Everything in Gaza has its price. 

For Hani Farah, $20,000 bought refuge for him and his family — $5,000 per adult and $2,500 for each of his four children — six months after the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023.

This fee went to Hala Consulting and Tourism, an Egyptian company that registers Palestinians for emigration and moves them across the border. But there are no guarantees. Mr. Farah’s family did not appear on the list to cross into Egypt for a month after applying and paying for their registration in March 2024. 

Eventually, they left for Cairo that April, where they now live in a state of flux, stuck in a cycle Mr. Farah says has left them “between the sky and the earth.” Without residency in Egypt, they are unable to receive visa approval, making it difficult to find a landlord that will rent an apartment to them and impossible for Mr. Farah to find work. 

In Gaza, he was the executive secretary general of the only Y.M.C.A. in the strip, which cooperated with local partners to provide aid and services to the vulnerable. However, it was bombed on 17 December 2023, destroying the building and rendering it inoperative. 

Mr. Farah’s brother-in-law, Amin Edward Amin Sabagh, registered his family to leave Gaza for Cairo, too, but their names were never called, so they remain in Gaza City, stuck within the now-closed borders. 

“We could lose our lives at any moment,” says Mr. Sabagh. He lives with his wife, Catherine, and their two children. 

“We went from being a happy family living with dignity to a miserable family living in shelters lacking the most basic human necessities, with no food or clean water,” he says. “We rely entirely on aid to provide us with food.”

A global collective aimed at assessing food insecurity worldwide announced on 29 July that “the worst-case scenario of famine” is underway in Gaza. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (I.P.C.) ranks global food insecurity on a five-point scale. Its data is used by the U.N. and other international agencies in decision-making and response-planning. 

Since its previous report on 12 May, the I.P.C. determined that instances of “extreme hunger” have doubled across households in Gaza, pushing most Gazans into the final phase on the five-point scale: catastrophe and famine. 

Mr. Sabagh’s children, Edward, 17, and Yanal, 12, documented their experiences in a written statement to ONE, dated 4 August. 

“We sleep most of the day, so we don’t feel the pain of hunger,” they wrote. “We only eat once a day at 5 p.m. — a single piece of bread, if we can afford it.” 

They listed the prices of basic food items: $50 per pound of sugar, $100 per pound of meat, $10 for a single egg. They have not eaten meat in more than 17 months, as it is inaccessible. 

“For over a year and a half, we’ve lived through nonstop war, fear and destruction,” they wrote. 

“Now, we are living through a new kind of war — a war of hunger. There is no food left in Gaza.”

Israel began a blockade on 12 March that has remained in effect, although it was eased on 19 May to allow some humanitarian aid into Gaza. The effects of this let-up were described as “a trickle” and “a drop in the ocean” by the I.P.C. and the United Nations. 

“The ugliness of the war is that while the people in power are fighting against each other, it’s the innocent people who pay the price.”

The I.P.C.’s July alert also reported that one in three people are “going without food for days at a time,” and more than “20,000 children have been admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July.” At least 16 children under the age of 5 died of hunger-related causes between 17 July and the alert’s publication on 29 July.

Pope Leo XIV has described the situation in Gaza as the “iniquitous use of hunger as a weapon of war.” 

“Starving people to death is a very cheap way of waging war,” he said in his 30 June message to the Food and Agriculture Organization conference in Rome.

Nataly Sayegh, a socio-pastoral project coordinator with Caritas Jerusalem based in Gaza, shared her experience of famine. “We started counting pieces of bread, saving portions for later, trying to make everything last just a bit longer,” she wrote. 

“Hearing someone say, ‘There’s a food package,’ felt like a treasure — but even that was short-lived, and the need never stopped.”

The pursuit of food at aid centers has proven dangerous for Palestinians. The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported on 31 July that more than 1,300 Palestinians were “killed while seeking food” since 27 May; about 65 percent of them were killed near Gaza Humanitarian Foundation sites. Established by Israel in February as a nongovernmental organization, the foundation receives U.S. support. In a statement on 5 August, U.N. experts called for the closure of the foundation on the grounds that its use of humanitarian aid as a vehicle for “covert military and geopolitical agendas” is in violation of international law.

In addition to inflated prices, cash withdrawals from banks are controlled by cash brokers, who take about 50 percent of every withdrawal, says Dr. Maher Ayyad, medical director of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City.

“You lose half of your money just to have it in your hand,” he says. 

