Every day this week Mustafa, his wallet full and belly empty, has left his house to hunt for food in the ruins of Gaza City.
He walks for hours, chasing rumours: flour sighted at a shop on Nasser Street, lentils near the destroyed mosque, green vegetables at what used to be the Saraya Square.
For four days, he found nothing, returning empty-handed to his brother’s home in Rimal, a neighbourhood where the enclave’s small middle class once lived.
On the fifth day, he followed a black market trader down an alleyway and paid almost $100 for a kilo of lentils. Boiled at home on foraged firewood, the rare find was his family’s first meal in almost a week: a few spoons of lentils in warm salt water, split between six children and nine adults.
“We are like detectives, chasing the smell of flour,” he said, as the whine of an Israeli drone nearly drowned out his voice. “And even if we find it, we have to be millionaires to buy a single kilo.”
Mustafa’s futile searches mark the latest grim milestone in Gaza’s descent into mass starvation, as even those with money find themselves in the same nightmare as those without: hungry and hunting for food.
After months of warnings that Israeli restrictions on aid were tipping the enclave into full-blown famine, local health officials are now reporting dozens of deaths — nearly 60 in July alone — from starvation and malnutrition.
One in three Gazans goes multiple days without eating, the World Food Programme said this week. Malnourished mothers can no longer produce milk to breastfeed their children, the injured are unable to heal and hospitals have run out of nutritional supplements to treat gaunt babies.
While no one was left untouched by Israel’s offensive, Gaza’s small middle class — lawyers, doctors, university professors — were initially able to blunt the worst ravages of hunger by raiding their life savings or tapping remittances from abroad. Now food is so scarce they too are wasting away.
“There are no rich people, no middle class or poor,” said Youssef Ahmed Abed, 36, who has burned through $25,000 to keep his family alive. Now, he said, even money could not help: “There is nothing to buy.”
Israel’s 21-month war, which started after Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack, had already destroyed much of Gaza’s economy, driving an impoverished population into near complete dependency on aid.
But Israel’s policies have now pushed the enclave and its 2.1mn population into an unthinkable hunger crisis. Israel imposed a full, multi-month siege on Gaza in March, and since May has allowed the UN and other humanitarian groups to bring in only a trickle of aid.
Instead, it has backed the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which operates four militarised distribution sites in a model denounced by the UN as an “attempt to weaponise aid”.
Israel says restrictions are necessary to prevent Hamas from diverting supplies, though international officials have repeatedly said they have seen no evidence of systematic diversion by the militant group.
Making matters worse for Gazans is the shortage of hard currency. Cash machines and banks have long since been closed, with money changers now selling tattered Israeli shekels, in exchange for bank transfers, at commissions of as much as 45 per cent.
Abed, who burned through his life savings, said he bore the money-changer fees and paid whatever the traders asked just so it did not reach the point “where my son is crying for bread”.
Sweets, though, are an unattainable dream. With a kilo of sugar costing $100, the graphic designer once bought a handful for $6 simply for his sons to “lick”.
Asmaa Tafesh, whose monthly UN salary of $1,200 allowed her before the war to rent a car, eat out and take her three children to the beach, now loses so much to commissions she must some months sell jewellery to survive. A bag of flour can cost her $40.
The shortages have been so intense in recent days that “all the children can think about is, ‘What we are going to eat?’” she said. “The youngest one asks me, ‘Mama, has any flour come into Gaza?’”
The answer is: not enough. Much of what comes in has languished along the Gaza border, with the UN and others struggling to distribute it due to active combat, churned-up roads and the danger not just from looters but the Israeli military.
Local officials say more than 1,000 people have been killed trying to get aid in recent months, many in attacks by Israeli troops while trying to reach GHF sites.
The Israeli military has acknowledged opening fire on multiple occasions, but claims it only did so after people approached troops in a way they deemed threatening.
For Mustafa, the descent into hunger began slowly, then suddenly became unavoidable.
Money from abroad initially helped blunt the worst of the shortages. But soon, the men in the family started skipping meals before the children and their mothers began going hungry too.
These past few weeks had been the worst, he said. On the days he and his brother cannot find food, the children eat a tablespoon of salt and fill their bellies with water.
Tall, broad-shouldered and handsome before the war — his friends joked he could be a movie star — Mustafa said he had lost 40 kilos, nearly half his weight.
He is now too embarrassed to send a photo. Polite to a fault, he apologises for the condition Israel has reduced him to.
“I am sorry to say this, but if my family doesn’t die in an Israeli military operation, we will die of hunger,” he said. “If this happens, please forgive us.”
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