only way for armed gangs to exist in this area would be with Israel’s knowledge. In June, Netanyahu admitted himself that Israel has been arming gangs, most notably a notorious clan operating in the Rafah area, where much of the looting takes place. He defended the decision, stating these clans were helping in the fight against Hamas.
Just getting trucks cleared into Gaza by Israel is a lengthy and laborious process itself. Anything entering Gaza must get pre-approved. We must submit packing lists, and Israel can arbitrarily decide to remove items (in the past, sugar was one such example) or determine that entire pallets are not necessary (as late as last year, it was educational materials). The trucks get scanned and searched by the IDF before entering Gaza, where they are offloaded. At this point, organizations are notified that they can come and collect.
The uphill battle of aid delivery
In a recent post on X, the Israeli Foreign Ministry stated that the UN was refusing to distribute aid and instead was coming to collect supplies.
If only it were that simple. To reach our pallets, which arrive at three crossing points along the Israel-Gaza border, organizations must cross through the “red zone.” As of this writing, more than 85 percent of Gaza is either a “red zone” or under evacuation order, meaning that movement within them necessitates coordination with the Israelis.
In practice, this looks like a movement request being submitted, along with vehicle descriptions, license plates, driver names and IDs (any of which can be rejected or approved and then rejected at the last minute), waiting for it to be approved, waiting for on the day of the movement the “green light” to be able to proceed to a “holding point” and then waiting for a “green light” again. The process is then reversed to cross the red zone again.
Just this past Friday, for example, out of fifteen movement requests, only a third were facilitated by Israel, as is detailed by the UN’s Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. It also cites the example of one aid agency that waited for nearly eight and a half hours for the “green light” to move its trucks from the crossing to its warehouse. However, at that point, they were informed by the Israeli authorities that they had to use a different route and change the warehouse for drop-off, as the original site had been subject to a displacement order that same day.
This is just one example of what happens—and has been happening all along for the last twenty-one months—on a daily basis.
With the conditions that Israel created now, with these levels of starvation, trucks that do manage to navigate all the obstacles face swarms of hungry Gazans who will, out of desperation, loot whatever is being carried. And if they gather too close to the “red zone,” the IDF is all but certain to shoot, as happened in July when crowds gathered after hearing a UN convoy carrying flour was coming through. Dozens were gunned down. Israel claimed it fired “warning shots.”
Under increasing pressure over the weekend, Israel agreed to resume airdrops and open so-called “humanitarian corridors.” It implemented a “tactical pause” in bombings for ten-hour stretches in specific areas not considered the red zone—parts of Mawasi, Deir al-Balah, and Gaza City.
The initial airdrops – carried out by Israel, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)– amounted to a couple of trucks at best and injured at least ten people. Aid agencies are warning that this is a grotesque distraction, not to mention highly inefficient and costly.
Air drops cannot and will not meet the needs of the people, nor will they even begin to stem the starvation. It is absurd to any observer that air drops are the only solution that the international community can come up with when the World Food Program has enough food either in the region or en route to the region to feed all of Gaza for three months.
However, Israel’s weekend announcement does seem to have come with a slight easing of restrictions. UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher said that initial reports indicated that roughly one hundred trucks had been collected.
“A moral crisis that challenges the global conscience”
But nothing will change unless Israel allows aid to be properly scaled up and delivered in a safe and humane manner.
In addition to that, you cannot just turn on the tap of food and reverse what has been done. The images we are seeing now are a result of weeks and weeks of limited calories and limited nutrients. They have no reserves of fat in their bodies, and their immune systems are destroyed. Children and adults need specialized treatment.
It can take several weeks to “stabilize” this level of malnutrition among children and others or they risk facing lifelong consequences.
“This is not just a humanitarian crisis. It is a moral crisis that challenges the global conscience,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres recently stated.
It often seems that it is only those in Gaza who have any moral conscience left. I’m reminded of another video that the INARA team sent me. A mother had arrived hysterical at our clinic, her kids were starving, her twin babies had screaming red diaper rash, and one of her boys had an upcoming birthday. He had asked his mother not for a cake, but for bread; it had been weeks since they had last been able to find some.
Yousra, INARA’s program coordinator, returned the next day with a couple of loaves she had been able to find, stacked them on top of each other, and placed a candle on top.
“I had to do it, I had to give him a little joy,” she messaged me.
Arwa Damon is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East and president and founder of the International Network for Aid, Relief, and Assistance (INARA), a nonprofit organization that focuses on building a network of logistical support and medical care to help children who need lifesaving or life-altering medical treatment in war-torn nations.
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Image: SENSITIVE MATERIAL. THIS IMAGE MAY OFFEND OR DISTURB A man carries the body of Palestinian baby Zainab Abu Haleeb, who died due to malnutrition, according to health officials, at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, July 26, 2025. REUTERS/Ramadan Abed TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY