Preparing a meal using wood and fire. Serena / AFSC
Since March 2, Israel has prevented all aid from entering Gaza. This is the longest period that humanitarian aid has been blocked from reaching its population of more than 2 million Palestinians since October 2023. Israel has also resumed its bombardments and ground offensive across Gaza.
With no aid being allowed in, supplies of food, water, medicine, and other essentials are dwindling. People are on the brink of starvation.
AFSC’s staff in Gaza are among the many whose lives are at risk. Serena is part of our team in Gaza that has worked tirelessly over the past year and a half to provide vital aid to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in this crisis. In this article, she describes the dire situation that she and the entire population of Gaza now face.
Maybe these are some of the most heartbreaking words I’ve ever written. I thought nothing could hurt more than losing my home or being displaced. But the feeling of weakness, of slowly losing my strength, day by day, might be even worse.
I have no energy left.
Who would have believed that someone young, once considered fit and active, can no longer walk a few steps without feeling faint and dizzy?
My body has become too weak to carry me. I haven’t eaten fresh, healthy food in over a year and a half. For the past 41 days, I’ve had nothing but the same canned meal—breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now we're trying to survive on just one meal a day, so the food lasts longer. That is how we ration hunger in Gaza as long as no crossings open. No aid is allowed in. No clean water is available. Nothing.
Supplies of food, drinking water, and other essentials are dwindling since Israel began blocking all humanitarian aid from Gaza on March 2, 2025. Serena/AFSC
I live on a sixth floor. I now avoid leaving home because my legs won’t carry me back up the stairs. And it's not just me. My parents are the same. My father can no longer leave the house, his body, too, has given up.
My muscles are vanishing. My face is pale. Every movement feels like a battle. My body is collapsing quietly from the inside. And there’s no strength left to fight back.
My body is in constant, indescribable pain. Even that pain is starting to fade, not because it's gone, but because my body is too weak to feel it anymore.
Walking through Gaza now feels like hiking through a wasteland. You're already dizzy from hunger and exhaustion, and every scene around you makes it worse. You step over rubble, between collapsed homes, on broken streets.
I recently walked near Al-Shifa Hospital through a neighborhood where every house was either burned, flattened, or barely standing. The destruction was so overwhelming, beyond what the eyes can process and the mind can bear, that the world began to spin. I nearly collapsed.
I used to run on the beach street every morning. I used to swim. I used to feel the sun and wind and sea. But all of that has been stolen from us.
Now, any effort leaves me breathless.
This famine is not just a crisis, it's a deliberate act of cruelty. It is heart-wrenching to wake up each day knowing there is no food, no help, and no hope on the horizon. The despair is suffocating. We are not dying quietly; we are being starved in plain sight, and the world is watching with indifference. How can humanity sleep at night knowing that entire families are wasting away behind closed wire fences and walls, their cries unheard, their lives dismissed?
It’s only a matter of days before food disappears completely, and starvation becomes the only thing served at our table.
How many bones must shatter, how many voices choke, how many bodies must break before the world decides we are worth saving?
