KHAN YOUNIS: Famine approaches slowly for Gazans, who spend hours in queues for a few ladles of cooked food and the chance to fill plastic containers with drinkable water after nearly nine months of Israel’s military campaign in the enclave.

Sometimes, there is nothing to queue for in the shattered streets and crowded schools that have been turned into shelters for the vast majority of Palestinians displaced by bombardment.

In a UN-run school in Khan Younis that has been turned into a shelter for displaced people, Umm Feisal Abu Nqera sat on the floor between mattresses, preparing a small meal for herself and her six children.

She cut tomatoes into a bowl, stirred a small pan of beans, and crushed ingredients in a mortar and pestle. Her young daughters lay nearby, playing listlessly. 

Her husband fed a baby liquefied lentils from a bottle.

“If the charity kitchen did not come here for one day, we would wonder what we would eat that day,” she said. 

The beans came from the kitchen. Food prices in Gaza are very high, and her family has had no income since the war began.

“We are living the worst days of our lives in terms of famine and deprivation,” she said. “Today, your son looks at you, and you bleed from within because you cannot provide him with his most basic rights and the simplest needs for his life,” she said.