Hisham, 19, shot while trying to get food

Thirty-two Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops on Saturday, July 19, as they tried to get food from the US-sponsored Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

One of them was Hisham, 19-year-old son of  Monzer Fesifes. "He went to bring food from the failed US, Zionist aid to feed us," said his father.

Sanaa al-Jaberi, a 55-year-old woman, said she saw many dead and wounded as she fled the area.

"We shouted: 'food, food,' but they didn't talk to us. They just opened fire," she said.

More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed trying to get food, according to the United Nations human rights office.

Israel banned food distribution by the United Nations after accusing Hamas of stealing the aid provided by the United Nations and other international organizations. The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza.

But the Israeli military never found proof that Hamas systematically stole aid from the U.N., according to a New York Times report published July 26. The Times said its sources were two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.

More information: CBS News and New York Times

Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, 18 months old

Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, his mother, and his three-year-old brother live in a tent on a Gaza beach. Mohammed’s father was killed last year when he went to seek food.

A photo of his mother holding him in her arms was featured on the front page of the New York Times under the headline, “Gazans are dying of starvation.” He is little more than skin and bones. 

“As an adult, I can bear the hunger,” his mother said. “But my kids can’t.”

Mohammed was diagnosed with severe malnutrition by the Friends of the Patient clinic and Al-Rantisi children’s hospital, but there was little they could do, she said. “They told me, ‘His treatment is food and water.’” 

More information: New York Times

Yahia al-Najjar, 4 months old, died of severe malnutrition

Yahia died at the American Hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza on Tuesday, July 22. His mother successfully nursed her previous three children but she could not produce milk for Yahia. She was subsisting on one meal of lentils or rice per day. The family could not afford baby formula.

More information: New York Times

BBC freelance journalists so hungry they can’t think straight

The BBC and other Western media organizations work with freelance Palestinian journalists to report from Gaza. Israel does not allow Western journalists to enter except on escorted tours. Recently, the BBC shared messages they’ve received from three journalists about the starvation. The BBC did not name them out of fear for their safety. 

"I can't describe the feeling," said a cameraman in southern Gaza. "My stomach twists in knots, and I have a headache, add to that being emaciated and weak. I used to work from 07:00 until 22:00 [10 pm] but now I can barely do one story. I just feel dizzy."

Recently, he collapsed while filming but later resumed his work.

Another journalist said he has lost more than 60 pounds. “"I used to complete most news reports with great speed, but now I am slow in finishing them due to my poor health and psychological state," he said. "Delirium and fatigue accompanies me."

More information: Yahoo News

Nour al-Huda al-Husari, mother

Nour al-Huda al-Husari took her eight-year-old and 12-year-old daughters to the al-Baqa Cafe in Gaza City on Monday, June 30, “to get some fresh air and try to lift their spirits,” according to her husband, Mohammed al-Husari. 

When Israel attacked the cafe, Nour was among more than two dozen patrons who died. Her eight-year-old daughter was thrown through the air by the explosion but was found mostly unharmed. Her 12-year-old daughter, however, suffered life-threatening injuries.  

On July 6, the Israel Defence Forces announced that they had killed Ramzi Ramadan Abd Ali Salah, who they said commanded the Hamas naval force in northern Gaza, and other Hamas militants in the attack on the cafe. 

More information: The Guardian

The Abu Jarad family

When Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire last January, hundreds of thousands of Gazans trudged back to the homes in the northern areas that they had abandoned under orders of the Israeli army. Many found their homes demolished. But Ne’man Abu Jarad, his wife Majida, and their children were lucky. 

The grove of orange, olive and palm trees that once stood in front of the house was bulldozed away. The flowers on their roof and in their garden were gone. But the house still stood, damaged, but habitable. 

One flowering vine in front of the house had miraculously survived.  Ne’man immediately set about examining and arranging its tendrils.

After 477 days — fleeing the length of the Gaza Strip, hiding from bombardment, living in tents, scrounging for food and water, losing their possessions — they were home.

More information: Associated Press

Abdullah, a boy waiting for water

Abdullah was killed in an Israeli air attack that struck children and adults waiting with their jerrycans at a water distribution site in central Gaza on Sunday morning, July 13.

The Israeli Army said the strike was intended to kill an Islamic Jihad terrorist but "as a result of a technical error with the munition,” it fell on the line of people waiting for water dozens of meters away. The strike killed six children and four adults, and injured 16 others.

More information: BBC

Anas Baba, NPR producer

Anas Baba is a native of the Gaza strip. He spends his days interviewing his fellow residents about their lives and their losses. 

He told the Washington Post that NPR has encouraged him to take time off but he wants to work every day. “If you give me a day off, you leave me just with my brain, and then I think about all the horror and misery,” he said. “So, no stops.”

Baba himself is starving. He has lost a third of his body weight. “Hunger is a little bit of an addiction,” he reports. “Once it's controlling your own mind, you cannot think straight. Once you feel that your stomach, your brain, your body, are craving something, you will not be afraid of anything. You will do anything to get food.” 

