Journalist Shares What He Saw in Gaza: “People Are Starving Right Now”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Major news organizations, including ours, are calling on Israel to allow international journalists in and out of Gaza. Right now, the world depends on local journalists and humanitarians to get any information out. Israel so far has not budged, but an American journalist, Afeef Nessouli, managed to get in volunteering as a medical worker. And he spent his off hours reporting. He wrote about the suffering he saw in The Intercept. And here he is talking about that with Hari Sreenivasan.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Afeef Nessouli, thanks so much for joining us. One of the reasons that we have you on is it’s very rare, at this point almost impossible, to get any first line reporting out of Gaza. And you went there for seven weeks and you went as an aid worker, but you were kind of reporting on the side. 

In the last couple of weeks, well, logistics and aid delivery has come into the spotlight a bit more with the crisis of just starvation, access to food, however you wanna put it, for the people of Gaza right now. So tell me, what were you able to see? Because what we are hearing is that there are – the majority of Palestinians do not have enough food to eat and are in significant health risk of death.

AFEEF NESSOULI: Yeah. I saw this sort of escalate as I was there. It – the blockade started March 2nd. I was there by March 27th. By the time I was there, people were rationing and thinking about how to make sure they would have food if it got worse. And it was just getting worse. It was just the beginning at that time.
So I experienced it as seeing 170 community kitchens dwindle and dwindle and dwindle until there were just dozens of them. And then I experienced volunteering at one that eventually had to close down and just had potatoes, on June 1st, I remember, from some other organization.
So you, you see this population getting emaciated. I had a friend who lost over a hundred pounds in the last two years. I have a friend at six foot who’s 119 pounds. People were just losing weight and we were all just eating as little as we possibly could so that we could eat again tomorrow. Even I lost 10 to 12 pounds and got sick once because I was like subsisting on just a few calories and, and I was also sick from something else and I just couldn’t sort of get through it. 

But it, look, it looks like a million things happening at once. It looks like doctors also operating on people that are skin and bones, because it’s different for everybody. Everybody has a sort of a different privilege, but then when there’s a blockade for months, you’re all just, you’re, you, no one’s privileged. It’s, it’s, there’s this equal suffering happening. I remember people asking for tahini or flour and just having, you know, being able to speak Arabic and telling them back that we don’t, we don’t have flour either. Like, just because I have this GLIA vest on, doesn’t – we just don’t have flour either. And, and I, I was thankful that we could speak Arabic and that I was with Gazaoui colleagues ’cause it was so hard to see people struggling in the streets and, and begging on the level and with the frequency and the amount of people.
Everybody was hungry, everybody.

SREENIVASAN: So gimme some idea of what somebody in Gaza subsists on for calories on an average day.

NESSOULI: I would say it’s changed over time. It, it was always rice. We ate a lot of rice, a lot of lentils, chickpeas. You know, there is produce that’s fresh, there was for a while. It tripled in price because a lot of farmland is not, you’re not, it – there’s nothing you can cultivate on it. It’s destroyed. Like 83%.

SREENIVASAN: Because of the bombing, the farmland –

NESSOULI: Because of Israeli bombing

SREENIVASAN: – is no longer farmable.

NESSOULI: Yes, exactly. Because of bombing.
Fishing fleets destroyed. So what you have are like tomatoes and eggplants on the market, but they’re so expensive and they’re also, there’s not many of them. So we were eating food that we brought. I brought a whole suitcase of canned tuna that I would mostly pass out and subsist on. And, you know, there were biscuits that I think that the UN passed out for – there were still stuff on the market when I was there. I have not been there since June. It has gotten considerably worse. So now people are subsisting on the same thing I was subsisting on but for three, for – instead of eating once a day, I’ve heard a lot of people are eating once every couple of days at this point. So it’s just, it’s catastrophic. It’s become catastrophic.

SREENIVASAN: And then let’s talk a little bit about what used to be part of the infrastructure and how people got food, which was the UN and USAID. What have happened to those sources?

NESSOULI: So those seem to have been done away with over time. I mean, basically Israel coordinate – is, is sort of in charge of whatever goes in, whatever comes out. Every coordination you do is through Israel. They replaced the UN max system with the GHF, which is American Run and also Israeli controlled. So what happened was 400 locations across Gaza became four. Four that are barely operational semi-daily. Has a Facebook site to tell people when they’re operating, if they’re operating. They might not be because of op– security or maintenance. I’ve had people go and, and, and it just not be open. Also it’s just very disorganized. 

