The entire Strip, with a population of two million people, may be on the brink of famine as the World Food Programme runs out of supplies.
At least 13 Palestinians have been killed since dawn and dozens of others buried under the rubble of a building destroyed in an Israeli air attack on Gaza City.
Four victims, at least, were killed in a strike on a home in the city’s Sabra neighbourhood on Saturday, with the residents forced to dig the ground with their bare hands to reach people buried in the debris.
Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for Gaza’s civil defence agency, said a lack of rescue equipment has prevented emergency workers from reaching those buried underneath the collapsed building bombed by Israel before dawn.
“Our crews cannot reach them because of the lack of the necessary machinery,” he told the AFP news agency.
Earlier this week, Israeli aircraft destroyed 40 engineering vehicles the civil defence teams were using to remove heavy debris during rescue operations.
Israeli air raids also hit other parts of the Strip on Saturday, including al-Mawasi and Khan Younis, as the besieged territory faces impending mass starvation amid an ongoing genocide.
After 18 months of the Israeli military invasion that has killed more than 51,000 Palestinians, the situation in Gaza “is probably the worst” it has been, the United Nations warned.
The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) on Friday said the entire Strip, with a population of two million people, may be on the brink of famine and aid kitchens are “expected to fully run out of food in the coming days”.
Israel’s ongoing blockade has meant no food, fuel or medicine has entered Gaza for two months. For many Palestinians in Gaza, community kitchens were their only source of nutrition after Israeli forces destroyed almost all food production facilities.
WFP has appealed to the international community to put pressure on Israel to lift the blockade, saying more than 116,000 metric tonnes of food assistance – enough to feed one million people for up to four months – are already positioned for delivery “as soon as borders reopen”.
Reporting from Deir el-Balah on Saturday, Al Jazeera’s Tareq Abu Azzoum said the humanitarian crisis in the besieged territory “has reached a very unprecedented breaking point”.
“Civilians are really struggling to cope with this crisis,” he said.
Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, said the crisis was “man-made”.
Michael Fakhri, UN rapporteur on the right to food, said Israel is “executing this starvation campaign with no repercussions”.
The World Health Organization said the situation was no different for medical supplies, with WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus pleading on X for the aid blockade to end.
At least 2,062 people have been killed in Gaza since Israel resumed its deadly campaign against Hamas on March 18, and more than 50,000 since October 7, 2023. Hamas’s attack on Israel killed 1,218 people, mostly civilians.