Twelve-year-old Do’a Atef spends her days knocking on doors begging for food, or gathering firewood from a dusty hill near a refugee camp outside Rafah, in southern Gaza, to cook the few tomatoes and peppers given to her by strangers.
Do’a told NBC News that she was displaced from her home in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza, along with her parents and seven siblings, and they are now sleeping in tents. They are so thirsty, “we drink dirty water,” she said. “My siblings are crying all day.”
They couldn’t find flour, they were cold, there was no bathroom for them to use, no diapers for her baby brother, and no milk to give him. Two months ago, Do’a said, she used to read in school and play with her friends. “Now, all we do is bring firewood and walk barefoot.”
Do’a’s situation underscores a bleak reality for many in Gaza, as the Israeli military’s ground invasion and aerial bombardment continues, displacing an estimated 1.9 million Palestinians into shrinking “humanitarian zones,” mostly in southern Gaza. A dire food and water shortage is putting many at risk of infection and death, according to humanitarian aid groups that stressed difficulties in delivering aid due to the intensity of hostilities.
Israel continued to intensify its offensive in southern Gaza into Sunday.
“The scarcity of aid has led to desperate struggles over water tearing at our social fabric,” Bushra Khalidi, policy lead for Oxfam, said. “The situation in Gaza is not just a catastrophe, it’s apocalyptic.”
Aid agencies described children and families roaming the streets, unable to find food and with nowhere to go. Lines for clean water can last hours, and some have turned to collecting rainwater, which in this semi-arid land is scarce, too. Supermarket shelves are empty. People arrive at bakeries before dawn, with no guarantee they’ll end up with a sack of bread before the shop runs out.
The price for a 25-kilogram (55-pound) sack of flour has skyrocketed to as high as $100 — up from about $15 before the war.
“Numbers that are really, really beyond any capacity,” Najla Shawa, a Palestinian humanitarian aid worker who recently left Gaza, said of the soaring wartime prices. Other commodities and essentials, down to the containers Gazans use to collect water, she said, have also become perilously expensive.
“Even if you have the money,” Shawa said, “the trip to get it is very dangerous and it’s really difficult and humiliating.”
Shawa said the people she has spoken to in Gaza are rationing water. “They are really trying to consume very little,” she said. “A cup a day. A couple of cups a day for the adults, giving priority to children.”
Hazem Zarifa, a 24-year-old university student sheltering in the southern city of Khan Younis, said he has walked miles searching for a little bread or some canned food.
“I have so far lost more than 10 kilograms of weight” — about 20 pounds — Zarifa said. He felt sick from hunger.