On Monday evening, June 23, Baba joined crowds walking toward a distribution site sponsored by the US and Israel and later reported on his trip for NPR. He encountered an Israeli tank firing at the crowd, killing and wounding many. The Gazas had approached because of a rumor that the distribution site was open – it wasn’t. Later, after the site did open, Baba saw a mother who had managed to get some food. She had her child beside her and a knives in both hands, screaming at people not to touch her son or the food.

More information: Washington Post

Dr. Marwan al-Sultan, cardiologist

Dr. Marwan al-Sultan, director of Gaza’s Indonesian hospital and one of only two heart specialists in the territory, died July 2 when the apartment where he and his extended family were living was struck by an Israeli missile. 

His wife, sister, daughter, and son-in-law were also killed. A surviving daughter said the missile precisely targeted the room where Dr. al-Sultan was living. 

The Israel Defense Forces said in a statement, “the IDF struck a key terrorist from the Hamas terrorist organization in the area of Gaza City. The claim that as a result of the strike uninvolved civilians were harmed is being reviewed. The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals.”

More information: The Guardian

Hadeel Sbakhi and Abdelrahman Abu Taqyia, Palestinian couple documenting their lives on Instagram

Hadeel Sbakhi and Abdelrahman Abu Taqyia met as university students. They married and started a business today, but their equipment was destroyed in an Israeli attack. Now they are trying to show with their Instagram posts that Gaza is not all tragedy. They struggle to eat and survive, but they also have happiness in their lives. Their Instagram handle has 112,000 followers. They also post on YouTube.

More information: PBS NewsHour

Reem Zeidan, wife and mother

Reem Zeiden was shot through the forehead in front of her 20-year-old daughter and her 12-year-old son as she walked toward an aid distribution site before dawn on July 1, hoping to get food to feed her family. She had been rehearsing with her children where they should meet in case shooting caused panic and chaos among the crowds of hungry Gazans approaching the distribution site. Her last words, according to her son: “‘If we get separated, where will we meet again?’”

“We went there out of desperation. Hunger is what forced my mother to go. She had been going every day for a full week, walking six hours to get there and coming back with nothing,” said her daughter, Mirvat. 

Two days before Reem was killed, Israeli troops opened fire on the crowds approaching the aid distribution site. “I told my mother it was a sign from God not to go again and that convinced her,” Mirvat said. “But she would quickly change her mind when my little sister Razan, who is only five years old, cried to her that she was hungry.”

More information: The Guardian

Pediatrician Ahmmed Al-Farra and a 6-month old baby he is trying to save

Dr. Al-Farra is head of pediatrics and maternity in Gaza's Nasser Medical Complex. He says there are no functioning hospitals in the northern part of the Gaza strip, and his hospital has repeatedly been bombed. 

“We're seeing children with marasmus -- skin and bone," he said. "Some are just 40% of their expected weight. Severe malnutrition, no protein, no vitamins."

Marasmus is a form of severe malnutrition.

Siwar Ashour, a child in Gaza, was born small, but was a relatively healthy baby six months ago, according to Al-Farra.

But today, she is acutely malnourished and fighting for her life in the Nasser Hospital. She is bound in plastic because she has lost so much weight that he can no longer regulate her body temperature. Six months old, she weighs just over 7 pounds. That is less than half the weight of an average American baby girl, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

"If she does not take the suitable formula of milk, unfortunately, she will not survive," Al-Farra said.

More information: ABC News

Yaqeen Sbeita, five months old, and her parents

Yaqeen Sbeita, born five months ago in the midst of the Gaza war, was killed with her parents, Ali Aoun and Saja Ammar Sbeita, when Israel attacked her apartment near the Carrefour Mall in Gaza City.

According to Yaqeen’s grandmother, Saja was nursing her baby girl when the family was killed.

The Israeli military did not respond to an NBC request for comment on why the apartment was targeted. NBC News reported the attack on July 9.

More information: NBC News

Hanya Aljamal, former English teacher

Hanya Aljamal used to teach English in the Gaza strip, but her school was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike. Before the war, she was applying to American universities to study for a Master’s degree in international development. Her Gaza is a different world now, so much so that the Gaza she remembers feels like a fake memory. 

Aljamal works for a British for a British aid organization that runs a project for children in Gaza. She kept an audio diary for the BBC to give listeners a sense of what her life is like today. It starts on Tuesday, June 1.

In one entry, she says children came to the organization’s kitchen with empty pots, begging for food, but she and another staff member turned them away because their food was for people in the aid organization’s camps and they couldn’t feed everyone. 

In another, girls take part in a therapy session at which they talk about emotions – what makes them happy (“When you get really high marks on a test and you feel proud of yourself!”) and what makes them sad. One girl suddenly started crying. She had lost both parents.

One day that week, she watched five colorful kites flying in the air. "I like kites - they're like an active act of hope," she says. "Every kite is a couple of kids down there trying to have a normal childhood in the midst of all this."

More information: BBC

Mahmoud Ajjour, 9-year-old boy

Mahmoud Ajjour and his family were fleeing Israeli shelling in Gaza City in March, 2024, when he was hit. He was evacuated to Qatar but lost both of his arms. New York Times photographer Samar Abu Elouf’s photo of him won the 2025 World Press Photo of the Year.

More information: World Press Photo of the Year