Nutritionist Rana Soboh is haunted by scenes she can’t forget. A mother in Gaza collapsed while breastfeeding—she hadn’t eaten in days. The next day, Soboh encountered a one-year-old child weighing only 5 kilograms, toothless and too weak to cry. His mother, skeletal from starvation, begged for food. Soboh wept. “I wished the earth would swallow me,” she said, overcome by despair and helplessness.

After nearly three months of an Israeli blockade cutting off food, fuel, and medicine, aid workers say Gaza is collapsing under a man-made catastrophe. The World Food Programme has warned that famine is imminent. With 2.3 million people acutely malnourished and one in five at starvation’s edge, the need is staggering.

Food trucks sit idle just across the border. Aid workers—some veterans of the world’s worst crises—call this one of the most harrowing because it is deliberate. New restrictions by Israel and the U.S. seek to centralize distribution under armed contractors, a move aid agencies say violates humanitarian norms.

Community kitchens are failing. More than 60% have shut. In Khan Younis, cook Nihad Abu Kush watches 2,000 hungry people arrive for just 1,000 meals. He once gave away his portion to a child with an empty pot.

Doctors hand-pump air for patients when machines fail. Children suffer without proper nutrition, surgery, or basic medicine. “People are dying because we don’t even have the essentials,” one hospital director said.

“This is hunger used as a weapon,” said Oxfam’s Mahmoud al-Saqqa. “Every human being has the right to food.”

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