July 24, 2025
The BBC, Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse have all called on Israel to allow journalists in and out of Gaza as starvation there becomes imminent. In a statement, the news outlets said, “We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.” We speak with Afeef Nessouli, a journalist who just returned from Gaza, where he volunteered as an aid worker. “It has been an incredibly awful experience to see people sort of become sicker and sicker from hunger,” says Nessouli, who describes visiting community kitchens in Gaza that have run out of food. “Many of us would just have one meal a day,” he says of his seven weeks in Gaza. Now his colleagues who remain in Gaza “are having one meal every three days.”
The BBC, Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse have all called on Israel to allow journalists in and out of Gaza as starvation there becomes imminent. In a statement, the news outlets said, “We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.” We speak with Afeef Nessouli, a journalist who just returned from Gaza, where he volunteered as an aid worker. “It has been an incredibly awful experience to see people sort of become sicker and sicker from hunger,” says Nessouli, who describes visiting community kitchens in Gaza that have run out of food. “Many of us would just have one meal a day,” he says of his seven weeks in Gaza. Now his colleagues who remain in Gaza “are having one meal every three days.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: The BBC, Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse have called on Israel to allow journalists in and out of Gaza. In a statement, the news outlets said, quote, “We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.”
Well, our next guest, who joins us in our New York studio, was reporting in Gaza for seven weeks during his off hours as he also volunteered as an aid worker for the medical nonprofit Glia, which brings doctors, nurses and others into Gaza to support local healthcare workers.
AMY GOODMAN: Afeef Nessouli is a journalist and host of With Afeef Nessouli. He’s reported from the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 2011. His most recent piece for The Intercept is headlined “Our Reporter Got Into Gaza. He Witnessed a Famine of Israel’s Making,” which he wrote with journalist and author Steven Thrasher. We last spoke to Afeef in January about their report headlined “Surviving War and HIV: Queer, HIV-Positive, and Running Out of Medication in Gaza.”
Welcome back to Democracy Now! In June, when you left, you were in Deir al-Balah, which was packed with many thousands of displaced people. Can you talk about what you saw in Gaza? And talk especially about the community kitchens and hunger, starvation, people starving to death.
AFEEF NESSOULI: Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for having me again.
I went to Gaza because of that first report, and I was there from March 27th to June 3rd. I even lost about 10 pounds to 12 pounds, because we were having one meal a day. There was rice, there was lentils, and sometimes we would have an errant can of tuna that we had brought and hadn’t passed out yet to people that were starving.
Hunger is something that I don’t think any of us here can actually fathom. I think many — maybe many of us can in the United States, but most of us can’t. And that feeling was seeing people begging all of the time, no matter where you’re walking. If you have your NGO sort of paraphernalia on, people want to know if you have tahin, flour. And I speak Arabic, and my colleagues were mostly Gazawi, and we would just really appeal to them and say, “We really don’t have flour, actually. We’re also really hungry.” Many of us would just have one meal a day. Now I’m speaking to my colleagues who are having one meal every three days often. I worked at a Glia —
AMY GOODMAN: And you’re talking about more than a month ago.
AFEEF NESSOULI: Yeah, this is more than a month ago, right. The blockade started March 2nd. I got in March 27th. By then almost, people were already rationing food. We were really, really overly thinking about what was available and what would suddenly go away if we did too much, if we ate too much.
I also volunteered at Shabab Gaza, which is a community kitchen. It was in — it’s sort of in collaboration with Glia, so a lot of us kind of do both. And at the start of this genocide, there were about 170 community kitchens. Two hundred and fifty thousand meals per day were being served. About 45% of the population was being served. By the time I was leaving, Shabab Gaza, at least, went from 250,000 meals a day to 25,000. And now they’re not operating really at all. I think that they’re operating when they can, when some farmer or someone has potatoes. The last time I was there, on June 1st, they had a bunch of potatoes, and they were passing them out and preparing them. But that’s what they had. They had potatoes.
So, it has been an incredibly awful experience to see people sort of become sicker and sicker from hunger. I even had an experience where I was sick because I just sort of had beets one day. And I don’t know, maybe I had some virus, and together, I couldn’t sort of hack it, and I became quite sick for about two or three days. So, it’s pervasive. If you’re a patient, you need protein to heal. I mean, so, if you have an explosive injury, and any injury that isn’t about malnutrition, malnutrition makes it way worse. And people now are going to the hospital because they’re malnourished. People are fainting regularly. I’m getting voice notes all the time from people who are just in hunger pain, which is hard to hear.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And explain the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, so many people being killed while they’re trying to access aid. What’s going on there? Were you in the vicinity of any of those aid sites while you were there?
