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Lack of food in Gaza affects doctors and journalists as well as everyone else [1]
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Date: 2025-07-24
An article in the Washington Post on July 24 titled Mass starvation stalks Gaza as deaths from hunger rise tells of starving children and their parents, and also focuses on the doctors and journalists who are almost unable to work.
Doctors are famished to the point that they have dizzy spells as they make their rounds, medics say, and the journalists documenting their caseloads are often too weak to even walk to the clinics.
The article says testimonies from doctors, relief workers and others this week make it clear that “nearly 1 in 3 people are going multiple days without eating, according to the United Nations, and hospitals are reporting rising deaths from malnutrition and starvation.” The article includes this information we reported yesterday in Starvation death toll in Gaza:
The Gaza Health Ministry said Wednesday that 10 people had died of starvation in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total number of those killed by hunger to 111 since the start of the war. The International Rescue Committee, a global relief and development organization, said Wednesday that its teams had reported an increase in the number of children being rushed to hospitals because of malnutrition in recent days. “Their small bodies are shutting down. They can’t breathe; their immune systems are collapsing,” said Scott Lea, the organization’s acting country director for the Palestinian territories.
Tess Ingram, a spokeswoman for the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, said rising rates of child malnutrition were preventable, but that the health care system needed to treat it was “running on fumes or hit by strikes.”
“These numbers are rising fast because children are being denied enough food, water and health care. It’s as simple as that,” she said.
The Washington Post article says that throughout the war, Israel has imposed “severe restrictions” on the amount of food and other aid entering Gaza. However, at times, it allowed more trucks to enter, including during a six-week ceasefire earlier this year.
But on March 2, Israel reimposed its blockade, lifting it only partially in May after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “pictures of mass starvation” could cost his country the support of the United States and other allies.
The U.N. says Israeli authorities are the “sole decision-makers” on how much aid enters Gaza, as well as the type of supplies that are allowed in.
“Once inside Gaza, movement requires navigating an obstacle course of coordination with Israeli forces, through active hostilities, traveling on damaged roads, and often being forced to wait at holding points or pass through areas controlled by criminal gangs,” the U.N. relief chief Tom Fletcher told the U.N. Security Council in New York last week. When vehicles do make it through, he said, starving people often try to grab flour from the backs of the trucks.
The article says Gaza’s ability to make its own food has been “almost entirely destroyed as Israeli military operations have wiped out farmlands and factories.“ People in Gaza are now reliant on “humanitarian aid that most people under Israel’s new system cannot easily access.”
According to local health authorities, more than 1,000 people have been shot dead as they race through territory controlled by the Israeli military toward distribution points run by U.S. security contractors, where supplies are first-come, first-served.
The article reports that even the hospital staff are running out of food. “The flour, milk, eggs and meat that were available during an earlier ceasefire have disappeared from the market. A bag of flour and lentils might cost almost $200.”
Relief workers say parents throughout Gaza regularly forgo meals, and sometimes days’ worth of food, to feed their children. When there is still nothing in the cupboards, they find a way to explain why no one eats.
In an open letter published Wednesday, 115 organizations, including Doctors Without Borders and Save the Children, said
Israel’s blockade and ongoing military operations were pushing Gaza’s more than 2 million people, including relief workers, toward starvation.
A spokeswoman for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) is quoted in the article as saying colleagues had begun receiving “SOS messages from staff who are hungry themselves, who are exhausted themselves.” The Washington Post article reports that doctors, health officials, and aid workers this week have all apologized for their lack of focus, citing hunger. Many were surviving on lentil soup only, and the director of one hospital said he needed to pause during an interview because of a headache and dizziness. He explained that
his family of six had obtained about 4.4 pounds of flour the day before, which he estimated would last a day and a half. “The main problem is that you are all of the time thinking about where and how we can obtain any amount of food.” The doctor said doctors and nurses were struggling to work long shifts on empty stomachs, and some “have not been able to stand.”
The lack of food is also affecting journalists in Gaza. The Agence France-Presse news agency has warned that the Israeli blockade and subsequent hunger crisis had made conditions for their Palestinian colleagues in Gaza “untenable.”
The AFP’s principal photographer posted on his Facebook page that he no longer had the strength to work. Other colleagues were starting to say the same. The AFP statement also included this: Over the last few days, we have learned from their brief messages that their lives are hanging by a thread and that the courage they have shown for months to bring news to the world will not be enough to pull them through.”
The statement added:
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