The UN system was, you know, the type of system that delivered food to people, made hot meals. Like it was really backed by local, local experts who really understood what their communities needed. And it was run by Gazawis in many ways, doing the like, sort of heavy lifting. And now you just have these – you know, you’re, you’re replacing expertise, a lot of care, a lot of like real social work, a lot of community care with men in weapons, men just like sort of holding machine guns from a distance and just sort of letting aid sit there and watching people fight over it because they’re desperate and hungry. It’s definitely, it’s definitely, to me, an obvious, an obvious strategy to further eradicate a people that are on a land that other people want.

SREENIVASAN: So tell me, you probably talked to people who had made that trek to one of these four sites, right? So if you force all these people away from 400 sites to four sites, I imagine the natural tendency is there’s gonna be a huge spike in demand and you see these huge crowds of people waiting. What is that process like? How do people describe that to you?

NESSOULI: So I have one source who’s in his mid twenties named Khalil. And Khalil told me about – I think it was mid-June that he was visiting a GHF site near the Netzarim corridor. He had gone really early in the morning. It was still dark out. And he was saying that by the time he got there, there were – he, he went with his two brothers and his friends. So it was as usual young men who are kind of given the responsibility to, like, sort of brave the trek. They have to walk a few kilometers wherever they are. They have to walk a few collaborators for sure. And there’s no fuel, nor can you drive because the Israelis won’t allow that. It’s very dangerous. You might be targeted. So you have to walk. And you have to walk while you haven’t eaten in a while, at least even if you’ve had something in your mouth. I mean, it’s not been a lot. It’s been not been on for the last couple of days. 

So imagine Khalil, who has already lost nearly 50 pounds from what I understand since a year and a half ago, is with his brothers and his friend. And it’s early morning. There’s thousands of people already there. They’re, from what he told me, barefoot and sort of just, it’s intense. It’s intense because people seem really nervous. They’re, again, not even again, I don’t think I’ve said this, but Gaza is loud. The quadcopters are incessant and sometimes they’re near and sometimes they’re far, but they’re always, always abuzzing. They’re always buzzing and there’s bombs always present. They’re ever present and they’re sometimes near and they’re sometimes far.
So there’s a lot of noise while you’re doing this trek and you’re getting to these people who are intensely hungry and hoping to find a morsel of food and are willing to do a lot to get it.

And I remember he told me that he was waiting in line and there was just thousands of people.
And then shots rang out and he just started running. Like, and that was his experience. Basically getting in line, looking, seeing soldiers in the distance, seeing sort of other non-Israeli soldiers maybe nearer to the, to the aid. And then like sort of waiting for it to start happening. And then before it even sort of took – like even the aid distribution happened, gunshots rang out and he just started running for his life. And he said, that day I got closer to death than a piece of bread.
And I thought that that was a really, really sad, sad way to have an experience with trying to get aid. Like, this is an incredibly hard, this is an incredibly impossible situation for someone to experience to not only then try to get aid and then be shot at is, it’s undignified. It has nothing to do with peace or humanitarian, sort of the humanitarian qualities of aid distribution and what they should be founded on actually. So it was just hard to hear and it’s, it’s hard to keep talking to these people who are having just harrowing experiences on their way to trying to get food for their families.

SREENIVASAN: You know, Israeli leaders for a long time – and in also parts of the American press – have used this line of reasoning, that Hamas has been in charge of the food that’s coming into Gaza, and they have been either stealing it or they’ve been destroying it, or they’ve been bargaining with it. And I wonder, I mean, there’s a recent New York Times article that says that members of the Israeli military are now saying that they never found proof that Hamas stole the aid provided by the UN. In your time there with the people that you spoke with, what is the role of Hamas when it comes to gathering or distributing any of the food aid that is coming into the region?

NESSOULI: I didn’t have any reason to suspect or believe that anyone was experiencing anything or much of anything with Hamas. Now, are there men in this scenario that might have worked in government or have an association with Hamas in some loose way who are also men who are unstable at this point after 21 months of a genocide and several months of starvation? Are some of those men probably bullying other people and maybe doing that? I’m sure they are. In fact, I’ve heard stories of that. But they’re never connected specifically to Hamas. And I, so my point is, is that I think that this is all a line. I think it’s a, it’s a way to skirt responsibility, to justify ethnic cleansing, to justify forced starvation. They keep blaming Hamas when it’s really clear that it’s almost, it’s almost like it’s, it’s undignified for me. It is hard for me to dignify that, that sort of line of thinking with a response ’cause It just feels like it’s completely made up to me. Now I don’t wanna overstate and say that there’s no one stealing aid or that there aren’t problems. But I think that the disorganized thing with – the disorganized way that GHF is, is handling everything, is really the problem. It’s not Hamas.

