A relief worker on how, exactly two months since Israel suspended all aid to Gaza, hundreds of thousands of people in the territory have grown desperate for food and are struggling to survive.

In mid-January, Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, putting a temporary stop to the war in Gaza, which began after the attacks of October 7, 2023, and which has killed more than fifty thousand Palestinians. (The combined Israeli death toll from the Hamas attack and the ensuing war is around three thousand people.) Throughout the first fifteen months of the conflict, Israel’s behavior, specifically in refusing to allow sufficient amounts of aid into Gaza, drew international condemnation. The humanitarian situation improved during the ceasefire, but in early March, Israel suspended aid completely, and talks to extend the ceasefire broke down. Full-scale fighting has since resumed, and the amount of food and medicine that remains in Gaza is woefully inadequate for the needs of its people.

I recently spoke by phone with Louise Wateridge, a senior emergency officer at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (unrwa). Wateridge left Gaza in December of 2024, and unrwa’s international staff has not been allowed back into the territory for several months. (Last year, the Israeli government passed two bills, which went into effect in January, that together prevent the Israeli government from communicating with unrwa, and prevent unrwa from operating in Israel or the occupied territories. unrwa’s local staff has been trying to continue its work.) I wanted to understand what had changed on the ground during the ceasefire, and what new reality Gazans have faced since it ended. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed how aid workers are trying to navigate life-threatening Israeli military actions, what the end of communication between unrwa and the Israeli government might mean for the delivery of aid going forward, and how Gazan society will continue to splinter as starving people become increasingly desperate.

How would you describe the current moment—this period after the ceasefire ended?

As of today, I think it’s safe to say that all the progress that was achieved during the ceasefire has been reversed. It has now been two months exactly, as of Friday, May 2nd, that there have been absolutely no supplies entering the Gaza Strip. And that’s not just humanitarian supplies—that’s all supplies. That’s commercial supplies, that’s fuel, it’s food, it’s medicine. It is absolutely everything. Nothing has entered the Gaza Strip for two whole months.

You could see, for weeks on end, the achievements that were made when the ceasefire was in effect. unrwa was able to feed the entire population during the ceasefire. We provided non-food items—so that’s shelter items, hygiene kits, and things like that—to five hundred thousand people. The achievements from colleagues on the ground were absolutely endless because we were able to do our jobs. And the situation now is so beyond imagination, so beyond words at this point, because people are being starved, basically. These are choices that are being made to prevent supplies from entering. And it has been prolonged for two months. When we speak to our colleagues, when we speak to people in Gaza, children are now starving. People are surviving on one meal a day. People are without medicine.

I just want to take a step back for a second, and understand what was happening during the ceasefire. We had been hearing about the inability to get goods across the border, and about problems distributing goods within Gaza before the ceasefire. So what changed in that period?

The difference was access, really. We spent more than a year, from October 7, 2023, until January, 2025, with a humanitarian response that was strangled in absolutely every way. Our facilities were hit. They were impacted. I spent hours, I couldn’t tell you how many hours, sitting in convoys waiting to deliver aid to people, waiting to move, waiting to have access and being denied, being turned away. I was in Rafah this time last year, on the ground before the military operations occurred. There were 1.4 million people down there, and then it was chaos. But during the ceasefire, we had bulldozers and machinery that were needed delivered. We had food delivered. The looting situation dwindled because people had what they needed. We were able to provide services and provide aid to people in all areas of the Gaza Strip, and that simply was not the case before the ceasefire. It really happened overnight.

What do you mean by access? Can you talk more about that?

For the best part of a year, you would talk to doctors at hospitals, and they’d say, “We always have enough fuel for about three days.” The first day they would have fuel. This is to run the generators, to run the incubators, to keep babies alive. The machines, the air-conditioning in I.C.U. units, everything that runs a hospital was running on these generators from fuel. So the first day they’d have everything. The second day they’d have to start switching machines off, switching their air-conditioning off. Flies would be entering the I.C.U. because they’d have to open windows because there was no air-conditioning. And on the third day, they’d have to start shutting machinery down, and then there’d be enough fuel again, because just a little bit more would come in.