AFEEF NESSOULI: Yeah, so, they were announced on May 19th. On May 26th or 27th — I believe it was the 26th — was the first aid distribution. It was a disaster. I remember Al-Qarara and Khan Younis were really loud that day.
The GHF has been, basically, the new sort of brainchild of the Israelis and the Americans. They kind of fight over who even created the idea. But, ultimately, there were 400 aid sites around Gaza by the U.N.-backed system, and it’s been replaced by now just four. For a while, it was three. And many of them don’t always operate. Sometimes it’s security reasons. Sometimes it’s maintenance. They have a Facebook page people check.
From my reporting and my experience, people are shot at, very regularly shot at. Doctors mention that the bullet holes seem targeted, like snipers, because they’re in certain spots in the back of the head. There’s people who are just simply trying to find food for their families, and they go in the middle of the night to start lining up. And this is for parcels that are about $1.30 in all, like medical supplies, you know, a food parcel, but all of it together is just $1.30.
And the experience, from what I understand and what I experienced there, but it’s also been more developed since I’ve left, is that there’s thousands of people just disorganizedly just hoping to find something. And when you get something, it’s also pitting you against all of your neighbors, all of your family, because you’re the one who somehow picked up this bag of flour, and now you have to somehow justify that everyone around you doesn’t get to have that flour, just you. So, a lot of people are getting into, you know, sort of tension and fights with each other. So it’s just an incredibly chaotic, awful, basically, supplantation of what was there before, which was working. Albeit it had its own flaws, it was working.
AMY GOODMAN: And you went in as a medical worker. You went in with a medical aid group and then wrote about your experience.
AFEEF NESSOULI: Yeah, so, I went in with Glia. I think that it’s really important to realize that right now Palestinian journalists are suffering because of malnourishment. But for the last year and a half, two years, they’ve been on the frontlines. I don’t think that they necessarily needed me to go in as a journalist. What they needed was someone to help on the ground, which is what I did. And as part of Glia, I also documented, did a lot of interviews with doctors and nurses and sort of gleaned this information in retrospect and have a lot of sources there still. And we’ll hopefully go back.
AMY GOODMAN: “The Taker Story” by Chicano Batman, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: The BBC, Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse have called on Israel to allow journalists in and out of Gaza. In a statement, the news outlets said, quote, “We are desperately concerned for our journalists in Gaza, who are increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families.”
Well, our next guest, who joins us in our New York studio, was reporting in Gaza for seven weeks during his off hours as he also volunteered as an aid worker for the medical nonprofit Glia, which brings doctors, nurses and others into Gaza to support local healthcare workers.
AMY GOODMAN: Afeef Nessouli is a journalist and host of With Afeef Nessouli. He’s reported from the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 2011. His most recent piece for The Intercept is headlined “Our Reporter Got Into Gaza. He Witnessed a Famine of Israel’s Making,” which he wrote with journalist and author Steven Thrasher. We last spoke to Afeef in January about their report headlined “Surviving War and HIV: Queer, HIV-Positive, and Running Out of Medication in Gaza.”
Welcome back to Democracy Now! In June, when you left, you were in Deir al-Balah, which was packed with many thousands of displaced people. Can you talk about what you saw in Gaza? And talk especially about the community kitchens and hunger, starvation, people starving to death.
AFEEF NESSOULI: Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for having me again.
I went to Gaza because of that first report, and I was there from March 27th to June 3rd. I even lost about 10 pounds to 12 pounds, because we were having one meal a day. There was rice, there was lentils, and sometimes we would have an errant can of tuna that we had brought and hadn’t passed out yet to people that were starving.
Hunger is something that I don’t think any of us here can actually fathom. I think many — maybe many of us can in the United States, but most of us can’t. And that feeling was seeing people begging all of the time, no matter where you’re walking. If you have your NGO sort of paraphernalia on, people want to know if you have tahin, flour. And I speak Arabic, and my colleagues were mostly Gazawi, and we would just really appeal to them and say, “We really don’t have flour, actually. We’re also really hungry.” Many of us would just have one meal a day. Now I’m speaking to my colleagues who are having one meal every three days often. I worked at a Glia —
AMY GOODMAN: And you’re talking about more than a month ago.
AFEEF NESSOULI: Yeah, this is more than a month ago, right. The blockade started March 2nd. I got in March 27th. By then almost, people were already rationing food. We were really, really overly thinking about what was available and what would suddenly go away if we did too much, if we ate too much.
