food aid deliveries gaza
© Anadolu AgencyFood aid being trucked into Gaza
As another famine threatens, Israeli troops killed two Palestinian families on Sunday, including a pregnant mother carrying twins

Israel is strangling Gaza, allowing only a fraction of the needed humanitarian aid and commercial supplies to enter the strip amid the ongoing war against Iran, Palestinian officials warned on 16 March.

The Israeli military has allowed just 640 aid trucks out of the 6,000 expected under existing arrangements, according to Ismail al-Thawabta, director general of the Government Media Office in Gaza.

This amounts to just 10 percent of what Israel had previously committed to allow entry, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in the strip created by Israel throughout its two-year genocide of Palestinians and raising the specter of another famine.

In August 2025, the UN declared a famine in Gaza due to the Israeli blockade of the strip.

"Israel is taking advantage of the world's preoccupation with the war on Iran and increasing restrictions on Gaza," said Abu Mohsen, a 33-year-old Palestinian living in a tent in north Gaza.

"We want to live like human beings."

The restrictions have created severe shortages, particularly of fuel, affecting hospitals, water and sanitation systems, municipal waste collection, and other essential services that rely on fuel-powered equipment and generators.

Shortages of vegetables, food products, and frozen items have also resulted, causing huge price increases and worsening already widespread poverty.

The media office warned that the continued restrictions threaten food security for more than 1.5 million people in Gaza, as the humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate under the prolonged blockade.

In the days after Israel launched its war on Iran on 28 February, prices in Gaza doubled or tripled for many items.

"What we saw is that immediately there was an increase in prices," Jonathan Crickx, spokesman for the UN children's agency UNICEF, told AFP.

"Most basic necessity items, like food, soap, those sort of things, saw their prices increase by 200 or 300 percent," he said, adding that "this really shows Gaza's extreme vulnerability and extreme dependency on outside aid."

Israel has also continued bombing Gaza despite the so-called ceasefire. On Sunday, Israeli bombing killed at least 12 Palestinians, including two boys, a pregnant woman, and eight police officers, health officials stated.

One Israeli strike in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza killed four people, including a 10-year-old boy, his father, and his mother, who was pregnant with twins.

"We were sleeping and got up to the strike of a missile. The strike was strong," said Mahmoud al-Muhtaseb, a neighbor. "There was no prior warning."

Also on Sunday, Israeli soldiers executed four members of a family in the northern occupied West Bank, including two children, as they were traveling by car.

The Palestinian Red Crescent (PRC) rescue service said that Ali and Waed Odeh, and two of their four children, were shot in the head. The couple's two other children survived but sustained shrapnel wounds to the eye and head. Israeli troops also delayed ambulances seeking to respond to the killings.

The family had gone to a mall in Nablus to buy clothes for Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.