• Closure threatens food supply for 2.3m Palestinians
• Red Cross says aid blockade to Gaza ‘unacceptable’
• Military strikes across the enclave kill 105 people

CAIRO: Dozens of community kitchens in Gaza shut their doors on Thursday due to a lack of supplies, closing off a lifeline used by hundreds of thousands of people in a further blow to efforts to combat growing hunger in the enclave.

The move followed hours after the US-based World Central Kitchen (WCK) charity announced that it had run out of the ingredients necessary to provide much-needed free meals and had been prevented by Israel from bringing in aid.

Amjad al-Shawa, director of the Palestinian Non-Governmental Organisations Network (PNGO) in Gaza, told Reuters that most of the enclave’s 170 community kitchens had shut down after running out of stock due to Israel’s continued blockade on Gaza.

Shawa said the decision by the WCK, announced late on Wednesday, and the closure of community kitchens on Thursday would cause a drop of between 400,000 to 500,000 free meals per day for the 2.3 million population.

“The remaining kitchens will be closing soon. The hunger catastrophe is beyond words. People are losing their lone source of food,” Shawa added.

Those Gazans trying to cook independently meanwhile complain that flour still available on the market is contaminated.

Israel has faced growing international pressure to lift an aid blockade that it imposed in March after the collapse of a US-backed ceasefire that had halted fighting for two months.

Two weeks ago most of the population relied on one and a half meals per day, but in the past few days that has dropped to one meal a day, and even that will lack meat, vegetables or the necessary healthy components, said Shawa.

‘Unacceptable’

The Red Cross denounced the human cost of the war raging in Gaza, slamming Israel’s “unacceptable” full blockade on aid into the besieged and conflict-ravaged Palestinian territory.

Aid agencies have repeatedly warned of a growing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, which they say has been exacerbated by an Israeli blockade on all aid since early March.

“It is unacceptable that humanitarian aid is not allowed into the Gaza Strip,” Pierre Krahenbuhl, director general of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told reporters in Geneva.

“That’s just fundamentally against anything that international humanitarian law provides.” The situation in Gaza is on a “razor’s edge” and “the next few days are absolutely decisive”, he added.

“There’s a moment where we will also run out of anything that’s left in terms of medical supplies and other” aid, he said.

“Right now, the most effective way to get aid to people is to lift…actions or decisions that were taken to prevent aid from reaching” inside Gaza, Krahenbuhl said. “There are huge quantities of aid that are on the borders of Gaza that can go in tomorrow,” he insisted.

On Thursday, the Gaza health ministry said Israeli military strikes across the enclave killed at least 105 people in the past 24 hours, in one of the biggest death tolls in a single day in two months. More than 52,700 people have been killed by Israel since Oct 2023.

Published in Dawn, May 9th, 2025