A family was so hungry they ate C4 thinking it was some sort of a spread.

At first I was not sure I had heard the doctor properly.

“C4, like the explosive?”

“Yes, they thought it was cheese. They found it along with some bottles of water and Pepsi.”

It’s towards the end of Nov 2024 and I’m in Gaza City. The IDF had recently withdrawn from the area this family lived in. The family had briefly returned.

Survival requires this type of foraging, the doctor explained.

“Starvation can do anything.” the doctor said.

This family had divided up the C4 and put it in some bread. They came into the ICU vomiting and convulsing. Most of them recovered, but one 13 year old girl was still connected to a mechanical ventilator.

At the time, in Gaza City there was a shortage of everything except for flour. On the way to the hospital, my charity INARA’s physical therapist, Mohammed, had pulled up a picture of a steaming roasted chicken lying on a bed of rice. It had been months since he’d had a proper meal, nevermind a chicken.

“I dream of chicken” he had joked. “Sometimes I just look at this picture and pretend I’m eating it.”

The pediatrics ward for malnutrition is packed. Children whose wounds aren’t healing because their bodies don’t have the nutrients they need. Babies who are too weak to cry.

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Back then the Gaza Strip was split by what was called the Netzarim corridor. Crossing for aid organizations required permission from COGAT (the Israeli unit that is meant so faciliate coordination), but we were only allowed to move personnel, not products through it.

Most of the population had been forcibly displaced further south, crammed into the central part of Gaza. One of Israels tactics to obstruct aid was to prevent its movement within the Gaza Strip itself. There are countless examples of this, but I’ll explain using the example of flour, specific to that point in time. In south and central Gaza there was a massive flour shortage. (Note: when I say shortage is does not mean that there were ever the needed levels. Its like shortage on top of shortage.)

There were even a couple instances where people were crushed to death at bakeries. We, the humanitarians, were screaming about the flour shortage. Israel was like no, the humanitarians are lying there is flour and broadcast images of flour moving into Gaza.

It’s true, flour was moving into Gaza. But what Israel did not talk about, and what governments and much of the mainstream media did not bother to look into was this inconvenient part of the story: Israel was allowing flour to move into the NORTHERN part of Gaza. We, aid organizations, were not permitted by Israel to move that flour through Netzarim to central and south Gaza where the majority of the population was and where the shortage of flour existed.

Conversely we were not allowed to move hygiene kits, food and so on from south/central to the north. This resulted in the flour shortage in south/central and the shortage of everything else in Gaza City/the north.

It was one of the evil genius ways that Israel used a half-truths and turned that into an accepted truth for the rest of the world, especially it’s supporters, aka the United States and Europe. And Israel could happily call humanitarians liars and everyone else just gobbled up that story.

I remember back then thinking to myself “Israel doesn’t need to bomb Gaza. It can just keep up the status quo and everyone will die.”

Fast forward to present day. Fast forward through Israel deliberately shutting off all aid entry in 2025, the abomination called the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” that was a horrendous real life Squid Games only the players were starving Palestinians forced to make a death run towards food as Israeli soldiers fired on them, through the famine the UN declared, the farce of President Trump’s “Board of Peace” and the ceasefire deal that isn’t being implemented by any stretch of the imagination. The US/Israel say that Hamas is refusing to disarm, Hamas says it cannot even consider that as long as Israel continues to bomb and push its “yellow line” further into Gaza. Reminder: Netanyahu recently said that “70% is just the start”.

(Read this for an update on those negotiations.)

I despise the question of “are things better than they were?”, often responding “better than what? the baseline has moved into the depths of a nightmare none of us can understand.

On that Nov 2024 trip of mine to Gaza City I met a little boy named Osama in the same hospital. He moved his mouth to speak but no sound came out. Osama was playing marbles in the street with other kids when the Israeli strike happened. His parents cannot grasp this reality of theirs. He was just playing marbles outside they say over and over again. Marbles.

The nurse pumps an ambu bag, allowing Osama to squeak out a couple sentences. He says he’s hot but actually he doesn’t know if he is or not, he cant feel anything. There is shrapnel high up in his spine, he’s paralyzed.

He says he wants to go home, he wants to ride his bike. And he says “I want to travel”. He means outside of the Gaza Strip, for medical treatment, but already back then the list was thousands long.

Today that list is closer to 16,500 people who need medical evacuation despite the “partial re-opening” of the Rafah crossing. The so-called “ceasefire deal” that was meant to see a regular flow of medical evacuations and Palestinians being permitted to return to Gaza, but its more like a drop trying to squeeze itself out of a tap. In fact at this rate of medical evacuations, it will take years for all those who need urgent treatment to actually get out, ie they will die or be permanently disabled. Responsibility for that does not just lie with Israel. Countries are not coming forward and offering to take cases.

Add to that the litany of “games” that Israel plays to obstruct the access of aid, ranging from new regulations that mean that many of the largest aid organizations cannot bring their own items in, the rejection of items like baby incubators, reconstruction materials, medicine and so on. Sound familiar? Sound like I could be writing about 2024 or any timeframe over the last nearly three years now?

To go even further, aid organizations face funding shortages and soaring prices that are forcing humanitarian partners to, as is stated in the UN’s report from early June, to scale down or suspend certain critical services. Back in May the World Central Kitchen cut its hot meal distributions in Gaza by half, stating “This decision is driven entirely by financial pressure. It does not reflect any reduction in need on the ground”

I’m often asked what scares me the most when it comes to Gaza. There is a lot. But the shortest answer is “That the current conditions become the accepted norm. That much in the way many lamented Palestine and specifically the open air prison of Gaza pre-Oct 7th but did little to try to change that, the level of suffering now will turn into something that we just lament before going on to drink our lattes and sit in our air conditioning.”

Prologue: I last left Gaza in Dec 2024. I tried to re-enter in Feb/Mar 2025 and was denied four times in a row. I am still denied entry & going through the process of trying to appeal that through Israeli courts. It is moving like molasses. My charity INARA’s Gaza team does incredible work, I am in constant awe of them, not just in terms of the way that they selflessly serve their own people, but the way that they have held onto their dignity and humanity through it all.

If you want a funny but not funny back story of the absurd, read this earlier Substack piece of mine “Israeli soldiers swabbed my breast implants for explosives”

For the “but Hamas” or the “but Hamas was/is stealing the aid” gang, here is some more reading:

A piece I wrote for the Atlantic Council “I can barely stand or make it through the day’: First-hand views of Gaza’s starvation”

Sky news was the first “mainstream” media outlet to investigate the gangs that the Isreali government armed that were in reality responsible for the majority of the looting. This was not really picked up and/or properly looked into by other outlets.