The World Food Programme (WFP) has cut the food aid it is distributing in the Gaza Strip by around a third. Half a million people – nearly a quarter of Gaza’s population – lost their monthly aid in a single statement. My mother wants to know what to tell her grandchildren if they go hungry again, and you, dear reader, owe her an answer.
It was my mother who told me first, before any statement from an aid agency reached my phone here in Paris, about the cuts announced on 19 October. Just before that, on 14 October, Israel closed Gaza’s borders to commercial goods. The closure only lasted several days, but it was a reminder that Israel can starve Gaza at will.
People in Gaza know the feeling of hunger all too well. Within a few hours, my mother said, everything fresh began to vanish from the market – the meat, the vegetables, the fruit, all of it – while whatever was left in the stalls grew more expensive by evening.
Five days later – the same day Israel said it would resume allowing commercial goods to enter – WFP announced that funding shortages were forcing it to cut its assistance. Those who kept their place on the agency’s distribution lists will also receive less.
” Israel is restricting the entry of new tents because tents, tarps, and tent poles are considered dual use items that might be used for a military purpose. So people are left without adequate shelter. At the same time, Israel continues to carry out attacks, killing over 1,550 people since the signing of the ceasefire agreement last year. “
Some 75,000 families receiving cash assistance will see the amount reduced from 1,250 (about $413) shekels per month to 750 (about $248). In the hardest-to-reach areas, near the so-called Yellow Line that divides Gaza between Israeli- and Palestinian-controlled zones, families will now receive a hot meal only every other day, instead of daily. And even though commercial deliveries have resumed, my family tells me that very little food is getting in and that it is very, very expensive.
In the same week the ration cuts were announced, the UN published a story: Across Gaza, young men like Ahmed Al-Omari have been filling sacks that once held the WFP’s flour with sand and stacking them around their tents hoping to keep out the flooding from winter rains.
A tent lasts about six months in Gaza, and this is the fourth winter of the war. Israel is restricting the entry of new tents because tents, tarps, and tent poles are considered dual use items that might be used for a military purpose. So people are left without adequate shelter. At the same time, Israel continues to carry out attacks, killing over 1,550 people since the signing of the ceasefire agreement last year.
This is what the coming winter is shaping up to look like in Gaza – no real ceasefire, no adequate shelter, and not enough food.
From closed crossings to closed budgets
I called my aunt, Om Adham, in Deir al-Balah, where my family has been displaced from our homes in eastern Gaza City, which is now on the Israeli-controlled side of the dividing line: Israel is erasing our houses even as I write these words. She told me that the family is afraid of starvation coming back, that they do not know what to do, and that they are not ready to live through it a second time.
I understood exactly what she meant. I was evacuated from Gaza in July 2025, in the midst of starvation. A month later, the world’s hunger monitor, the IPC, declared a famine in Gaza City and warned that it would spread to Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis by the end of September. People were already dying of starvation when I left.
Just over a year later, my family is being asked to prepare for starvation again, and this time what threatens them is not just a closed crossing but a decision about a budget.
What struck me most in the WFP announcement was the honesty of its explanation. Its acting head, Carl Skau, said the cuts were not happening because needs had fallen, nor because the food could not be brought in. It is only because the agency has less funding.
” What my research has taught me to see is not what these sentences say but what they leave out. In them, civilians die of hunger, but no one starves them, and famine is a risk, but no one creates it. The grammar is careful and humane, and it never names the one who acts. “
For two years, hunger in Gaza came through closed gates, while governments shook their heads at a door they said they could not open. Now, the door is partly open and the food can enter. What has closed, instead, is the budget.
For my master’s thesis, I have spent this year reading, line by line, everything Emmanuel Macron said about Gaza during the first six months of the war. I know the vocabulary of concern by heart.
In Ramallah in October 2023, he said: “A Palestinian life is worth a French life, which is worth an Israeli life”. In February 2024, he said: “Civilians in Gaza are dying of hunger and disease”. In March 2024, he called the imminent risk of famine in Gaza “unjustifiable”.
What my research has taught me to see is not what these sentences say but what they leave out. In them, civilians die of hunger, but no one starves them, and famine is a risk, but no one creates it. The grammar is careful and humane, and it never names the one who acts.
Read the sentence in the UN’s announcement about WFP’s cuts again with that in mind: “funding shortages have forced [WFP] to reduce food assistance”. The subject performing the action creating the shortages isn’t mentioned.
The truth is simple: Somewhere in a ministry – or several ministries – someone decided not to pay, and the sentence is built so that no one has to say who.
Donors’ double game
The sociologist Craig Calhoun wrote that the world imagines an emergency as a “sudden, unpredictable event emerging against a background of ostensible normalcy”. Suffering that lasts slowly stops resembling an emergency and becomes normalised.
Calhoun noticed this happening to Palestinians more than 15 years ago when he pointed out that their displacement was still called an “emergency” after 60 years. Even now, WFP’s own website files Gaza under “Palestine emergency”. The label has outlived the urgency. Gaza has not stopped suffering – it has only stopped being new.
Those who are cutting funding to WFP and other aid organisations are playing a double game.
This month, the German government told its parliament that the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains “catastrophic”. In the same answer it said Germany had given up to €420 million in humanitarian aid to occupied Palestinian territories since 7 October 2023. At the same time, in the first five months of this year alone, Germany approved almost €800 million in arms export licences to Israel, more than in the previous 20 months combined.
In February, Donald Trump promised $10 billion to his Board of Peace, whose goals include rebuilding Gaza. WFP’s entire request to keep feeding people in Gaza and the West Bank through March is $450 million – 4.5% of that promise.
The money exists. It has just been assigned to weapons licences and to a future Gaza drawn on paper, while the Gaza of today – the one my mother and her grandchildren live in – is being rationed.
What the people of Gaza are asking for this winter is wheat, cooking oil, gas so that families do not have to burn plastic under their pots; and tents that will still be standing after the first storm. They are not asking to live the lives they had. The past three years have forced them to shrink their ambitions. They are simply asking to reach the spring.
My mother asked me what she should tell her grandchildren if they are hungry again, and I am passing her question on to you – to the ministers who wrote the word “catastrophic” and then signed the budget to cut aid and increase weapons sales, to the presidents who said a Palestinian life is worth as much as any other, and to everyone who felt relief at the word ceasefire and stopped looking.
My mother is waiting for an answer, and so are the children.
This article is republished from thenewhumanitarian under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Nour ElAssy
Poet and writer from Gaza, Palestine
