In Palestine, a growing starvation crisis is impacting a million women and children, and counting, United Nations officials warn.
The World Food Programme, a subset of the UN, said in a recent release that a July 20 attack by Israeli forces on a 20-truck humanitarian aid shipment – and on civilians who had gathered to secure food from the convoy – resulted in the deaths and injuries of dozens of people.
The strike exacerbated an already grave problem, they added. “These people were simply trying to access food to feed themselves and their families on the brink of starvation,” officials said in their statement. “This terrible incident underscores the increasingly dangerous conditions under which humanitarian operations are forced to be conducted in Gaza.”
They added that the hunger crisis on the ground has climbed to “new levels of desperation.”
And it’s an especially devastating problem for girls and women, officials from UN Women said earlier this week. “Women and girls in Gaza are facing the impossible choice of starving to death at their shelters, or venturing out in search of food and water at the extreme risk of being killed,” UN under-secretary-general and UN Women executive director Sima Bahous said in the release. “Their children are starving to death before their eyes. This is horrific, unconscionable and unacceptable. It is inhumane.”
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The July 20 attack is latest in a series of incidents in which Palestinian people seeking relief from humanitarian workers have been injured or even killed by Israeli soldiers, reports say, amid an militaristic and increasingly deadly Israeli occupation.
Israel’s presence in Palestine has been ramping up since October 2023, when a Hamas attack on an Israeli music festival claimed the lives of about 1,200 concert-goers. The Israeli response to that attack has been a years-long onslaught – many organizations, including human-rights group Amnesty International, are now calling it genocide, with tens of thousands of Palestinian people killed. Over 28,000 of the deceased were women and girls.
Late last week, Israeli government minister Amichay Eliyahu said Israel is not obligated to help with the hunger crisis, adding that “there is no nation that feeds its enemies.” But last weekend, amid growing international pressure, the Israeli Defense Forces announced that they will take a “tactical pause in military activity” to allow for increased aid to reach Palestinians. On Sunday, however, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu stoked outrage by denying widespread reports of starvation in Gaza and blamed Hamas for stealing aid.
In the meantime, the toll has already been taken. Najah Hashem Barbakh, a 36-year-old mother in Gaza, told NBC News late last week that her 11-month-old daughter, Sela, no longer smiles and plays as she once did – due to suffering from severe malnutrition. While seated in a pediatric ward where several children around her daughter have already died of starvation, Sela’s mother noted that she has gone from weighing 20 pounds to just eight. And “she is continuously losing weight.”
This is the sort of suffering the world cannot stand for, Bahous of the UN said. “We need unhindered humanitarian access at scale and a permanent ceasefire leading to sustainable peace.”
(This post, originally published July 28, 2025, has been updated with additional information.)