With each trip, he recalled recently, “the level of desperation has increased incrementally. Every time I went, it just looked worse and worse.”
According to a report released by the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, northern Gaza is on the brink of famine. Organizations say the Strip must be flooded with food aid to address the issue, but accounts from inside the Strip indicate it has become increasingly impossible for aid convoys to traverse the route from the south of the Strip, where Israel allows them to enter, to the north, where the worst hunger is.
According to Mark, who asked to use a pseudonym due to the sensitivity of the subject, as Gazans have grown hungrier, relief trucks are increasingly being emptied by both desperate civilians and armed looters before they can reach their intended distribution points.
“In the first convoys, we were able to arrive at the distribution points and actually set up the distributions. But from around February, it’s been very difficult to be able to even move more than a kilometer after the first checkpoint. Once you cross past it, everyone is desperate, everyone is hungry,” Mark told The Times of Israel.
