Consider This from NPR - Palestinians are counting lentils, as Gaza food crisis worsens

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

Nearly half a million people in Gaza now face starvation, according to a new report from the IPC, the international panel of famine experts who advise the United Nations.For more than ten weeks, Israel has halted the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, to pressure Hamas to release Israeli hostages. Israel accuses Hamas of seizing aid, selling it on the black market and using aid distribution to reinforce its control of Gaza.The UN says hundreds of truckloads of lifesaving supplies are waiting at the border. Meanwhile, inside Gaza, food is scarce. Humanitarian groups like the UN World Food Programme (WFP) exhausted supplies of basic staples weeks ago, forcing them to shut down their kitchens and bakeries, and everyday Palestinians are grinding up pasta and lentils to make flour for bread. Antoine Renard of the WFP says when he was in Gaza last week, wheat flour was selling for $10 a pound. Juana Summers talks with Renard about what he's seen in Gaza, and what's next for the people there.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

For a lot of people living in Gaza, each day is centered on one thing, getting something in their stomachs to keep hunger at bay. Right now, that means stretching dwindling supplies, because Israel is enforcing a total blockade on aid coming into Gaza. In Jabalia in northern Gaza, NPR's Anas Baba talked to families waiting to grind small bags of lentils and beans into flour to make bread. There's barely any wheat flour left in Gaza. This is not how Palestinians eat in peacetime. Lentil soup is more common.

But it doesn't last long in the stomach, Mustafa Shalail tells Inas. Bread made from lentil flour helps the hunger stay away longer, he says. Israel imposed the blockade 10 weeks ago to pressure Hamas to release Israeli hostages. It accuses Hamas of seizing aid, selling it on the black market, and using aid distribution to reinforce its control of Gaza. Here's Israeli Finance Minister Betzal Smotrich speaking at a conference last month. Read my lips, not a single grain of wheat will enter if it ends up in Hamas's hands.

In Gaza, 60-year-old Nadia Almasri needs balls of a grainy dough made from lentil flour, soaked pasta, and water. Her family of 12 lives in one classroom in a packed school, housing hundreds of families with worn tarps serving as makeshift walls. She tells Anas Baba that this is the worst hunger her family has faced since the start of the war. Hunger, she says, is when your children cry themselves to sleep. They're too hungry. Why are you punishing everyone, she asks. What do we have to do with Hamas? It's not right to make the entire population, more than two million people, suffer.

Consider this. The UN's World Food Program has shuttered its kitchens. It has run out of food. What comes next for the people of Gaza? From NPR, I'm Wanda Summers. Tariffs, recessions, how Colombian drug cartels gave us blueberries all year long, that's the kind of thing the Planet Money podcast explains. I'm Sarah Gonzalez, and on Planet Money, we help you understand the economy and how things all around you came to be the way they are. Para que sepas. So you know.

Listen to the Planet Money podcast from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. The US and Israel have announced a new plan to get aid flowing back into Gaza. According to an Israeli defense official, it would force Gaza's population south into a zone cordoned off by the military to prevent Hamas from accessing the aid. He spoke on condition of anonymity to divulge details. The U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, said last week that Israeli soldiers would maintain a security perimeter but not be involved in delivering aid.

The focus is going to be get the food, get it to the people who are hungry, keep it away from Hamas. It's really that simple. A group sharply criticized the plan. Here's UN Children's Fund spokesperson James Elder. The use of humanitarian aid as a bait to force displacement, especially from the north to the south, will create this impossible choice between displacement and death. There is no official timeline yet on when that plan would be rolled out.

In the meantime, nearly half a million people in Gaza are now facing starvation according to a new report from the IPC, that is the International Panel of Famine Experts who advise the United Nations. That is a fifth of the population. The Israeli agency that coordinates humanitarian aid rejects those findings. In a post on X, it said, quote, the IPC's projections have consistently failed to predict the reality on the ground. Antoine Renard was just in Gaza last week and got a firsthand view of what is happening on the ground. He's the representative and country director of the United Nations World Food Program in the Palestinian territories. He spoke with me from Jerusalem.