I also volunteered at Shabab Gaza, which is a community kitchen. It was in — it’s sort of in collaboration with Glia, so a lot of us kind of do both. And at the start of this genocide, there were about 170 community kitchens. Two hundred and fifty thousand meals per day were being served. About 45% of the population was being served. By the time I was leaving, Shabab Gaza, at least, went from 250,000 meals a day to 25,000. And now they’re not operating really at all. I think that they’re operating when they can, when some farmer or someone has potatoes. The last time I was there, on June 1st, they had a bunch of potatoes, and they were passing them out and preparing them. But that’s what they had. They had potatoes.
So, it has been an incredibly awful experience to see people sort of become sicker and sicker from hunger. I even had an experience where I was sick because I just sort of had beets one day. And I don’t know, maybe I had some virus, and together, I couldn’t sort of hack it, and I became quite sick for about two or three days. So, it’s pervasive. If you’re a patient, you need protein to heal. I mean, so, if you have an explosive injury, and any injury that isn’t about malnutrition, malnutrition makes it way worse. And people now are going to the hospital because they’re malnourished. People are fainting regularly. I’m getting voice notes all the time from people who are just in hunger pain, which is hard to hear.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And explain the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, so many people being killed while they’re trying to access aid. What’s going on there? Were you in the vicinity of any of those aid sites while you were there?
AFEEF NESSOULI: Yeah, so, they were announced on May 19th. On May 26th or 27th — I believe it was the 26th — was the first aid distribution. It was a disaster. I remember Al-Qarara and Khan Younis were really loud that day.
The GHF has been, basically, the new sort of brainchild of the Israelis and the Americans. They kind of fight over who even created the idea. But, ultimately, there were 400 aid sites around Gaza by the U.N.-backed system, and it’s been replaced by now just four. For a while, it was three. And many of them don’t always operate. Sometimes it’s security reasons. Sometimes it’s maintenance. They have a Facebook page people check.
From my reporting and my experience, people are shot at, very regularly shot at. Doctors mention that the bullet holes seem targeted, like snipers, because they’re in certain spots in the back of the head. There’s people who are just simply trying to find food for their families, and they go in the middle of the night to start lining up. And this is for parcels that are about $1.30 in all, like medical supplies, you know, a food parcel, but all of it together is just $1.30.
And the experience, from what I understand and what I experienced there, but it’s also been more developed since I’ve left, is that there’s thousands of people just disorganizedly just hoping to find something. And when you get something, it’s also pitting you against all of your neighbors, all of your family, because you’re the one who somehow picked up this bag of flour, and now you have to somehow justify that everyone around you doesn’t get to have that flour, just you. So, a lot of people are getting into, you know, sort of tension and fights with each other. So it’s just an incredibly chaotic, awful, basically, supplantation of what was there before, which was working. Albeit it had its own flaws, it was working.
AMY GOODMAN: And you went in as a medical worker. You went in with a medical aid group and then wrote about your experience.
AFEEF NESSOULI: Yeah, so, I went in with Glia. I think that it’s really important to realize that right now Palestinian journalists are suffering because of malnourishment. But for the last year and a half, two years, they’ve been on the frontlines. I don’t think that they necessarily needed me to go in as a journalist. What they needed was someone to help on the ground, which is what I did. And as part of Glia, I also documented, did a lot of interviews with doctors and nurses and sort of gleaned this information in retrospect and have a lot of sources there still. And we’ll hopefully go back.
AMY GOODMAN: “The Taker Story” by Chicano Batman, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.
“Wasting Away” in Gaza: Oxfam, 100+ Groups Decry Israel’s “Man-Made” Mass Starvation of Palestinians
As Gazans face mass starvation due to Israel’s blockade, more than 100 humanitarian organizations are demanding action to end Israel’s siege of Gaza. Their warning comes as the Palestinian Ministry of Health announced the number of starvation-related deaths in Gaza has climbed to at least 113 people. We go to Gaza City for an update from Mahmoud Alsaqqa, Oxfam’s emergency food security and livelihoods lead. “We are really exhausted, and we’ve become unable to bear the situation any longer,” says Alsaqqa, who adds he has lost nearly 15 pounds since the Israeli blockade began.Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show in Gaza, where health officials have reported two more deaths, quote, “due to famine and malnutrition” in the past 24 hours. They say at least 113 Palestinians have starved to death. The World Health Organization is warning Gaza is suffering from man-made mass starvation caused by Israel’s blockade. The WHO’s Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus spoke on Wednesday.
TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS: As you know, mass starvation means starvation of a large proportion of a population. And a large proportion of the population of Gaza is starving. I don’t know what you would call it, other than mass starvation. And it’s man-made, and that’s very clear. And this is because of blockade, and, I have said it in my statement, more than 80 days of blockade straight. And then, of course, there is opening now, but it’s not enough. It’s just a trickle, and people are starving.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: At this point, Gaza officials say 500,000 bags of flour are needed each week to, quote, “avoid a comprehensive humanitarian collapse.” Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children and Oxfam, along with over a hundred other aid agencies, issued a statement saying their staff and the people they serve in Gaza were, quote, “wasting away.” Doctors and medical staff in Gaza told The Guardian that the lack of food has left them too weak and depleted their physical health, making it difficult to provide urgent medical care for their suffering patients.
In Khan Younis, one mother, Najah Barbakh, talked about the plight of her malnourished daughter.
NAJAH BARBAKH: [translated] Since I delivered her, she has been small, and she doesn’t grow up. Her condition gets worse in the hospital. And every time I go home, I find her becoming more and more weak. Her nerves are weak, and she doesn’t sit properly. Babies like her, in her age of 11 months, should sit up straight. She should be 11 or 10 kilograms minimum. My daughter can’t sit straight or play with her siblings. She stays lying on her back, and that’s all.
AMY GOODMAN: This comes as Israeli President Isaac Herzog visited soldiers in Gaza on Wednesday to show support, and said intensive negotiations for a ceasefire are underway.
PRESIDENT ISAAC HERZOG: [translated] We owe you our thanks. You are holding the line for us here. I would say, for an entire country, a small number of people are carrying this immense, tremendous campaign.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we go to Gaza City, where we’re joined by Mahmoud Alsaqqa, Oxfam’s emergency food security and livelihoods lead in Gaza.
Welcome to Democracy Now! You are right there in Gaza City. Can you describe what’s happening on the ground? The U.N.'s World Food Programme said earlier this week nearly a third of Gaza's population was not eating for several days at a time.
MAHMOUD ALSAQQA: Yeah. Thank you, DN, for having me again in this show.
In fact, it’s become not easy even for us to describe the situation on the ground that we are all living. We are seeing this starvation is widespread nowadays, and increasingly widespread. And we are seeing that the human death become an absolute, and we are seeing that more than 100 people have lost their lives until now because of that.
Unfortunately, this is happening in front of all of all the world, while the world, all the world, are watching this heartbreaking and without having a concrete action. And this is really harmful and also confused us as a people who are living here and working there, and how all this is happening in front of the world and without having — without having concrete actions.
We were, past — in the past, we are saying that the vulnerable groups in the Gaza are threatened by malnutrition and starvation, but nowadays we are talking about the whole populations are suffering from starvation and also diseases. We have just released in a report that showed a lot of people and how the Gazan people are facing multiple kind of disease, mainly waterborne diseases, and this kind of diseases could be preventable and treated easily if we have our supplies and the medical supplies in. This is the situation on the ground, to be honest. It is unbearable. And it’s not easy even for us to describe what’s happening.
And what is astonishing us and also confusing us again: How is all this happening without having any real and concrete actions? We are in 2025, and we are seeing the scenes on the TV shows that people are starving to death on a daily basis. And we are expecting the worst is coming, and we’re still lacking this concrete actions and decisive action from the people who have this pressure on Israel in that regard. It’s shameful that Israel has been allowed to besiege Gaza all this period of time, even before for the last five months. So, that’s the reality on the ground.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Mahmoud, as you pointed out, now everyone working in Gaza is impacted, including medical personnel, journalists and, of course, people working at Oxfam and other aid agencies operating in Gaza. There are reports of medical staff fainting in operating rooms during surgeries. There have been statements. Your statement, the Oxfam statement that was issued along with over a hundred other aid agencies, has said that “With supplies now totally depleted, humanitarian organizations are witnessing their own colleagues and partners waste away before their eyes.” One agency representative quoted in the letter says — in the statement, “Each morning, the same question echoes [across] Gaza: will I eat today?” So, Mahmoud, if you could talk about your own experience, the experience of your colleagues at Oxfam and their families?
MAHMOUD ALSAQQA: To be honest, in that situations, we are seeing ourselves and our colleagues on a daily basis becoming more weak and weak. And to be honest, we are — we are more, let’s say, privileged that we still have our work in that regard. But as you already mentioned, we have a depleted market. Even if you have money, it’s not easy for you to find something to eat. So, this is the question and the uncertainty on a daily basis for each of the people here in Gaza about: Are they going to eat today or not? And it’s become frustrating and become — become really harmful for us, even we are supposed to help the people. And we have — you know, it’s compounded even — you can imagine, for us, we are facing and enduring that right now. You can imagine the vulnerable groups who are — what they are facing right now. It’s compounded suffering for them. We are talking about the elderly people, the women and the children in that regard. So, this is the issue.
