Children and elders scavenge trash bins for food. Exhaustion sends people to hospital. Friends waste away to the point of being unrecognizable.
This is the reality confronting aid workers in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza, a UN spokesperson on the ground told CNN on Monday.
“I have seen this with my own eyes… children and adults dying of hunger and infants literally dying in their mothers’ arms,” said Olga Cherevko, from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Beyond the front door of her guest house, Cherevko said she witnesses people of all ages rummaging through the trash for scraps on the street.
“I myself don’t recognize my friends because they look so thin,” she added.
Last week, Israeli tanks pushed into Deir al-Balah, an area that had not previously seen ground operations in the 21-month war.
The city is packed with displaced Palestinians. Now, it is one of three areas included in Israel’s “tactical pause” zones, where more than 100 trucks delivered humanitarian aid to Gaza on Sunday.
“Inefficient” air drops: More supplies have been airdropped in from Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. But humanitarian workers urge this is not enough to “even scratch the surface”.
“Airdrops are an incredibly inefficient way to deliver aid,” Executive Director of Doctors Without Borders, Avril Benoit, told CNN on Monday.
“What we really need is to open up those land borders again and allow all the trucks to come in, all the food to come in.”
“Prior to this latest escalation, prior to October 7, there were 500 trucks entering Gaza every day. Now to compensate for all the gaps and the months of siege, we would need thousands of trucks to meet the needs.”
Benoit said it is not just a question of quality but also the quality of aid entering the strip, stressing the importance of specialized food to treat the malnourished.
“You can’t just give them rice and porridge and grains. They need something more substantial to be able to recover from all of the medical consequences even in the short term,” she added.
Micronutrient-rich therapeutic foods are needed for malnourished children in particular, she added, to treat damage to their internal organs and developing brains.
