People in Gaza scramble for food aid as the death toll from hunger rises

Dozens of men, women, and children holding any form of container they could find, scrambled on Saturday to get some rice or lentils at a makeshift charity kitchen in Gaza City.

Amid severe hunger and food shortages it is their only hope of getting something to eat for their hungry families.

Zeinab Nabahan, a displaced Palestinian from Jabalia, said she arrived at the charity kitchen at six in the morning in the hope of getting some food for her children.

"They are surviving on the small amounts of lentils or rice that we get here. I hope that God will help me get something. My children haven't had bread or any breakfast,” she said.

The United Nations is warning that levels of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza are at their highest level since the war began.

Tayseer Naim, a man who has been displaced from Beit Hanoun, said that without the charity kitchen, they would not survive.

"We come here at 8 in the morning and struggle to get lentils or rice. We suffer a lot, and we leave at 11 or 12 to walk for about a kilometre.”

Israel reinstated a complete blockade on food and other supplies to the Palestinian enclave for two and a half months, beginning in March.

It said its objective was to increase pressure on Hamas to release dozens of hostages it has held since its attack on Israel on 7 October 2023.

Faced with growing international pressure over the widening food crisis in Gaza, it allowed the flow of aid to resume in May.

But the UN says the amount is a fraction of what is needed and deliveries continue to face delays and impediments by Israel, and pressure from crowds of hungry Palestinians.

On Saturday the Gaza Health Ministry said 11 people, including a child, had died as a result of starvation and malnutrition over the past 24 hours.

It said the latest figures have raised the total death toll to 251, including 108 children, in the Gaza Strip over the past three months.

The UN human rights office says at least 1,760 people were killed while seeking aid between 27 May and Wednesday.

It says 766 were killed along routes of supply convoys and 994 in the vicinity of “non-UN militarised sites," a reference to the Israeli-backed and US-supported Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which since May has been the primary distributor of aid in Gaza.

The Hamas-led attack in 2023 killed around 1,200 people in Israel.

Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed 61,897 people in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry, which says around half of them were women and children.