Desperate Gazans turn to raiding UN warehouses as supplies dwindle: ‘They want to survive. That’s it’

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Fadi Hanuneh watched, unsurprised, as thousands of Gazans looted a United Nations warehouse in Khan Younis in the south of the strip on Sunday.

“People are hungry. There’s no food here,” the journalist said, adding that he had not been able to buy bread for his family since Saturday.

Inside the warehouse of the UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, the crowd saw large supplies of flour and oil, enough to feed many thousands. “People were upset” to see it all there, Mr. Hanuneh said. “They want to survive. That’s it,” he said, adding that basic elements of Gazan society were beginning to collapse. “Money has no meaning.”

In a statement on Sunday, UNRWA called the raids on four of its warehouses “a worrying sign that civil order is starting to break down after three weeks of war and a tight siege on Gaza.”

The looting of the warehouses captured the widespread desperation in Gaza after two days of the heaviest air strikes of the 23-day-old war that now sees Israeli troops pushing slowly into the densely packed and desperately poor Palestinian territory.

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Images posted on social media appeared to show Israeli tanks and troops approaching Gaza City from the north and east, while another photo showed soldiers waving the Israeli flag from a beach hotel in the northwest of the strip.

Hamas said it had struck back at Israeli troops with mortars and anti-tank missiles, and rejected reports of substantial Israeli gains. The militant group also continued to fire rockets at Israeli cities, setting off sirens in Tel Aviv and other parts of central Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday that the war – which began Oct. 7 when Hamas militants staged a deadly raid into southern Israel – had entered a “second phase” that he warned would be long and difficult.

“This mission is not a simple or easy one,” Mr. Netanyahu said in his first televised news conference since the war began. “This is the second stage of the war, whose objectives are clear: to destroy the military and governmental capabilities of Hamas and bring the hostages home.”

Hamas took more than 220 Israeli and foreign citizens hostage in its Oct. 7 attack, which left more than 1,400 Israelis dead. The condition of the captives is unknown, though Hamas military spokesperson Abu Obeida claimed 50 had been killed in the Israeli attacks.

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The UNRWA warehouses housed the trickle of aid that has arrived in Gaza on the trucks that have entered the strip from Egypt. Sunday saw the largest aid delivery so far, at 33 trucks, but that was still down from hundreds a day before the war, and well below what’s needed to reverse the burgeoning humanitarian crisis.

Israel has otherwise choked off all deliveries of food, water and medicines to the territory, and no fuel at all has been allowed to enter Gaza since Israel declared a “full siege” of Gaza shortly after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.

“The needs of the communities are immense, if only for basic survival, while the aid we receive is meagre and inconsistent,” the UNRWA statement said.

UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini told The Globe and Mail in an interview last week that the system of delivering limited aid to Gaza via stop-and-start mini-convoys of trucks from Gaza was “designed to fail” and that residents of the strip were starting to direct their anger toward the people trying to help them. He said there had been a “riot” on Thursday as UNRWA was distributing aid near Rafah, in the south of the territory.

The desperation, and the feeling of being isolated from the outside world, was exacerbated by a cut-off of mobile phone and internet service that began amid an intense Israeli bombardment on Friday and which eased only Sunday when some Gazans were finally able to get back online.

For some 34 hours, not only could people in Gaza not speak with those outside, they could not reach each other or call for help. With no ability to summon an ambulance, the injured were carried in donkey carts, said Husam Masri, a taxi driver from Beit Hanoun, in the northeast corner of the strip who is now living in a school in southern Gaza with his family.

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The information blackout intensified the darkness, as heavy bombing punctuated nighttime without electricity.

“We were lost. I didn’t let my children go away from me,” Mr. Masri said. “I was holding them close.”

The death toll in Gaza passed 8,000 on Sunday, according to figures from the Palestinian Health Ministry, which is part of the Palestinian Authority headed by president Mahmoud Abbas, though its independence from Hamas in the current situation is unclear.

That number will almost certainly continue to rise.

On Sunday, the Palestine Red Crescent Society said it had received two phone calls “from Israeli authorities” warning it to evacuate patients and staff from the al-Quds Hospital in Gaza City.

“Al-Quds Hospital has hundreds of wounded and patients receiving medical care, including in the Intensive Care Unit and children in incubators; in addition to approximately 12,000 internally displaced civilians sheltering at the hospital,” the Palestine Red Crescent said in a statement.

The organization said air strikes had already hit within 50 metres of the hospital and called for the international community “to act immediately and save al-Quds Hospital, as well as all hospitals in Gaza from being targeted, and to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe from unfolding.”

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The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, visited the Egyptian side of the border with Gaza on Sunday. He called on Israel to respect international law and said the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 constituted a serious violation.

“The burden rests with those who aim the gun, missile or rocket in question,” he said. The ICC is already investigating the actions of Israel and Palestinian militant groups including Hamas in a 2014 war.

Mr. Hanuneh, the witness to the UNRWA looting, said he had decided to be honest with his children, who are seven and four, about the situation they’re in. “If you lie, that means they will not trust you,” he said.

But he still tries to instill some hope in the darkness.

“We are explaining to them what we are going to do for them after the war, after a ceasefire,” he said. “We will buy toys. Maybe we will travel. What else can we do?”