The Christian hospital is operating amid shortages of essential resources, including medicines, specialized personnel, equipment, food, beds, and fuel for generators.

Hospital staff sometimes faint from hunger and, without proper nourishment, Dr. Ayyad expects patients will face even greater challenges healing because of a lack of nutrients. The 50-bed hospital has faced a 300 percent increase in occupancy because of the surge in casualties. Prior to the war, funding from church groups and UNRWA allowed the hospital to provide free medical care to vulnerable populations, including general medicine and surgeries, pediatric care and orthopedic surgeries. Now, nearly 90 percent of patients are casualty victims.

An airstrike on 13 April destroyed the genetics lab, some of the hospital clinics, the pharmacy, and a section of the emergency department where most patients were treated. A shortage of beds in the intensive care unit forced the hospital to accelerate its turnover rate for patients in need of ventilators and other intensive care. There are three I.C.U. beds with an occupancy of more than 150 percent.

“Sometimes, when they [had] casualties, the senior surgeon used to tell me to choose, to make priorities, which patients they have to take and which patients they have to leave to die … because we don’t have enough operating rooms or specialized personnel to take care of them,” says Dr. Ayyad.

In Jerusalem, Joseph Hazboun, regional director of CNEWA-Pontifical Mission for Palestine and Israel, says aid provided through the agency is purchased entirely within Gaza because “it’s too challenging and risky” to bring goods in from the outside. 

The office staff remains in communication with families in Gaza, particularly those sheltering in the Catholic and Orthodox churches of the Holy Family and St. Porphyrios, to determine the needs on the ground and which suppliers are available. Amid the current food shortages, the office coordinated with another partner agency, the Near East Council of Churches, to supply 22 pounds of vegetables to 444 families. The vegetables were purchased from local markets. 

“Starving people to death is a very cheap way of waging war.”

In addition to the 100 families sheltering at the Orthodox parish and the 145 families at the Latin church, Mr. Hazboun says his office provides aid to about another four families to the south. To date, CNEWA’s coordinated response has assisted more than 36,400 people throughout the territory.

“The real tragic situation is outside the convents, where people are left without any support, and so we’re trying to reach out to as many as we can,” says Mr. Hazboun. 

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, and Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilos III visited the two communities on 18 July. 

“There, we encountered a people crushed by the weight of war, yet carrying within them the image of God,” Patriarch Theophilos said at a 22 July press conference after his visit.

“Christ is not absent from Gaza,” Cardinal Pizzaballa said at the same press conference. “He is there — crucified in the wounded, buried under rubble and yet present in every act of mercy, every candle in the darkness, every hand extended to the suffering.”

He said humanitarian aid is “a matter of life and death” and “refusing it is not a delay, but a sentence.”

“Christ is not absent from Gaza.”

Rami Tarazi, former director of the Arab Orthodox Cultural Center in Gaza City, was instrumental in securing aid through CNEWA-Pontifical Mission in the first days of the war. According to Mr. Hazboun, Mr. Tarazi contacted CNEWA-Pontifical Mission’s Jerusalem office with the request on 8 October 2023, a day after the war began, and it was approved immediately “without any secured funding.” 

“This swift decision was critical,” he says. “The water was delivered on the morning of 9 October, just hours before the supplier’s warehouse was destroyed.” This first round of aid provided a three-month supply of food and water for 1,600 people.

However, by the end of the month, on 30 October, the Israeli Defense Forces had flattened the Arab Orthodox Cultural Center in a targeted airstrike. Some 3,000 people had been sheltering there up until two days prior to the attack, when Mr. Tarazi was instructed by the Israeli military to evacuate the compound.

Mr. Tarazi fled Gaza in April 2024. As with Mr. Farah, he paid for the opportunity to leave: $12,500 for him, his wife and their son. 

Their harrowing journey from North Gaza to the Rafah crossing took them past tanks, the sound of bombs, the smell of death, and along the sandy beach for about six miles. Once in Egypt, they waited for Mr. Tarazi’s parents, who had fled Gaza five months earlier for Turkey, where his mother received cancer treatment.

He and his family now live in Sydney, Australia, where Mr. Tarazi found a job as a support worker for people with disabilities. He remains in contact with CNEWA-Pontifical Mission to perform needs assessments.

“If there is no international intervention for Gaza, most of the people will die in Gaza, especially the elderly people and the children,” he says. 

Mr. Hazboun implores “people with conscience” to realize the reality of this conflict. 

“The ugliness of the war is that while the people in power are fighting against each other, it’s the innocent people who pay the price.” 

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