DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Gaza’s bakeries will run out of flour for bread within a week, the U.N. says.
Agencies have cut food distributions to families in half. Markets are empty of most vegetables. Many aid workers cannot move around because of Israeli bombardment.
For four weeks, Israel has shut off all sources of food, fuel, medicine and other supplies for the Gaza Strip’s population of more than 2 million Palestinians. It’s the longest blockade yet of Israel’s 17-month-old campaign against Hamas , with no sign of it ending. Aid workers are stretching out the supplies they have but warn of a catastrophic surge in severe hunger and malnutrition.
Eventually, food will run out completely if the flow of aid is not restored, because the war has destroyed almost all local food production in Gaza. “We depend entirely on this aid box,” said Shorouq Shamlakh, a mother of three collecting her family’s monthly box of food from a U.N.
distribution center in Jabaliya in northern Gaza. She and her children reduce their meals to make it last a month, she said. “If this closes, who else will provide us with food?” The World Food Program said Thursday that its flour for bakeries is only enough to keep producing bread for 800,000 people a day until Tuesday and that its overall food supplies will last a maximum of two weeks.
As a “last resort” once all other food is exhausted, it has emergency stocks of fortified nutritional biscuits for 415,000 people. Fuel a.
