Palestinian families in Gaza are now facing an unbearable choice: feed their children or simply try to survive another night under fire. According to UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, who is currently in Khan Younis, more bombs and missiles are pouring into Gaza than food, in what he calls a deliberate humanitarian collapse.

Elder describes a harrowing reality where mothers go two days without eating to offer their children a single meal, and children weakened by hunger are dying from easily treatable conditions. With most hospitals no longer functioning and food barely reaching the displaced, Gaza has become a graveyard for hope.

Efforts to distribute aid have been deliberately undermined. A previously successful UN-led network of 400 aid points has been dismantled and replaced by a militarised system backed by Israel and the United States. This new method, Elder warns, not only fails to reach the hungry but is actively endangering lives, children are being shot simply for trying to access food.

Now in its second year without a true Eid celebration, Gaza is caught between starvation and bombardment. “People spent their lives building homes and gardens, but all of that disappeared overnight,” Elder said, as he condemned the world's indifference to the psychological torment endured by those repeatedly displaced and abandoned.

With famine tightening its grip and aid systematically blocked since early March, the people of Gaza are being forced into submission not by force alone, but by hunger.