People had enough to eat maybe that week, but what’s happening next week? So it was access to supplies that changed. We had thousands of trucks entering during the ceasefire, which is something we never saw before the ceasefire. Before the ceasefire, we would sometimes maybe get fifty trucks or so a day. And a lot of it was getting looted because the population was so desperate. So we went from that kind of number to more than four thousand trucks per week during the ceasefire. People were getting tents, too. Everything just changed.

But it was also the access that we had within the Gaza Strip. There were areas that we haven’t seen for months. Rafah was one of them. Our staff were able to return to their homes in Rafah. We were able to have access to facilities that we hadn’t seen for months on end because we were denied access. We were able to restore some of the health centers. We were able to repair some of these facilities, and use them again as health centers, and use them as shelters.

The same was true in Jabalia. At the end of last year, we had a complete and total siege of Jabalia. After the ceasefire, we were able to access those areas. We were able to find people. People were able to return home. Very sadly, people were able to return to these buildings where they’d been and dig their relatives out. A lot of people I know and a lot of our colleagues, the first thing they did in the ceasefire was return to their homes to actually dig and find their families who were still under the rubble—some had been there for weeks, some of them over a year—and bury them and have some kind of dignity in mourning and putting those lives to rest. So that’s the situation we had in the ceasefire. And now all of that is lost. We also began educating over fifty thousand children again, but that has been severely impacted.

When I talked to you and other aid workers in the first year of the war, you would say that aid was always insufficient but that it was rarely zero. What was needed were five hundred trucks per day, but instead it would be a hundred or it would be two hundred or it would be seventy-five that would be allowed in. But what’s happening now—zero trucks—is strikingly worse.

I think that’s very fair to say. What was needed were something like five hundred trucks a day to provide for two million people’s needs, and we are getting none.

Your interactions with the Israeli government were limited last year, but what about now? Do you have a sense of how they explain what is happening?

Since the Knesset bill has gone into effect, which was at the end of January, we now have a zero-contact policy with the Israeli authorities. They will not communicate with unrwa. The coördination and the communication goes through the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, ocha.

But the reality is that we are the largest humanitarian agency on the ground with twelve thousand staff members. We’re one of the only agencies now able to do anything because our staff are providing services and they are able to still run the health centers with what they have, including clear trash and sanitation and try to stop disease spreading. So we are one of the only agencies able to still do anything with this two-month deficit of no supplies and no contact.

But the Israeli authorities will not work with the agency. And you can imagine the challenges that brings to everything. Of course, it just makes things so much harder in every way possible. There are three categories of humanitarians right now. There are my colleagues, who get up every day and serve their communities. They’ve been doing this the entire war. Everything’s at stake for them. They put their own lives, their families’ lives, on the line every day to do this. Then you’ve got people like me who are no longer permitted entry to the Gaza Strip, but who have sufficient and quite established knowledge of the Gaza Strip from either working there previously or at least working there throughout the war. And this is not just from unrwa. This is from other U.N. agencies, other N.G.O.s, doctors, surgeons. We are seeing a huge rise in humanitarians who are skilled, trained, and able to provide assistance to people in Gaza being denied entry. And the third category are those who’ve been killed. Nearly three hundred of my colleagues at unrwa have been killed. Four hundred humanitarians in total have been killed.

And the reality of that is the accountability comes from filming their own deaths and providing video footage to have any kind of accountability as to why these people are being killed or how they’re being killed, but they are being killed. So that’s the reality with the humanitarian response. And it’s just utterly grim. It’s utterly grim. How on earth can you have a response when that’s the reality for the people providing it?

What have ocha’s interactions been like with the Israeli government?

They have interactions with the Israeli authorities. They provide coördinates of our facilities, but we still have these very serious incidents. There was an incident when one of our colleagues was killed just a few weeks ago because of Israeli tank fire upon a U.N. facility, and those coördinates had been provided to Israeli authorities. So yes, there is coördination, but a lot of the convoys and a lot of the movement within the Gaza Strip is still being denied. So again, we’re back to pre-ceasefire times where we are just strangled in every way possible.

