To get a bag of flour for his starving three children, Nedal AbuSharbi arms himself with a knife to protect against thieves and prepares to be shot by the Israeli military.
There is so little food in Gaza – in the grip of famine due to a punishing Israeli blockade and the war – that lawlessness has taken over around the land crossings where the few aid trucks are able to get in.
Now, the desperation is more acute with news that, rather than returning to the negotiating table, Israel is to widen its already devastating offensive and take full military control of the besieged strip, starting with the remains of Gaza City, where Nedal is sheltering with his family.
The father-of-three, whose youngest is just five months old, describes desperate, hungry crowds surging toward and attacking the few aid convoys that enter via the northern Zikim crossing. Even journalists are being targeted.
He says the Israeli army opens fire “under the pretext of combing the area or shooting to prevent people from gathering outside the buffer zone”. The United Nations says more than 1,000 people have been killed trying to receive aid in the enclave in just a few months – most of them shot by Israeli forces operating nearby.
Even if you can avoid that, the last time he went, he had to let three trucks go by before he was able to, in the suffocating scrum, grab a single bag of flour.
“My joy was indescribable and I was overwhelmed,” he says, with desperation in his voice. “But on the way home, three young men I’d never seen before came up to me with large knives – and one man with a gun. They threatened me: either give them the bag of flour or they would kill me.
“I left the bag on the ground. I lost hope and fainted because of what had happened.”
The situation is so dire, he says they call aid convoys “death traps” and the new Israeli security cabinet plans a “deadly game”.
“This is a game of chess controlled by the occupation, and we are the pawns it moves and controls, according to its mood, under the control of snipers and tanks.”
Israel launched its unprecedented bombardment of Gaza in retaliation for Hamas’s bloody 7 October 2023 attacks on southern Israel, during which they killed over 1,200 people and took more than 250 captive, according to Israeli estimates.
Since then, Israel’s bombardment has killed more than 61,000 people, according to local officials, destroyed more than 90 per cent of homes, and – through a devastating siege – sparked a hunger crisis.
According to the United Nations, over 86 per cent of Gaza is already an Israeli-militarised zone, under displacement orders or where these orders overlap.
“The data speaks for itself. Already early this year, over 90 per cent of Gaza’s housing units were reportedly destroyed as per satellite images. Gaza has been reduced to a wasteland of rubble, with over 87 per cent of the territory declared a war zone – forcing people to concentrate in a tiny space,” said Tamara Al-Rifai, spokesperson for the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, the largest UN agency operating in Gaza.
