The mathematics of starvation: why aid can’t fix the lethal shortage of food in Gaza
A man looks at the body of six-week-old infant Yousef al-Safadi who died of starvation according to health officials, at Shifa hospital in Gaza City, 22 July 2025
Nir Hasson writes in Haaretz on 23 July 2025:
To an uncritical eye, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – backed by Israel and the U.S. – looks like a dizzying success story. After it boasted on Monday [21 July] that it has already distributed more than 85 million meals and that the day’s distribution passed without incident, one might have thought all the earlier problems and the negative reports were just the project’s birth pangs.
But a few other variables need to be factored into this equation of success. First and foremost, the equation lacks context and ignores the broader picture. If roughly 2.1 million people live in the Gaza Strip today, it’s preferable for them to eat three meals a day, and GHF had been in operation for 56 days as of Monday, how many meals should it have distributed? A simple calculation produces the answer – 353 million.
Thus even if, by some miracle, Gazans had managed to evenly divide the food the organization handed out among themselves, then cook it and extract every last calorie and nutrient it contained, this would still be only a tiny fraction of the food they need to survive. And this gap reveals only the tip of the iceberg of the mathematics of starvation.
There’s no shortage of other indications. Since this weekend, hunger in Gaza has escalated further. Hospitals, humanitarian organizations, journalists and Gaza residents are all reporting severe shortages of food even in comparison to previous months.
On Tuesday, Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry reported that in the last 24 hours alone, 15 people, including four children, had died of starvation or malnutrition. Since the war began, it said, 101 people have died of these causes, including 80 children. And dozens of those deaths occurred in recent days.
The hunger in Gaza isn’t just evident from the numbers. It’s also evident in photos, videos and stories. The internet is full of them – starving children with swollen bellies and stick-thin arms and legs, an older adult eating fig leaves to put something in his belly, a story about a man who divorced his wife because she ate part of his allotment of bread.
The hospitals are reporting on older adults who have collapsed from weakness, heat and hunger. Parents describe their efforts to give their children a bit of comfort in place of bread. “I haven’t eaten anything for two days now,” a woman named Salwa who is the mother of a baby told the Quds new agency. “My body isn’t producing milk, and my son cries until he falls asleep. We feed him rice water … But he knows the truth, because it’s tasteless.”
GHF aid box contents
As reports of starvation intensifying flood in, GHF continues to put out festive press releases about distributing large amounts of food, as if there were two parallel universes that never intersect. To understand the reciprocal relationship between these two universes, you have to dive deep into the statistics and facts.
According to GHF, every aid package contains 57.75 meals (the number is calculated on the assumption of three meals for a family of 5.5 people for 3.5 days). But this figure also raises questions.
For instance, given the actual living conditions in Gaza, is it really possible to get almost 60 meals out of 16 to 18 kilograms of food? The composition of the packages varies, but in general, they contain four kilograms of flour, three of pasta, a jar of tahini, four kilos of chickpeas and lentils, a bottle of oil, a kilo of salt and two kilos of rice.
Quite a few of those ingredients need to be cooked. But that’s mission impossible in Gaza today, where almost nobody has a functioning kitchen, or even gas to cook with. Moreover, there’s a severe shortage of clean water, which is also necessary for cooking those foods. And that’s before even mentioning the obvious – the difficulties of saving and storing food for a few days amid repeated flights and displacements.
Another question is whether GHF’s food even reaches the people who need it. Ever since the organization began operating two months ago, it has handed out its packages via four distribution centers. These are open daily, but only for a very short time – usually around 15 minutes, after which the food runs out. And its opening hours aren’t known in advance.
The combination of the widespread hunger and the uncertainly about when the centers will be open has created a situation in which tens of thousands of people risk their lives every day. They surround the distribution centers all day long in the hopes of managing to get a little food for their family. Some even sleep on the sand in the live-fire zones around the centers in an attempt to be first to arrive.
This pressure has turned the roads to the distribution centers and the centers themselves into death traps. Every day, dozens of people are killed, usually by Israeli soldiers, who try to control the mobs with live fire. To date, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed at distribution centers, en route to them or near trucks carrying food.
The lucky ones who survive and manage to enter the distribution centers then go over to the piles of packages and grab anything they can carry. Unlike the UN and other humanitarian organizations, which use hundreds of distribution points and orderly recipient lists, law and order doesn’t exist at GHF facilities. Everyone grabs what they can and then flee for their lives. Consequently, the people who need food the most – young children, women, the elderly and the sick – are left empty-handed.
Even among those who manage to receive aid, there are differences, according to someone who lived in Gaza until recently. He said there are organized groups of young men whose members go to the distribution centers to turn a profit. “They cut open the crates, collect the most expensive things – cheese, oil, maybe tuna fish – then run to a car parked not far away and load it,” he said. “On the way back to the camps for displaced people, they sell the products directly from the car. The farther they get from the distribution sites, the higher the prices rise.”
And even in cases where the food does reach the neediest people, it often doesn’t help them. That’s because the food distributed by GHF doesn’t have enough variety. Among other things, there are no specialized foods for people with celiac disease, heart disease or kidney disease.
Above all, there’s a severe shortage of baby formula, which appears to be the most lethal shortage of all. Baby formula has become essential to save the lives of Gazan babies when their malnourished mothers are no longer capable of breast-feeding.
On this issue, the statements put out by Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories contradict the reality on the ground. According to COGAT, 2,500 tons of baby formula and enriched food for children has been brought into Gaza over the last two months. But the term “brought in” has a variety of interpretations.
The humanitarian organizations active in Gaza claim that a large portion of the food that enters Gaza gets stuck on the Palestinian side of the border crossing because the IDF doesn’t let the trucks move any further. In other cases, the trucks make it farther into Gaza but are looted on the way to the distribution warehouses. Either way, the chaos created by the fighting, the repeated displacement of the population and the collapse of the medical system are depriving the neediest children of food – and thus of a chance to survive.
This disaster had been predicted. Nutritionists and experts on the distribution of humanitarian aid warned the government of exactly this scenario. But despite the dying children, the starving adults and the complete collapse of the food distribution plan that Israel dreamed up, nobody in any Israeli institution seems to feel any urgency.
That includes the Israeli Supreme Court. On May 18, four human rights organizations asked the court (after their previous petition on the issue was rejected) to order the government to allow food to enter Gaza with no limitations. Since then, the prosecution has filed 10 requests to postpone submitting its response.
The latest request, filed by attorneys Yonatan Berman and Jonathan Sitton of the prosecution’s Supreme Court department, was approved on Tuesday by Justice Yosef Elron – just like the nine that preceded it.
This article is reproduced in its entirety