• ‘Essential items like flour, cooking oil, eggs, meat, and chicken are rare or almost unavailable,’ Palestinian shop owner says

GAZA CITY, Palestine / ISTANBUL

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip continue to endure hunger under a new starvation policy engineered by Israel, which allows only non-essential goods to enter the enclave while blocking essential food and medical supplies.

At first glance, anyone passing through Gaza’s markets might think life has returned to normal after two years of a brutal Israeli offensive that left the territory uninhabitable.

Store shelves are filled with imported biscuits, chocolate boxes, instant coffee jars, and potato chip cans.

However, behind these shelves stacked with non-essential consumer goods lies a suffocating humanitarian crisis deliberately engineered by Israel to starve Palestinians.

“I haven’t found eggs, chicken, or cheese since food supplies started entering the Gaza Strip,” Aya Abu Qamar, a mother of three from Gaza City, told Anadolu.

“All I see are chocolate, snacks, and instant coffee. These aren’t our daily needs. We’re looking for something to keep our children alive,” she added.

With restrained anger, the Palestinian mother said that the Israeli occupation allows these products to show the world that it facilitates the entry of food into Gaza.

“But they’re of no nutritional value, mostly sugars and carbohydrates, lacking proteins and vitamins. This exposes people to serious malnutrition,” she continued.

“We want to live a decent life; we don’t want to die behind shiny store windows,” Abu Qamar said, calling for the entry of essential food and medicine into Gaza.

Israel has maintained a blockade on Gaza for nearly 18 years and tightened the siege in March when it closed border crossings and blocked food and medicine deliveries, pushing the enclave into famine.

Starving Gazans

In the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, Fadl Saad Abu Dalal, the owner of a grocery store, stood before shelves lined with biscuits and soft drinks, lamenting the lack of essential goods.

“These products mean nothing when people need flour or medicine,” he told Anadolu.

“Israel deliberately allows large quantities of non-essential products and limited basic goods in a clear policy of managing the blockade in a new way,” he said.

“People see these products but don’t buy them. There’s no cash, no salaries, no work,” Abu Dalal said.

“More than half of customers enter only to ask about prices, then leave silently. The market looks alive from the outside, but it is dead inside.”

The Palestinian merchant described the scene as “a fabricated image for media deception.”

“Israel wants to show the world that Gaza is shopping, while in truth, the people are starving.”

Collective punishment

Abdel Hayy Abu Shammala, a furniture factory owner whose facility was destroyed in Israeli strikes, said the Palestinians in Gaza have been living in a real crisis since the start of the Israeli war.

Pointing at an empty market filled with onlookers but no buyers, he said, “More than 85% of goods in markets are non-essential.”

“Essential items like flour, cooking oil, eggs, meat, and chicken are rare or almost unavailable,” he said.

Abu Shammala stressed that eggs, a staple food for children and the elderly, have not entered Gaza for months.

“The occupation controls everything that enters Gaza,” he said. “It only allows in chocolate and soft drinks but blocks flour and fuel.

“This isn’t just a blockade. It is collective punishment that deprives the people of food,” Abu Shammala said.

He added that Gaza’s industrial sector has completely shut down, warning that “Gaza needs essentials before any non-essential products.”

Hunger

Ismail Al-Thawabteh, director of the Gaza Government Media Office, told Anadolu that Israel continues to control “the flow of goods selectively, in violation of signed agreements.”

Around 145 trucks enter Gaza daily, 24% of the agreed number, and they are mostly loaded with non-essential foods rather than essentials and medicine, he said.

Gaza needs almost 600 aid trucks daily to meet the needs of the territory’s 2.4 million population, according to aid groups.

According to governmental data released on Thursday, 4,453 trucks out of expected 15,600 entered the enclave to date since Oct. 10.

“This is a new kind of policy, managing hunger and engineering the crisis,” Thawabteh said.

“We document every violation and report it to mediators and guarantor countries. Israel has violated the agreement 194 times so far, and its aircraft still fly over our heads despite the ceasefire,” Thawabteh said.

He held Israel fully responsible for the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza, and urged the international community to pressure Israel to protect the lives of Palestinians “held hostage behind border crossings.”

The Gaza Government Media Office said on Thursday that Palestinians are deprived of 350 essential food items, mainly dairy products, vegetables, eggs, red meat, poultry, fish, and nutritional supplements, which are urgently needed by children, patients, wounded, and other vulnerable groups.

The office said that Israel permits the entry of larger quantities of low-nutritional-value products, such as soft drinks, chocolate, processed snacks, and chips, which reach markets at prices exceeding their real value by more than 15 times, due to Israel’s control over supply chains.

“This confirms that the (Israeli) occupation is deliberately implementing a starvation-engineering policy and manipulating food security in a way that directly targets lives of civilians,” the office said.

The Israeli army has killed nearly 69,000 Palestinians and injured over 170,000 others in a brutal offensive in the Gaza Strip since October 2023. The assault came to a halt under a ceasefire agreement that took effect on Oct. 10, under US President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan.