Food is scarce and morale is fading after glimpse of normalcy during this year’s cease-fire was shattered by return to fighting
By Feliz Solomon
May 9, 2025 9:30 am ET
Key Points
Gaza faces a breakdown of law and order due to hunger, collapsed governance and conflict since a ceasefire ended in March.
Israel’s blockade, the war’s longest, is defended as a means to pressure Hamas to release hostages and prevent aid diversion.
Gazans are protesting Hamas and are desperate as restaurants close, food is scarce, and fights over resources increase.
What most. en Israel blockaded the Gaza Strip in early March, banning entry of all aid and other goods, Fady Abed, a dentist who works for a medical nonprofit there, thought it would last a few weeks
Months later, he can’t believe how much things have fallen apart.
In Gaza City, where he lives, community kitchens are closing because they have nothing left to cook. Each day, clinics run by his organization, MedGlobal, are visited by more malnourished children he described as “skin and bones.”
At night, a mix of hungry men and opportunistic gangsters roam the streets looking for places to loot. In the absence of authorities, armed vigilantes chase down and beat up suspected thieves. He worries about break-ins, because he has a bag of flour in his home.
“Things can’t continue like this,” Abed said. “We just won’t survive.”
Since Israel imposed the blockade—now the longest of the war set off by Hamas’s deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on southern Israel—the territory is descending into a state of chaos. Residents and aid workers say they have seen a breakdown of law and order amid the perfect storm of hunger, collapsed governance and intensifying conflict since March, when a two-month cease-fire fell apart.
“I’ve been doing this kind of work for two decades and I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Claire Manera, an emergency coordinator for the nonprofit Doctors Without Borders, speaking from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. At night, she hears the sounds of gunshots and men shouting outside her compound.
Tents of displaced Palestinians in the Jabalia refugee camp, northern Gaza. PHOTO: MAHMOUD ISSA/REUTERS
Children wait for food to be distributed in Khan Younis, southern Gaza. PHOTO: DOAA EL-BAZ/ZUMA PRESSIsrael has defended the blockade, saying Hamas reroutes aid to support its operations and that the pressure is needed to convince the militant group to release the roughly two dozen hostages it still holds. It says supplies built up in Gaza during the cease-fire and it is working on a plan to distribute aid with the help of American contractors that it says would circumvent Hamas.
The toll of the war in Gaza has been immense. Most of its two million people have been displaced at least once; swaths of the enclave have been reduced to rubble; there are persistent shortages of medicine and daily necessities; and more than 52,000 have been killed, according to Palestinian authorities, who don’t say how many were combatants.
The return to fighting has been especially hard to bear for a population that got a brief taste of relative normalcy during the cease-fire. With no clear progress in negotiations, the fighting is set to get worse.