My understanding of what would happen during the past year and a half is that Israel would clamp down on aid and then there would be some sort of international pressure, or the humanitarian situation would get increasingly dire. And to prevent a situation where two hundred thousand people were starving to death, Israel would allow more aid in for a little bit, and then it would clamp down again. And then the Israelis could say, “See, things aren’t as bad as people say.” Listening to you talk about what’s happening now, it seems like a version of this is continuing, where food was brought in during the ceasefire, and people were able to get some of the stuff that they needed, and now it’s being clamped down on again.

I think it’s a fair analysis of what’s going on. And now it’s everything from what you eat in the morning to not having bathrooms to not knowing if you’re going to be forcibly displaced by the end of the day. You have to move somewhere else. Where do you go? How do you get there? When we speak to people, they sound beyond exhaustion. They don’t have anything left to give. They’re hungry. They’re tired. I speak to my colleagues, and they don’t sleep at night because of the noise. They say the planes fly by. Sometimes, they drop bombs. Sometimes, they don’t. So you’re constantly living in fear of that. There’s not enough food. So you’re hungry, you’re tired, you’re exhausted.

At a moment’s notice, you are displaced again. You have to move to another area with next to no notice. And it’s just relentless. It’s constant. They’re just living in this bubble where they’re being pushed and pushed and pushed to every limit and they’ve got nothing left to give. One thing I have heard people say a lot in the last year is, basically, “We’re just going to stay here, and we’re just going to die together because it’s inevitable we’re going to die. We are like pinballs in this machine. We’re not getting out, and we just want to stay in one place so at least if we die, we die at home or together.” And that’s the only dignity in any of it.

You mentioned earlier that things like looting had declined once aid was able to come back into the Gaza Strip, which makes sense. What are the ways in which things decline on a societal level once this current degree of scarcity returns?

Earlier this week, there were people in a shelter telling us about this mother, and she’s still got some bread left, or she’s still got some flour left. A lot of supplies are gone for people. Some people around her have no food. She has flour. So she will make bread but feel so guilty because other people’s children can smell them baking this bread on the wood fire, and when other people’s children come and ask for a piece of bread, she tries to share it, knowing that that’s going to put her children and her family out. But what can you do? These are hungry children, right? So you have a situation where we are hearing a lot of these kinds of stories at the moment where people have nothing, but somehow they’re still sharing. I don’t know where they find that strength.

I remember hearing similar stories myself when I was in the north when the siege of Jabalia was happening and we were meeting families who left. They ran for their lives. They had nothing on them. A lot of them lost relatives who were killed in front of them, and had children killed in front of them. And we were speaking to them in an unrwa shelter, and other families were giving them a blanket here and a mattress there just so they had something. But these people also had nothing. So there’s this strength in the society, which is really inspiring and powerful and devastating as well. It’s just heartbreaking that this is how they’re living, but they’re still sticking together.

But like there would be in any society, there is, of course, panic. Incidents are increasing now because people are hungry and people are trying to survive, and that is going to also have an effect on society. So you can’t really use a blanket approach to how two million people approach trying to survive starvation.

But things will start to fall apart, and we’re starting to see that. We are having incidents with our warehouses, for example. We have nothing left. There’s nothing in them. There’s nothing left to give. But people are still trying to break in, trying to see what’s there, because they’re desperate. You can’t blame them. If there are any kind of convoys or movements, they try and see if there’s anything in the cars because they just don’t have anything. That’s where we’re at now, and we’ve been there before.

At one point, my colleagues in the north were living on animal food and scrounging what they could find because there was no food left, and children were dying of malnourishment. So then you get these videos where the aid truck finally gets there, and it’s absolutely swamped. People swimming out to sea when the aid drops were landing, or the food was landing from the sky.

Every family we’re talking to—they’re not having three meals a day. Nobody’s having three meals a day. They’re on one meal a day. Some people go a day without eating. A lot of parents are not eating so that their children can eat. And of course, it’s just going to impact everything. It’s going to fall apart, if it hasn’t already.