And the issue that we have released this joint statement, that we have our supplies outside Gaza. We have thousands of tons of supplies that could resolve this issue, but we are not allowed even to get it in and to support the people and to fulfill our mandate in supporting the people who are in desperate need.
And in the same times, we are seeing massacres on a daily basis at the distribution point for this militarized mechanisms, and the people are losing their lives. More than 1,000 people are losing their lives in this distribution points, and other thousands of people have been injured in that regard.
The solution is clear and straightforward, if we are allowed to work, as we used to work even during the war, in supporting the people and supporting ourselves and our colleagues in maintaining our daily lives, I think they are at least — needs this opportunity to rebuild and to recover from all this what’s happening. And this is possible, in case of releasing all this shameful and illegal besiege and blockade.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you lost weight, Mahmoud?
MAHMOUD ALSAQQA: Sorry?
AMY GOODMAN: Have you lost weight?
MAHMOUD ALSAQQA: Yeah, myself, I think at least I have lost about 12 to 15 kilograms during the last at least five months. But, you know, I’m even in a better case than many other people in our community, in our — that we are observing and dealing with on a daily basis. The situation is more worse than the words that I’m describing the situation in.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to continue reading from that letter of the hundred humanitarian groups that Nermeen started. The statement also quotes an aid worker providing psychosocial support, who said, quote, “Children tell their parents they want to go to heaven, because at least heaven has food.” And the letter ends, “States can and must save lives before there are none left to save.”
MAHMOUD ALSAQQA: You can imagine how much pressure such words could drop on their parents in that regards. And unfortunately, we have just seen some of the posts in the social media. You can imagine what the parents are writing on the social media. And they are thanking God for the loss of their children who have been killed in a certain time of the war because of the bombardment or the invasion. They are thanking God that they have lost their children to not reach to this stage, while their children are asking them to feed them, and they didn’t have any capacity and any ways to just fulfill the needs of their children. So, this is beyond description and even unimaginable, to be honest.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: You know, a recent — Mahmoud, an Oxfam article talked also about the shortage of fuel, that Israeli authorities have denied humanitarian workers the permission to collect fuel stored in a U.N. warehouse inside Gaza. What’s been the impact of that?
MAHMOUD ALSAQQA: You know, it’s directly impacting our two very critical sectors. We are talking about the water and sanitation, and the bombing of the water, and also the health, the health facilities and the health centers. And on a daily basis, there are a lot of statements about the traumatic situation of our healthcare centers. And this is why we are seeing now the spread of the diseases, that it’s linked to the waterborne diseases. And you are talking about increase in percentages, increasing 100%, 200%, 300%, such as in a watery area or the bloodied area, and other diseases that could be prevented. And the same issue with the health facilities, and this is risking the lives of the people inside these facilities because of this lack of fuel.
So, it’s all linked together with the complications that without having concrete action in that regards, this will continue. And unfortunately, every day without having this ceasefire, we are — more deaths are happening, and more people are losing their lives. So, it’s not about days or months; we are talking on a daily basis we have people losing their lives because of diseases and starvation. So, I think there is no much needed action than now.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mahmoud, just before we end, if you could say: What do you think the prospects of a ceasefire are now? In Tel Aviv, there were protests, thousands of antiwar protesters calling for a ceasefire. So, perhaps there’s a change in sentiment in Israel itself. And then, Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, Middle East envoy, is now meeting with Israeli and Qatari officials to work towards a ceasefire. What’s your sense?
MAHMOUD ALSAQQA: Before my sense, you cannot imagine how the people here in Gaza are approaching such details. And unfortunately, they have been disappointed many times because of not reaching such a ceasefire. We are aiming that this time it could happen, because the people are really exhausted. We are really exhausted, and we’ve become unable to bear the situations longer. And there is lives that is counted on a daily basis and lost. So, all the people here in Gaza are aiming and willing and also looking for the time of such a ceasefire could be announced, so they can at least to finally begin to breathe again, to recover and to rebuild and to have this entry complete. And the people are even looking for this permanent ceasefire nowadays, and not just a pause, because they are looking for a full, complete ceasefire, where they can get all the supplies in, and they can — as I said, they can at least recover and breathe again.
AMY GOODMAN: Mahmoud, we want to thank you for being with us. Mahmoud Alsaqqa is Oxfam’s emergency food security and livelihoods lead, speaking to us from Gaza City.
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