Subhi Muhammad Asfour came to northern Gaza in search of food, a home and hope. Instead, he and his family are hungry and terrified, as Israeli evacuation orders threaten to force them to move for a seventh time since the war began.
“I came to western Gaza looking for a place to put up a tent,” Asfour, 46, told NBC News in a telephone interview Friday, saying that transporting his family from the area, as the Israeli military has told Palestinian civilians to do, would cost $500 or more.
“I don’t have money,” he said.
Israel’s military is pushing ahead with a new operation to seize Gaza City that could displace hundreds of thousands of people and worsen the dire situation there. It launched intense strikes on the area this week after announcing it had begun the first stage of its planned assault.
Under threat of worsening violence, Asfour doesn’t know how he can take care of his wife, four children, sister and parents.
“I’m afraid for my children, but where can I go?” he said. “There’s no place and no safety.”
Seeking refuge, Asfour lives amid airstrikes and increasing deprivation, following Friday’s declaration of famine in northern Gaza, including Gaza City, by the world’s leading authority on hunger.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC, said more than half a million people in Gaza are “trapped in famine,” as deaths from starvation rise across the Palestinian enclave in a spiraling crisis under Israel’s military assault and aid restrictions.
It said the number is expected to rise to over 640,000 by the end of September.
“Famine is a race against time,” the IPC said. “An immediate ceasefire and end to the conflict is critical to enabling an unimpeded, large-scale humanitarian response to save lives.”
The United Nations-backed body had up until now only declared famine on four other occasions since it was first established in 2004, most recently in Sudan last year.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the IPC’s findings, calling the report a “lie,” adding that Israel has allowed 2 million tons of aid to enter the Gaza strip since the start of the war.
“Israel does not have a policy of starvation,” Netanyahu added. The IPC report did not say that Israel had such a policy.
The hunger crisis in Gaza intensified after Israel launched a blockade barring the entry of food and other vital supplies into the enclave on March 2, in the middle of its ceasefire with Hamas, for more than two months. It lifted the blockade in May, but only allowed a trickle of aid in for weeks after that.
Humanitarian groups had warned of growing hunger in the enclave, but it wasn’t until Israel faced a wave of international backlash that it began to allow more aid to flow into Gaza starting in late July, although much less than aid groups say is necessary and far below prewar levels.
Israel launched its offensive in Gaza following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks, in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken hostage, marking a major escalation in a decadeslong conflict.
Since then, more than 62,000 people have been killed in Gaza, including thousands of children, according to the local Palestinian health ministry, with much of the territory destroyed.
Among the dead are hundreds of people who have been killed while trying to seek aid following the introduction of a new distribution system led by Israel and the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Liz Allcock, head of humanitarian protection at Medical Aid for Palestinians, told NBC News she was horrified after visiting a pediatric intensive care unit in Gaza City earlier in August, where she said children were suffering from malnutrition without access to the “treatment that they require to combat the horrific impact of starvation on their small bodies.”
“Really words don’t do justice to the images that will remain with me forever,” she said.
Meanwhile, Asfour doubts even his most basic needs will be met.
“I want the war to end. I want to sleep. I want to take a shower. I want to eat. We want to raise children,” he said. “God willing, the war will end before we get tired, flee and die.”
