The New Yorker:

A relief worker on how, exactly two months since Israel suspended all aid to Gaza, hundreds of thousands of people in the territory have grown desperate for food and are struggling to survive.

By Isaac Chotiner

In mid-January, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, putting a temporary stop to the war in Gaza, which began after the attacks of October 7, 2023, and which has killed more than fifty thousand Palestinians. (The combined Israeli death toll from the Hamas attack and the ensuing war is around three thousand people.) Throughout the first fifteen months of the conflict, Israel’s behavior, specifically in refusing to allow sufficient amounts of aid into Gaza, drew international condemnation. The humanitarian situation improved during the ceasefire, but in early March, Israel suspended aid completely, and talks to extend the ceasefire broke down. Full-scale fighting has since resumed, and the amount of food and medicine that remains in Gaza is woefully inadequate for the needs of its people.

I recently spoke by phone with Louise Wateridge, a senior emergency officer at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (unrwa). Wateridge left Gaza in December of 2024, and unrwa’s international staff has not been allowed back into the territory for several months. (Last year, the Israeli government passed two bills, which went into effect in January, that together prevent the Israeli government from communicating with unrwa, and prevent unrwa from operating in Israel or the occupied territories. unrwa’s local staff has been trying to continue its work.) I wanted to understand what had changed on the ground during the ceasefire, and what new reality Gazans have faced since it ended. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed how aid workers are trying to navigate life-threatening Israeli military actions, what the end of communication between unrwa and the Israeli government might mean for the delivery of aid going forward, and how Gazan society will continue to splinter as starving people become increasingly desperate.

How would you describe the current moment—this period after the ceasefire ended?

As of today, I think it’s safe to say that all the progress that was achieved during the ceasefire has been reversed. It has now been two months exactly, as of Friday, May 2nd, that there have been absolutely no supplies entering the Gaza Strip. And that’s not just humanitarian supplies—that’s all supplies. That’s commercial supplies, that’s fuel, it’s food, it’s medicine. It is absolutely everything. Nothing has entered the Gaza Strip for two whole months.

You could see, for weeks on end, the achievements that were made when the ceasefire was in effect. unrwa was able to feed the entire population during the ceasefire. We provided non-food items—so that’s shelter items, hygiene kits, and things like that—to five hundred thousand people. The achievements from colleagues on the ground were absolutely endless because we were able to do our jobs. And the situation now is so beyond imagination, so beyond words at this point, because people are being starved, basically. These are choices that are being made to prevent supplies from entering. And it has been prolonged for two months. When we speak to our colleagues, when we speak to people in Gaza, children are now starving. People are surviving on one meal a day. People are without medicine.

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