Using scraps of wood and plastic her children collected near their tent in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City, Heba Dweima, 41, lights a fire to cook the last portion of lentils in a food parcel she received from the World Food Program in late October.
Dweima lives in a displacement tent that has been heavily damaged by rain. She is raising four children alone after her husband was killed last year, leaving her to struggle for survival in Gaza’s displacement camps. Without a job or a reliable source of income, Dweima and her family, like thousands of other families across the Gaza Strip, depend on humanitarian organizations for assistance, including food, water, and other necessities.
“Today, we have food, so we eat and feel full,” Dweima said. “Tomorrow, if we have no food, we have no choice but to go hungry. This is the new equation in Gaza after the war.”
She explains that this was not always the reality for Palestinians. Before the genocide, they could work, run businesses, invest, raise poultry and livestock, cultivate their fields and land, and make a living in many different ways.
But the genocide that Israel has waged against the people of the Gaza Strip since October 2023, as Dweima describes it, has destroyed everything, leaving Palestinians with no means of supporting themselves. As a result, Palestinians across Gaza, without exception, are left waiting for humanitarian assistance to feed their families.
The World Food Program announced in late October that, due to funding shortages, food assistance in the Gaza Strip will be reduced by one-third. This means that half a million people will lose access to the assistance they had been receiving every month.
The World Food Program announced in late October that, due to funding shortages, food assistance in the Gaza Strip will be reduced by one-third. This means that half a million people will lose access to the assistance they had been receiving every month.
Starting this month, the WFP will provide food and cash assistance to 1.1 million of Gaza’s most vulnerable people, down from 1.6 million last month.
The program also said that beneficiary families “would now receive just one food parcel instead of two, along with a smaller-than-usual bag of wheat flour. This amounts to half the food assistance they had previously received.”
The number of hot meals distributed by the WFP has also been reduced, from 250,000 to 150,000 per day. In some hard-to-reach areas near the Yellow Line, beneficiaries will now receive one hot meal every two days instead of one every day. The program has also reduced the value of cash assistance provided to 75,000 families.
Residents across the Gaza Strip have been reporting food shortages even before the WFP announced its decision to reduce assistance. An estimated 1.4 million people, equivalent to 67% of Gaza’s population, are facing acute food insecurity at crisis level or worse (IPC Phase 3 or above), according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). The consequences of this decision have already become visible across different parts of the Gaza Strip. Immediately after the announcement, several bakeries in Gaza that had been receiving flour through the WFP closed their doors and stopped selling subsidized bread to residents. This prompted widespread sit-ins by displaced people outside the bakeries across several areas.
During these protests, residents demanded that their access to food not be made dependent on political decisions or financial pressure. They said they were living through a catastrophe for which they bore no responsibility, and that the world should stand with them rather than deprive them of food.
Umm Ibrahim, a woman participating in a protest in Khan Younis, says people are growing hungry. “Now that the World Food Program’s distribution points have been closed, we can see famine gradually drawing closer to us,” she said.
Umm Ibrahim explains that she, her neighbors, and relatives in Khan Younis have all lost their homes, loved ones, and land. They have been displaced and forced to live in tents, where they are enduring a harsh winter. On top of everything else, they are now being forced to live without food.
“Who could accept such a situation? Who could find this acceptable? It is more than any human being can bear. What have we done to deserve living without food?” she asked.
“They have taken everything from us. Even the food we need is too much for them to allow us to have.”
Umm Ibrahim directs her appeal to the World Food Program, describing it as a lifeline for Gaza’s population. She says people depend on the assistance it provides and that, without the program and its support, thousands of families will be forced to go to bed hungry, leaving their children without food because they have nothing they can do to help them.
In March 2025, famine began to grip the population of the Gaza Strip, eventually reaching a breaking point. People were collapsing in public spaces from exhaustion, hunger, and physical weakness. Deaths caused by starvation were being reported in Gaza daily.
At that point, the food parcel distribution system was replaced by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which took control of aid distribution sites across the Strip. People began traveling to these locations every day in hopes of obtaining food.
But the sites became known as “death traps” where Palestinians were subjected to sniper fire and deliberate shootings. More than 2,600 Palestinians were killed inside or around these distribution sites while food was being distributed under the supervision of the GHF.
The World Food Program’s announcement that it would reduce assistance to Gaza’s population is not the first restriction that Palestinians have been forced to endure, nor will it be the last
Last May, the World Central Kitchen, one of the largest providers of hot meals in the Gaza Strip, announced that it would reduce its food distributions, depriving more than 500,000 Palestinians of food as a result. The organization attributed the decision to financial constraints and funding pressures.
But the pressure on organizations providing food assistance to Gaza does not end there. At the beginning of this year, Israel prevented more than 37 international organizations from renewing their authorization to operate in the Gaza Strip. Most were Palestinian organizations or international organizations working in Palestine. The decision had catastrophic consequences for Gaza’s population.
Israel’s systematic campaign against Palestinians in Gaza continues to target everyone capable of providing them with assistance.
Standing outside his tent in one of Gaza’s displacement camps, Alaa Rabah, 45, a father of five, says Israel plans to destroy the people of Gaza entirely through starvation, bombardment, death, and displacement. He believes Israel will not stop or relent until Palestinians have been eliminated through every possible means.
“They are fighting our livelihoods,” Rabah said. “They deprive us of every opportunity to work in our own homeland. Then they target those who help us, those who bring us food, those who bring us water, those who help us feed our children. They fight us and tighten the restrictions around us because they do not want the world to help us.”
He recalled how the last famine forced people in Gaza to eat herbs and grasses from the ground to stay alive, but their will persevered.
“They want the world to forget us, to stop even mentioning our names, so that we die alone without anyone knowing,” he said.
“But they will not get what they want. We are a people deeply rooted in this land.”
