Representational image
Representational image
Gaza’s bakeries will run out of flour for bread within a week, the UN says.
Agencies have cut food distributions to families in half. Markets are empty of most vegetables. Many aid workers cannot move around because of Israeli bombardment.
For four weeks, Israel has shut off all sources of food, fuel, medicine and other supplies for the Gaza Strip’s population of more than 2 million Palestinians. It’s the longest blockade yet of Israel’s 17-month-old campaign against Hamas, with no sign of it ending.
The World Food Programme said on Thursday that its flour for bakeries is only enough to keep producing bread for 8,00,000 people a day until Tuesday and that its overall food supplies will last a maximum of two weeks. As a “last resort” once all other food is exhausted, it has emergency stocks of fortified nutritional biscuits for 4,15,000 people.
Fuel and medicine will last weeks longer before hitting zero. Hospitals are rationing antibiotics and painkillers. Aid groups are shifting limited fuel supplies between multiple needs, all indispensable — trucks to move aid, bakeries to make bread, wells and desalination plants to produce water, hospitals to keep machines running.
Netanyahu demand
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated a demand on Sunday for Hamas to disarm and for its leaders to leave Gaza as he promised to step up pressure on the group while continuing efforts to return hostages.
He said Israel would work to implement US President Donald Trump’s “voluntary emigration plan” for Gaza and said his cabinet had agreed to keep pressuring Hamas, which says it has agreed to a ceasefire proposal from mediators Egypt and Qatar.
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said Netanyahu’s comments were a recipe for “endless escalation” in the region.
Eid of sadness
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip had little to celebrate on Sunday as they began marking Eid with rapidly dwindling food supplies and no end in sight to the Israel-Hamas war.
Many held prayers outside demolished mosques.
“It’s the Eid of Sadness,” Adel al-Shaer said after attending outdoor prayers in the central town of Deir al-Balah. “We lost our loved ones, our children, our lives, and our futures. We lost our students, our schools, and our institutions. We lost everything.”