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Rabat – As the aid blockade on Gaza nears its second month mark, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) warns that the situation in the Gaza Strip has reached its most dire state since the onset of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
“This is probably the worst humanitarian situation we’ve seen throughout the conflict in Gaza,” said Jens Laerke, OCHA spokesperson, during a UN briefing in Geneva in response to a question from Anadolu.
Laerke stressed a “clear tendency towards total disaster,” noting that no humanitarian aid has entered Gaza in over 50 days, and commercial goods have been blocked for even longer.
With severe food shortages, some families have turned to eating sea turtles in a desperate attempt to find protein. A widely shared AFP report depicts one such case: a woman in Gaza, deprived of alternatives, preparing turtle-based meals as a new form of survival under Israel’s genocidal campaign.
In the video, 61-year-old Majida Qanan is seen cleaning the meat with flour and vinegar before boiling it in a worn metal pot and cooking it with onion, pepper, tomato, and a handful of spices — an $22 luxury if found in the shattered markets that remain amid the ruins left by Israel’s assault.
“The children were scared of the turtle meat, so we told them it tasted like veal,” said Majida, now living in a tent in Khan Yunis, Southern Gaza, after being displaced by Israel in the aftermath of October 2023.
In June of 2024, the Regional Director for the Eastern Mediterranean at the World Health Organization, Hanan Balkhy, reported that some citizens in Gaza were reduced to drinking sewage water and eating animal feed.
Following a short-lived ceasefire that began on January 19, Israel reinstated a full blockade on Gaza on March 2, just as Ramadan began, only to completely collapse the truce by March 18, escalating attacks on Gaza’s 2.1 million starving residents.