Antoine, even when aid was able to get into Gaza, food was quite scarce. And now, more than two months into this blockade, how would you describe the situation there? It's actually difficult to find proper words to describe what is happening. After the ceasefire in mid-January, we were really as humanitarian for the first time, practically since the beginning of the war, managing to reach the population at scale. Since the 2nd of March, with a full closure now for more than 70 days, what you find is a population that is eating one, one and a half meal per day maximum. The prices on the market, I'm just coming back from Gaza. I came back on the 11th of May. Wheat flour, a bag of 25

kg is actually now 560 US dollars. And we'll just note here for listeners, we're talking about 25 kilograms, that's somewhere around 55 pounds of flour. So the challenge that you have is that most of the population are not able to afford such a cost. And the challenge that you have as well is the quality of the wheat flour that is left. It's in very bad condition. People are smashing macaroni to do bread. So like that, the kids can actually still see bread on the table, if there is a table. The WFP has said it ran out of food to support its hot meal kitchens in Gaza a few weeks

ago. All of your bakeries closed a month before that. What is it like to have to shut down your organization's support network in Gaza at a time where there's just so much need? The challenge that you have is that you actually wonder when the countdown will finish because we used to serve one million meals per day until the end of April with all the different actors on the ground, not just the World Food Program. Then it started to be half a million a week ago, and now we are 250,000 meals per day. When are we gonna stop this countdown? And we have all the food in the different corridors

in Egypt, in Ashdod, in Jordan. For your radio listener, food is not even 40 kilometers from where people are. If I heard you correctly, you said you've drawn down from serving 1 million meals a day between the World Food Program and partners to now just 250,000 a day. Is that correct? It's correct. And even, you know, the type of meal that they have on the table, if it's called a lentil

soup, one of the family I was meeting last Sunday was telling me that they are actually with their kids counting the lentils. So like that, they actually remember that it is lentils. So they were counting 16 lentils into the soup. And that's your main meal for the day. Wow. Israel has said that it is blocking aid from entering Gaza in order to force Hamas to come to the negotiating table. I'd like to ask you, do you consider this blockade a violation of international humanitarian law? You know, the current period, we're feeling like we were in December 2024, early January. We were really contemplating that it was the end of the road for us as humanitarian to

operate and we managed to have the ceasefire. So we need to have the mediators for what is the current situation. Lylee McAllister If this blockade were to be completely lifted right now, would that be enough to undo the damage that has already been done there in Gaza in terms of malnutrition? Dr. Jean-Pierre Lévesque The impact is and will actually last for a long time. You've got a number of children that are actually growing. They are minus five. They need to have a proper and adequate dietary diversity. They don't have meat.

They don't have dairy products. They don't have fish. There's no fruit anymore in Tougasin. There's barely still some vegetables where you have cucumber, tomatoes, aubergine that are locally produced, but at such a low level and at such a cost, it will clearly have a long-term impact related to those that have been now 19 months into this conflict. Lyle Ornstein As you were saying, you've just returned from

Gaza several days ago, so you've been able to see firsthand what many of our listeners have not. What do you think it's important for them to know and to understand about the situation there, the hunger that is being experienced? I mean, I've been going to Gaza in really different periods. I've been just before the ceasefire, and I remember how the weight that was on the shoulder of the civilian population was lifted with the fact that the ceasefire was coming. I look now at the families that I've met, the despair that was there.

And I think that the most important for us is to remind that the population there have a human face. They are actually are part of our humanity and they deserve actually also to ensure that they have a future. And that's why, you know, even if it looks very dire and bleak now, this is why we need to continue to advocate to give them also a sense of humanity. We have been speaking with Antoine Renard of the World Food Program. Thank you so much. Thanks to you. program. Thank you so much. Thanks to you.

You heard reporting in this episode from NPR's Daniel Estrin and Aya Batraoui. This episode was produced by Eric Horian and Connor Donovan. It was edited by Christopher and Taliana and James Heider. Our executive producer is Sammy Yennegan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Wanda Summers.