In Gaza today, there are no safe lines dividing the helpers from the helped. The people who have long stood between catastrophe and survival — the aid workers — are themselves starving.
Every morning, the same question circles among families, friends, and relief teams: Will I eat today? It is not rhetorical.
Once, these humanitarians were the lifeline, delivering food parcels, clean water, and medical care to those in desperate need. Now, they stand shoulder to shoulder with the people they serve in the same food lines, clutching the same hollow hope. With Gaza sealed off under an Israeli blockade and supplies barred from reaching the most vulnerable, the aid community is watching its own colleagues waste away.
Just beyond Gaza’s border fences — and even inside Gaza itself — lie tons of food, clean water, medical supplies, shelter materials, and fuel. These are the basics of life. They are ready to be distributed. Yet they remain untouched, locked behind political barriers and military restrictions.
Meanwhile, in the streets, the evidence of hunger is everywhere. Markets stand empty. Children’s arms grow thinner by the day. Adults collapse in public from dehydration and malnutrition. Waste piles up uncollected, and preventable illnesses like acute watery diarrhoea spread unchecked.
Charities such as Humanity & Inclusion say the humanitarian system has not failed by incompetence — it has been prevented from functioning. They insist that the international aid network can respond at scale, but without access, they are blocked from reaching anyone in need, including their own exhausted and malnourished staff.
Sharaf Al Faqawi, Humanity & Inclusion’s area manager for Gaza, speaks not just as a relief professional, but as a man trying to survive. “Just like more than two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, we humanitarian workers are also being starved, displaced, and killed,” he says.
“For nearly two years now, every single day, we must juggle between surviving this war, caring for ourselves and families, and serving the most vulnerable. Hunger has reached its peak, with children and babies dying of starvation. There is no food, clean water, medicine, fuel among other basic needs.
“We cannot fully operate or serve those in need because we lack the necessary aid and equipment due to the Israeli blockade, the relentless bombardment, and forced displacement — but also because we, ourselves, are growing weak from hunger and malnutrition.”
The toll is not hidden. “You can see the impact on their bodies and in their eyes,” Al Faqawi adds. “Our staff are becoming dizzy, weak, and drained of energy. Although they remain committed to their mission, they can no longer focus or work as they did before. Many of our activities require physical movement and effort, such as our risk awareness sessions on explosive ordnance and our physical rehabilitation work. The coming days are very critical. If this situation persists, we could see some of our aid workers collapsing while on duty.”
The charity says Palestinians are trapped in a cruel cycle: they wait for help, for ceasefires, for a pause in the suffering. And when hope appears — often in the form of an announcement — it quickly dissolves.
The psychological toll is as damaging as the physical. Survival is dangled like a mirage, close enough to imagine but never close enough to touch. The humanitarian system, Al Faqawi warns, cannot run on false promises. Nor can aid workers survive on shifting timelines or political pledges that fail to deliver access.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC) echoes the alarm. According to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) — the global system for assessing hunger and malnutrition — famine thresholds have now been surpassed in Gaza City. The worst-case scenario is already unfolding across much of the territory.
“This is a devastating but entirely predictable confirmation of what the IRC and the wider humanitarian community have long warned,” an IRC spokesperson says. “Israel’s restrictions on aid have created the conditions for famine, and the window to prevent mass death is rapidly closing.”
The IPC’s Level 5 classification signals catastrophe: starvation, acute malnutrition, and widespread mortality. Data shows these thresholds are already being met in most of Gaza for food consumption, and in Gaza City for acute malnutrition.
“This is not a crisis that can be met with half-measures,” the IRC says. “Only full, safe, and sustained humanitarian access granted immediately — through land routes, at scale — can avert a catastrophic loss of life. Airdrops and brief humanitarian pauses offer only symbolic relief and cannot meet the scale or urgency of need. The evidence of widespread hunger, untreated malnutrition, and rising mortality has been visible for weeks.”
In the absence of proper food, families — including aid workers — survive on lentil water, wild herbs, or nothing at all. Some ration what little they have to children, skipping meals themselves. Others have already buried relatives lost to starvation-related illness.
“It bears repeating that, by the time famine is formally declared, people have already died,” the IRC warns. “The evidence of widespread hunger has been visible for weeks. What is needed now is immediate action to flood Gaza with aid.”
Perhaps the most haunting truth of all is that the people who have spent their lives saving others are now among those most at risk. Starvation knows no uniform, no badge, no mission statement. An aid worker cannot pull a child from the brink of death if their own body is failing.
The humanitarian mission in Gaza is collapsing under the weight of the very crisis it seeks to end. Unless full access is granted and supplies are allowed to flow freely, the next tragedy will not be measured only in the lives lost among Gaza’s civilians, but also among the men and women who, until now, have been their last line of hope.
