Starving Palestinians in Gaza are beginning to resemble “walking corpses”, a United Nations official has said, as a wave of hunger crashes on the enclave.
The head of Palestinian refugee agency Unrwa, Philippe Lazzarini, said that humanitarian workers in Gaza were seeing children who are “emaciated, weak and at high risk of dying” without urgent treatment.
Growing levels of starvation in the Gaza Strip have tipped over the edge in recent days. Most of the 113 hunger-related deaths have come in recent weeks, and 82 were children, according to Palestinian health officials.
Israel has imposed heavy restrictions on the amount of food and aid allowed to enter Gaza, limiting aid to a handful of trucks each day following a total 11-week blockade earlier this year. UN officials say the aid delivered into the strip is a drop in the ocean of what is needed.
In a post on X on Thursday, Mr Lazzarini said that a Unrwa worker had told him that “people in Gaza are neither dead or alive, they are walking corpses”.
He said the agency has the equivalent of 6,000 loaded trucks of food and medical supplies in Jordan and Egypt, which have not yet been allowed into the enclave.
“Families are no longer coping, they are breaking down, unable to survive. Their existence is threatened,” he said.
Israeli forces have killed hundreds of Palestinians attempting to secure food from a limited number of aid trucks, drawing widespread condemnation, including from many of Israel’s own allies.
As more than 100 human rights groups and charities demanded more aid in a letter on Wednesday, Palestinians living in the enclave said they had been forced to trade their personal gold for flour.
“We are living in hunger and daily suffering, as prices have risen in an insane way that no Gazan citizen, whether employed or unemployed, can bear, in a way that is beyond comprehension,” said Wajih Al-Najjar, 70, from Gaza City, the breadwinner for a family of 13.
“People are forced to go to death in search of some aid,” he told The Independent, lamenting the “insane” price spiral of flour, which he says has shot up from 35 shekels (£7.74) to up to 180 shekels (£39.80) per kilo.
Mr Najjar, who has lost one quarter of his bodyweight – dropping from 85kg to 62kg – says he can not get a full meal for himself. “So what about children who need food more than three times a day?” he said.
Hanaa Almadhoun, 40, told the BBC that Gazans are selling their personal possessions, including their gold jewellery, to pay for flour. Flour is the “basis of everything”, she said, but it is “expensive and difficult to secure”.
Major broadcasters and news agencies, including the BBC and Reuters, said their journalists on the ground in Gaza faced the “threat of starvation” in a joint statement.
