By Ahmad Awad
Gaza City (EFE).- The only remaining soup kitchen in Gaza City is struggling to feed some 1,000 people in its vicinity, with large hungry crowds, especially children, pushing at the gates for fear of the food running out.
Besides military attacks, the fear of starvation haunts 2.1 million Palestinians, as aid has been trickling into the Gaza Strip due to blockades by the Israeli army. Tons of relief material wait outside the borders, as the UN claims to have sufficient to feed all of Gaza for the coming months.
This soup kitchen, guarded by four fences made up of metal structures, plastic meshes and wires, is only able to feed some 300 people.
“Sometimes we cooked 40 pots of food, but today we struggled to reach about 17 and sometimes we didn’t get enough ingredients and only cooked 10 pots,” Ryad Saadat, a 50-year-old Palestinian who works in the charity kitchen, told EFE.
The large pots contain potato soup or lentils, and sometimes even rice on good days, as hundreds of hungry faces, showing signs of desperation, wait impatiently.
“I have been here at the soup kitchen since eight in the morning and it is already five in the evening. Our children expect us to bring food, but there is nothing. We get a little lentil and a lot of water; it’s not enough,” Hanadi Abeid, a 32-year-old mother with six mouths to feed, told EFE.
Going to the market has become impossible for most families. A kilo of flour can cost about 38 euros ($44), according to Abeid, who also does not dare to go to the aid distribution points run by the US and Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) over fear of attacks at these points.
The fear is shared by many others. Malak, 16, who came alone to the soup kitchen as his parents were wounded, told EFE he does not dare to walk miles to the GHF distribution points, from where many do not return.
Moreover, most of these points – fenced and with Israeli troops stationed a few kilometers from them – are located in the south. The Gazan capital has none, and malnutrition across the Gaza Strip has already reached historic lows.
On Sunday, the Gazan Ministry of Health reported the deaths of 18 people from malnutrition and hunger within 24 hours. Since October in 2023, the number stands at 76 children and 10 adults, most of them after Israel banned supplies in early March.
Over time, the meals offered in the charity kitchen, which depends on donations from Turkey, have become increasingly meager. Abeid complained that the center was not in operation for two days and she had no way to feed her children.
“The children are very hungry (…) I have a five-year-old son who sleeps all the time because of the little food there is,” she said.
Directors of different hospitals in Gaza have been warning for days that a large part of the population is exhausted, and that more and more cases of fainting and of patients with symptoms of starvation have been coming in.
“People don’t have anything to cook. This makes everyone now depend on these charity kitchens for food,” explained one of the volunteers who distributes food in the kitchen. EFE
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