Gaza Humanitarian Crisis Worsens Amid Israel-Hamas Cease-Fire Push: What to Know

Human rights organizations and residents describe the situation in the enclave as getting more desperate. Here is a closer look.

For the past several weeks, Fadia Nasser, a widow sheltering in Deir al Balah in central Gaza, says she has subsisted on nothing but a small sandwich of herbs for breakfast and a tomato she shares with her daughter for lunch.

Eleven miles away in a tent camp in southern Gaza, Said Lulu, who used to run a small coffee kiosk in Gaza City, says he is suffering in pain from kidney disease but has no access to the clean water doctors say he must drink to keep it from getting worse.

And Ola Moen, in Beit Lahia in the enclave’s north, fears going outside because of frequent airstrikes. But she doesn’t feel she has a choice: She says she spends her days scouring pharmacies for burn cream and painkillers for her 9-year-old nephew, whose legs were broken and burned by an Israeli airstrike in October.

Even as mediators try to secure a cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas, Palestinians and human rights organizations say the humanitarian situation is getting more desperate.

In the 14 months since Israel launched its invasion of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led terror attack on Israel, military bombardments have turned cities into rubble-filled wastelands and 90 percent of the population of about 2.1 million has been displaced at least once. Winter is adding to the misery. A doctor at a hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, said that four infants in tent encampments had died from the cold in the past week.

Israel says that its target is Hamas and that it does everything possible to limit the loss of civilian life. But the increasingly dire humanitarian situation has prompted a particularly scathing chorus of condemnation from the United Nations and international human rights organizations.

Here is a closer look at three parts of Gaza’s humanitarian crisis.

Food

Yaser Shaban, a 58-year-old civil servant for the Palestinian Authority who is living with six people in a tent in Gaza City, is dependent on the limited supplies of food — beans, lentils and pasta — brought in by humanitarian organizations.

When those run out he begs for food or uses his few remaining shekels to buy items from the market at vastly inflated prices. Fruit and meat are out of reach, he said. And eggs, at 15 shekels, or $4, each, are a rare treat. “I am not looking for delicious, healthy or luxury food,” he said. “The goal is to only beat hunger.”

The United Nations warned in November that 1.95 million people were at risk of famine and that absent a dramatic increase in food aid, people would start dying of hunger. On Dec. 24, it said deliveries of humanitarian aid were still inadequate, particularly in the north, where Israel has ordered evacuations and severely restricted access. Israel is pressing a renewed offensive there in an effort to stamp out what it has called a Hamas resurgence, unleashing some of its military’s most devastating attacks yet.

Georgios Petropoulos, a senior U.N. official based in the southern city of Rafah, noted that even when Israeli authorities allow shipments of humanitarian aid in, they sometimes strip the deliveries of vital components, such as the fuel needed to run generators in hospitals and shelters. Israel says that the fuel cannot be sent to areas where militants are active.

“From where we are in Gaza, it looks like the aid system has been weaponized,” Mr. Petropoulos said. “Every day as an aid worker in Gaza, you’re forced to make horrible decisions: Should I let people die of starvation or the cold?”

On Dec. 5, Amnesty International accused Israel of carrying out genocide in Gaza, citing prevalent hunger, the risk of famine and the inaccessibility of aid as contributing factors. Israel rejected the claim, and the Israeli authority that coordinates the flow of goods to Gaza said on social media that the group’s accusation that it is obstructing aid deliveries and precipitating famine “deliberately and inaccurately ignores the extensive humanitarian efforts made by Israel,” and listed recent deliveries of food, fuel and medical supplies.

There is little question that aid delivery has been reduced to a trickle, both because of Israeli restrictions and concerns about looting. To Ms. Nassar, what matters is that she still does not have enough to eat. She said that there is food in the market — most often smuggled in, or looted from humanitarian aid convoys — so, to outsiders, “it may not look like famine.”

“But when food is so expensive that most people cannot afford it, is it still available?” she asked.

Water

Mr. Lulu, the former coffee seller, has no regular access to a tap for water. He lives in a tent camp in Rafah, in southern Gaza, and the water there is delivered by the tank-load to a central area, where residents wait in line for hours to fill up their jars and buckets, at 2 shekels, or 50 cents, a gallon.

But the quality is dubious: smelly, cloudy and flecked with debris. “The only good thing about it,” he said, “is that it is less bad than the seawater.” He knows that drinking the water will exacerbate his kidney problems, but bottled water is unaffordable.

It wasn’t always that way. Gaza has water treatment plants, desalinization facilities and three pipelines channeling fresh water from Israel. But in a report released on Dec. 19, Human Rights Watch said Israel was intentionally depriving Palestinians in Gaza of adequate access to safe water for drinking and sanitation.

The pipelines were turned off and damaged from bombing at the start of the war and only partially reopened a month later, the report found. Israel’s restrictions on fuel imports have virtually halted desalinization activities. Water and sanitation infrastructure has sustained extensive damage, the report found. Israel also prevented the importation of equipment and chemicals, such as chlorine, needed for purifying water, saying those items risked being used by Hamas.

As a result, Gazans have little access to clean water. The report recorded 669,000 recorded cases of acute watery diarrhea since the war began, and more than 132,000 cases of jaundice, a sign of hepatitis. Both diseases spread via contaminated water.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense said in response to the report that Israeli pipelines were sending millions of gallons of water into the Gaza Strip and that Israel had helped repair damage to the water infrastructure caused by Hamas. Human Rights Watch noted that water from the pipelines was insufficient to offset the decrease in water production from other sources.

Ms. Moen says she spends two hours a day waiting in line to buy drinking water — at 19 shekels a gallon, or more than $5, in north Gaza. And she still has to boil and filter it. “At least I don’t see worms in it,” she said. “That is our criteria now.”

Medicine

When Ms. Moen’s house in Beit Lahia was hit in October, most of her immediate family died. Others were injured and are still in need of medical treatment. But painkillers, antibiotics and medicine for chronic diseases like diabetes are impossible to find.

She fears getting sick or injured. Going to a hospital is out of the question, she said. They are unclean, reek of death and blood, and lack the most basic supplies.

Few are functioning properly. The Israeli military forced patients and staff members on Friday to leave one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza, saying it was a stronghold for Hamas. Fighting has raged around the facility, Kamal Adwan, for nearly three months.

On Saturday, the Israeli military said that it had arrested roughly 240 militants in and around Kamal Adwan over the past couple of days and found weapons in and around the hospital. It added that the director of the hospital, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiyah, was detained for questioning and, without providing evidence, said he was suspected of being a militant.

On Dec. 19, a report from Doctors Without Borders described repeated Israeli military attacks on Gaza’s civilians and medical infrastructure, along with the “systematic denial of humanitarian assistance,” as “clear signs of ethnic cleansing.” Israel’s foreign minister slammed the report as “blood libel.”

Ms. Moen doesn’t need a report to tell her what is going on in Gaza, she said. Nor does she think it will make a difference.

“It’s been over a year of mass killing, starvation, displacement and misery, and no one seems to care,” she said.