JABALIYA, GAZA STRIP—Mohammad Sobeh lives in a wheelchair. He has been displaced multiple times, and he resides in a tent. He is exhausted. But the biggest challenge the 45-year-old faces right now in Gaza is hunger.
“The markets are empty. There’s no flour, and when there is, it’s sold at prices I could never afford,” Sobeh told Drop Site News as he sat on the side of the road in Jabaliya, watching passersby. “The worst feeling in the world is watching your child cry from hunger, and you can’t even give them a piece of bread.”
For more than a month, Israel has cut off all food, fuel, medicine, and other supplies to Gaza—the longest closure during the 18-month siege. Along with everything else, food is quite simply running out.
On April 1, due to a lack of flour and cooking gas, the World Food Program (WFP) announced that it was shutting down all of its bakeries, cutting off one of the main sources of bread for hundreds of thousands of people. At the same time, the Head of the Bakery Owners Association in Gaza, Abdel Nasser Al-Ajrami, announced that all bakeries in Gaza had shut down—also due to shortages of flour and diesel fuel. More recently, the WFP warned its kitchens might have to shut down by next week as supplies have depleted, having already stopped distributing boxes of staple foods to families last week. …more