Famine is striking in the central and southern Gaza Strip, as loaves of bread have become scarce and in demand by Palestinians who have been cut off from flour, and what is available has become “poor in quality and expensive.”
Displaced mothers in the Al-Mawasi area in Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, spoke with bitterness and sorrow about the entry of famine into their tents, where the calamities of war, displacement, rain, and hunger combined.
Umm Khaled, whose tent on the beach of Khan Yunis was flooded with sea water during the depression two days ago, goes out every day after dawn prayers in search of a loaf of bread for her children, and participates with the women of the camp in preparing some loaves of flour that is eaten by weevils and has a foul smell.
Umm Khaled said in her interview with the “Sanad” news monitoring and verification agency on Tel Aviv Tribune Network, “A loaf of bread is rare to obtain and basic foodstuffs have become non-existent, and whoever owns a loaf of bread is the richest of the rich.”
These harsh details prompted Palestinian women in the Mawasi displacement camp in Khan Yunis to collect the available flour to bake it in an initiative that faces extreme danger with the absence of flour from the markets, as they work to produce bread for about 600 families living in tents.
The famine has spread in most areas of the Gaza Strip as a result of the Israeli siege, especially in the north, following the Israeli occupation army’s continued genocide and starvation, at a time when all areas of the Gaza Strip are experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe, coinciding with the advent of winter for the second year in a row, with about two million displaced Palestinians. Most of them sleep in tents.
The government media office in Gaza said in a statement that the Palestinians in the Strip have reached “a catastrophic stage of hunger and worsening suffering” in light of the Israeli war of annihilation that has been ongoing for more than a year.
With American support, since October 7, 2023, Israel has been waging a war on the Gaza Strip that left more than 149,000 Palestinians martyred and wounded, most of them children and women, and more than 11,000 missing, amid massive destruction and famine that killed dozens of children and the elderly.
