Six weeks since Israel imposed total Gaza blockade, last food is running out

By Nidal al-Mughrabi, Olivia Le Poidevin and Hatem Khaled

CAIRO/GENEVA/GAZA (Reuters) - The bombs still haven't killed Rehab Akhras and her family. But if the checkpoints that Israel has sealed off since the start of March are not opened soon, she says hunger surely will.

Six weeks since Israel completely cut off all supplies to the 2.3 million residents of the Gaza Strip, food stockpiled during a ceasefire at the start of the year has all but run out. Emergency meal distributions are ending, bakeries are closed, markets are empty.

On a spot of packed ground in a camp of plastic sheets where she lives with her displaced family in Khan Younis, Akhras, 64, used cardboard to light a fire and boil a can of beans. It is all they have left.

"We’re a family of 13 people, what will one can of fava beans do for us?" she said.

"We have survived the war and we survived the aistrikes as we wake up and go to sleep. But we can’t survive the hunger, neither us nor our children."

To the north in Nuseirat, hundreds of Palestinians queued up for hot cooked rice at an outdoor emergency kitchen. Small children jammed the front of the queue, waving buckets to bring something home for their families.

Aid agencies that have been supplying those emergency meals say they will have to stop within days unless they can bring in more food.

The World Food Programme used to provide bread at 25 bakeries across the Gaza Strip. All of those bakeries are now shut. It will soon have to halt distribution of food parcels at reduced rations.

'VERY, VERY DEEP HUNGER'

"All basic supplies are running out," said Juliette Touma from UNRWA, the U.N. agency for Palestinian aid. "The prices of commodities have exponentially increased over the past one month plus since the Israeli authorities put the siege on the Gaza Strip.

"It means babies, children are going to bed hungry. Every day without these basic supplies, Gaza inches closer towards very, very deep hunger.”

Every Gazan can now quote the fantastical prices for the little food remaining in markets: a 25 kilo sack of flour that used to sell for $6 now costs ten times as much. A litre of cooking oil, if you can find it, costs $10 instead of $1.50. The lucky few might stumble on a tin of sardines if they can afford $5.

"Food distributions have almost stopped altogether, with remaining stocks now diverted to keep hot meal distributions going for a few more days, but that will soon finish too," said Gavin Kelleher, an access manager for the Norwegian Refugee Council in Deir al-Balah.

Medical charity Medicins sans Frontiers says it is encountering children and pregnant women with severe malnutrition. Lactating mothers are themselves too hungry to be able to breast feed.

Israel denies that Gaza is facing a hunger crisis. The military accuses the Hamas militants who have run Gaza of exploiting aid, and says it must keep all supplies out to prevent the fighters from getting it.

"The IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) is acting in accordance with the directives of the political echelon. Israel is not transferring and will not transfer aid to the hands of terrorist organizations," the military said.

The ministry of foreign affairs said 25,000 aid trucks had entered Gaza in the 42 days of the ceasefire - before it shut the border at the start of March - and that Hamas had used the aid to rebuild its war machine.

Hamas denies exploiting aid and accuses Israel of using starvation as a military tactic.

In Nuseirat, Neama Farjalla goes out every day at 6:00 a.m., trekking with her children across the war zone from soup kitchen to soup kitchen in the hope of a bowl of rice.

"If we don't die of airstrikes, we will die of hunger," she said.

"When my young son tells me, 'Mama I want a glass of milk', my heart breaks.”

(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin in Geneva, Nidal al-Mughrabi in Cairo and Hatem Khaled and Ramadan Abed in Gaza; Editing by Peter Graff)