Adel Adeeb Sukkar's grocery store feeds 500 families daily in Gaza City. Photo / Saher Alghorra, The New York Times
Aid began to trickle into the territory last week. But there is never enough.
The starvation of Gaza can be measured in the jutting ribs of a 6-year-old girl. In the twig-like thinness of her arms. In the kilograms she and those around her have lost. In the two tomatoes, two green chilli peppers and single cucumber a destitute child can buy to feed his family that day.
Until the week before last, Israel had blocked all food, fuel and medicine from entering the Gaza Strip for 80 days, attempting to pressure Hamas into releasing the Israeli hostages it still holds as negotiations over a ceasefire remain deadlocked.
With international alarm surging over its total blockade, Israel allowed in a drip of aid. That enabled some bakeries to reopen. But humanitarian officials said it did little to alleviate Gaza’s enormous needs and to stop the territory’s slide toward famine. Limited amounts of food began being distributed to residents last Tuesday under a much-criticised plan backed by Israel.
In northern Gaza, cut off by Israeli troops from the rest of the territory, hundreds of thousands of people are reduced to waiting for hours for charity-kitchen food that runs out too soon and to digging boreholes for water to drink, unsanitary though it might be.
There is never enough.
Najwa Hussein Hajjaj, 6, has lost 42% of her body weight in the last two months, going from about 15kg to 9.5kg. Najwa needs specially prepared meals because of an oesophagus condition, but her family can barely find any food at all. Doctors have diagnosed her with severe malnutrition.
People struggle to find fuel for hospital generators, cars and cooking stoves. Families have resorted to burning wood or even trash.
Pastry shops, along with grocery stores, have long since run out of anything to sell. Bakeries have no fuel to bake with.
There is no electricity and little clean water available in Gaza, so people dig for whatever water they can find. Then, they lug it away in plastic containers – an ever harder task for people weakened by malnutrition.
Vegetable markets in Gaza City were bustling before the war. But with nothing being imported and Gaza’s farmland mostly destroyed or inaccessible because of evacuation orders, there is now little produce for sale.
What few fruits and vegetables are available are far too expensive for most families, so if they buy at all, they buy by the piece, not by the usual kilogram. This week, locally grown tomatoes cost US$11.30 ($18.70) per kg and locally grown cucumbers cost US$10 ($17) per kg at a market in Gaza City.
Ordered by the Israeli military to leave growing swathes of Gaza, people have been herded into ever-smaller zones. About 90% of Gaza’s population of roughly 2 million has been displaced from home. Most have been displaced multiple times since the war began on October 7, 2023, when Hamas led a deadly surprise attack on Israel, drawing a crushing military retaliation.
Najwa’s family was displaced from Shajaiye to Gaza City and now lives in a tent. Jordanian authorities, who heard about her case, are trying to evacuate her to receive medical care abroad, her family said.
With bakeries closed for lack of wheat flour and fuel, people grind pasta down into flour that they can bake into bread.
Lentils, too, are being ground into flour for patties or bread. In all, people bring between 400 and 500kg of lentils, rice, pasta and other dry goods a day, some of it saved from when more aid was entering Gaza, to Gaza City’s Jaber Mill, which grinds it down. The owner, Ahmed Jaber, said some people had no choice but to grind up spoiled or rotten supplies.
Residents of the northernmost part of Gaza have fled the fighting to a school, now a shelter, in Gaza City. They line up their buckets to reserve a turn to fill them whenever the school’s water main starts pumping or when a water truck comes by. Those who arrive too late miss their chance.
As bakeries closed and aid groups ran out of supplies to distribute to families, local charity kitchens became some of the only places many Palestinians in Gaza could find food.
Adeel Adeeb Sukkar ran one kitchen in Gaza City, relying on donations from relatives abroad to provide free meals to 500 desperate displaced families a day.
By Sunday, with his stocks gone, he had been forced to close.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Vivian Yee
Photographs by: Saher Alghorra
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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