GAZA: Dozens of community kitchens in Gaza shut their doors on Thursday due to a lack of supplies, closing off a lifeline used by hundreds of thousands of people in a further blow to efforts to combat growing hunger in the enclave. The move followed hours after the US-based World Central Kitchen (WCK) charity announced that it had run out of the ingredients necessary to provide much-needed free meals and had been prevented by the Zionist entity from bringing in aid.

Amjad Al-Shawa, director of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organizations Network (PNGO) in Gaza, told Reuters that most of the enclave’s 170 community kitchens had shut down after running out of stock due to the Zionist entity’s continued blockade on Gaza. Shawa said the decision by the WCK, announced late on Wednesday, and the closure of community kitchens on Thursday would cause a drop of between 400,000 to 500,000 free meals per day for the 2.3 million population.

“Everyone in Gaza today is hungry. The world must act now to save the people here,” said Shawa, speaking to Reuters by phone from Gaza. “The remaining kitchens will be closing soon. The hunger catastrophe is beyond words. People are losing their lone source of food,” Shawa added.

Meanwhile, first responders in Gaza said Thursday that their operations were at a near standstill. “Seventy-five percent of our vehicles have stopped operating due to a lack of diesel fuel,” the civil defense agency’s spokesman Mahmud Bassal told AFP. He added that its teams, who play a critical role as first responders in the Gaza Strip, were also facing a “severe shortage of electricity generators and oxygen devices”.

Those Gazans trying to cook independently meanwhile complain that flour still available on the market is contaminated. “The flour is full of mites and sand ... We sieve it three, four times, instead of once, so we can bake it,” said Mohammad Abu Ayesh, a displaced father of nine from northern Gaza.“We don’t want to eat from it, but we feed the children, for the children. You can’t tolerate its smell, cattle and animals would not eat it, we are forced to eat it against our will, we are helpless,” he told Reuters.

On Thursday, the Gaza health ministry said Zionist military strikes across the enclave killed at least 105 people in the past 24 hours, in one of the biggest death tolls in a single day in two months. It added that more than 52,700 people have been killed by the Zionist entity since the war began on Oct 7, 2023. Senior civil defense official Mohammad Mughayyir told AFP that Zionist bombardment across Gaza on Thursday killed 21 people, including nine in a strike that targeted the Abu Rayyan family home in the northern city of Beit Lahia.

In Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, Palestinian woman Huda Abu Diyya has just returned from a visit to a community kitchen where she received what the owners told her would be her family’s last meal. “If it weren’t for the community kitchen, we would have died. For the sake of our children, what shall we do? ... What should I feed them tomorrow?” the woman told Reuters. “Nothing is available here. Everything became so expensive, we have nothing here. The situation is below zero. A bit more like this and we will die of hunger,” she added.

Two weeks ago most of the population relied on one and a half meals per day, but in the past few days that has dropped to one meal a day, and even that will lack meat, vegetables or the necessary healthy components, said Shawa. “The free meals are usually rice or lentils, that is now also at risk of being suspended within the next week. I am afraid that we may begin to witness deaths among elderly, vulnerable children, pregnant women, and the ill,” said Shawa.

“It is unacceptable that humanitarian aid is not allowed into the Gaza Strip,” Pierre Krahenbuhl, director general of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told reporters in Geneva Thursday. The situation in Gaza is on a “razor’s edge” and “the next few days are absolutely decisive”, he added.

The UN’s agency for children, UNICEF, warned that Gaza’s children face “a growing risk of starvation, illness and death” after UN-supported kitchens shut down due to lack of food supplies. Over 20 independent experts mandated by the UN’s Human Rights Council demanded action on Wednesday to avert the “annihilation” of Palestinians in Gaza.

On Thursday, Palestinians waited in line to donate blood at a field hospital in Gaza’s southern city of Khan Yunis, an AFP journalist reported. “In these difficult circumstances, we have come to support the injured and sick, amid severe food shortages and a lack of proteins, by donating blood”, Moamen Al-Eid, a Palestinian waiting in the line, told AFP.

Hind Joba, the hospital’s laboratory head, said that “there is no food or drink, the crossings are closed, and there is no access to nutritious or protein-rich food”. “Still, people responded to the call, fulfilling their humanitarian duty by donating blood” despite the toll on their own bodies, she added. “But this blood is vital, and they know that every drop helps save the life of an injured person.” – Agencies