SREENIVASAN: You are describing, structurally, a scenario where hundreds of people around you that you can see are visibly losing weight because they do not have enough calories in their body. Right? And at the same time, there seems to be this sort of war of words. Is this starvation? Is this famine? And you, we kind of get caught up in that debate. And I wonder… I mean, look, we have you know, David Mencer an Israeli spokesperson, he said, “In Gaza, there is no famine caused by Israel. There is, however, a man-made shortage engineered by Hamas.” Right? That was our last question. Then you have Prime Minister Netanyahu saying, “There is no policy of starvation in Gaza, and there is no starvation in Gaza. We enable humanitarian aid throughout the duration of the war to enter Gaza — otherwise there would be no Gazans.” So what’s your response to that?

NESSOULI: My response is that we often, in the West, or even not in the West, get caught up in semantics with each other as if it’s important or meaningful at all. If we’re even getting to the point where we’re speaking about genocide or anyone starving, it’s probably really very – it, it’s just like so, so much later than it should be in this situation, right? Like if we’re talking about genocide or whether something is starvation or if there’s a policy of starvation, like, right, you can mince, you can sort of like take these words and unpack them.
Ultimately, people are starving right now. I’ve seen them. I even was hungry for the nine weeks that I was there. And it’s because of a manufactured blockade. There’s an occupation.
There’s also people, community kitchens being just – there’s so much destruction. There’s, there’s a way where you just have to stop listening to semantics that try to parse out whether something is bad enough and understand that it’s so much worse to talk about this for 21 months than to have done something a year and a half ago before this became a human catastrophe that, I don’t know, probably has changed the trajectory of some of, so many people’s worlds and, and probably the world itself as well.

SREENIVASAN:  This past weekend Israel announced that it would pause fighting for 10 hours a day in populated areas to try to allow the food aid to get in. former Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy said, quote “…here are hundreds and hundreds of pallets of aid that the U.N. is letting rot in the sun. And instead of taking responsibility for that failure…they’re blaming Israel, and pretending that Israel isn’t letting this aid in altogether.” What did you see? Who’s controlling the flow of aid into this area?

I mean, there are, there were hundreds of trucks at the Kerem Shalom (?) border. There’s no way for aid to come in or out without coordination from Israel. So again, like engaging with these sort of boldfaced almost delusions of how this is working is hard for me because my experience was that for me to get to Nasser hospital, which is 20 minutes away from Deir al-Balah, I’d have to coordinate with the, with the Israelis when there was, because it was in a red zone. So any of these red zones, you have to go through – they’re in charge of what is going on. It took me five hours to get to Nasser and back and it’s 20 minutes away. They are occupying every possible way for any of this to be solved. So for them to sort of blame other parties makes no sense. And I, I don’t know how else to put it because logistically speaking, you, every single thing is greenlit by them. So whether there is fuel that you can take a car to Rafa and pick up whatever you need to pick up or from whatever crossing, you would have to do that through the Israelis. If it’s not getting done, it’s because the Israelis aren’t letting it get done, letting it get done.

SREENIVASAN: Did the Israeli officials that you reached out to have a comment for the story?

NESSOULI: No they didn’t. They didn’t. They didn’t. They refused to answer and then they didn’t answer our texts. So – but I think that they’ve commented a lot. I think that, you know, we’ve talked a lot about what they’ve said and to me it’s, we’ve gotta start listening to Palestinians a lot more because they’re telling us a lot sooner than we’re listening and then we’re listening when it’s almost too late. 

SREENIVASAN: You, you, you have the privilege of leaving.

NESSOULI: Yes. 

SREENIVASAN: And I wonder, Afeef, if now even in the weeks and months that you’ve been home since, is there a story or a person that kind of gnaws away at you that you check in on often? Tell us about that person or that story.

NESSOULI: Yeah, I have so, so many people now, I think. I have so many people there that are suffering in a way that is unimaginable. And now I can sort of imagine it.
But what I wanna leave you with, if I think what is important to say is that every person I met in Gaza was extremely faithful and they were also extremely capable of being appreciative even in the hardest sort of scenario. And it’s what made them capable of taking care of each other even when there was no supplies to do so. And so in the wake of my experience there, I’m trying to memorize how they lived because we’ve, we’ve learned a lot about how they die, and I think what’s more important actually is how they’ve been living and what’s been being stolen from them, actually. So there’s a lot of stories that race through my mind all the time. And I’m texting people all day, every day. So it’s been, and it was an incredible experience because I think we’re struck with how sad it all is. And it is very sad, obviously harrowing, but it’s also something I think that needs more spotlight is the fact that these people are vibrant and alive. And that is what is so sad is that that’s being stolen as we speak.

SREENIVASAN: Afeef Nessouli, thanks so much for joining us and for your reporting from the region.

NESSOULI: I appreciate you so much for having me on the show. Thank you.