The population of the Gaza Strip gathered “joylessly” last night for the first breaking of the fast at the start of this year’s Ramadan, which has been overshadowed by the threat of widespread famine and aerial bombardment as the devastating Israel/Hamas war enters its sixth year. month.

In much of the rest of the Muslim world, Ramadan, the faithful’s holy month of fasting and prayer, is a celebration accompanied by lavish family dinners every night. Nevertheless in the Gaza Strip, most people are not in much of a mood to celebrate.

“This Ramadan does not taste like Ramadan. It rather tastes of blood, misery, separation and oppression,” said Umm Mohammed Abu Matar, as she baked bread in a makeshift oven fueled with scraps of cardboard she picked up here and there.

“We don’t feel the joy of Ramadan, we lost it because the occupation displaced us and destroyed our homes. Look at the people living in the tents (…) We are suffering a lot. This Ramadan has nothing to do with those of previous years,” added Mohammad al-Masri, displaced in Rafah, on the closed border with Egypt, where some one and a half million Palestinians, forcibly displaced and now trapped, live in tent cities.

This is more than half the population of the enclave.

Some families were able to gather in front of plates of rice, garnished with small pieces of meat. In contrast, in the north, “more than 2,000 health workers are unable to find anything to eat to break their fast,” Hamas’ health ministry said. The ministry is talking about deaths of children from malnutrition and dehydration in recent days.

“Time is running out” to avert famine in the northern Gaza Strip, where a “humanitarian catastrophe” is unfolding in the absence of sufficient food, World Food Program (WFP) chief Cindy McCain has warned.

The head of the UN, Antonio Guterres, commented that he was left speechless by the fact that the war continues in the middle of this “holy month”.

Intensive negotiations in recent weeks aimed at agreeing a truce between Israel and Hamas, which would allow the release of Israeli hostages held in the enclave, Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, as well as an increase in humanitarian aid distribution, have been fruitless.

Assistance by sea

International humanitarian aid, which is subject to Israel’s control and approval, is only reaching the largely flattened enclave at a trickle, mainly through Egypt, at a time when needs pale in comparison to the pre-war period, the UN says.

In recent weeks, planes from various countries have dropped packages of ready-made meals over the airwaves of the Gaza Strip. At the same time, a ship hired by the Spanish NGO Open Arms is waiting for approval to leave Cyprus with 200 tons of food, as part of a maritime corridor that the EU and countries such as the USA and the United Arab Emirates intend to create.

“The planning is progressing normally” and the ship’s departure from the port of Larnaca is “a matter of time”, said the Cyprus government representative yesterday.

Larnaca is approx 370 kilometers from the shores of the Gaza Strip.

At the same time, an American warship left the USA carrying the necessary material for the construction of a quay so that the aid could be unloaded. This plan is estimated to take up to 60 days to implement.

Sending aid by sea and airdrops, which have become commonplace in the past 24 hours, cannot replace land routes, the United Nations stresses.

The war erupted after an unprecedented attack launched on October 7 by Hamas’ military arm in southern Israel, targeting the enclave where the Islamic Resistance Movement seized power in 2007. The attack killed 1,160 people, most of them civilians, according to AFP tally based on official Israeli data.

In retaliation, Israel vowed to “eliminate” Hamas, which it, like the US and the EU, describes as a “terrorist” organization, and the Israeli military’s operations since then have killed at least 31,112 people in the Gaza Strip, the vast the majority of them women and children, according to the Hamas Health Ministry.

“They’re all dead”

Yesterday the Israeli military said it carried out an airstrike overnight Saturday-Sunday targeting the number two in command of Hamas’s military wing, Marwan Issa, in the central part of the Gaza Strip, without being able to say with certainty whether he was killed or not.

The leaders of Hamas “are all dead,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

US President Joe Biden, looking increasingly unhappy with his Israeli ally as he comes under fire from much of the Democratic base for his support for Israel, was unusually harsh over the weekend, saying Mr Netanyahu was doing “more harm than good to Israel.”

“We agree on the basic goals, but we have disagreements on the means to achieve those goals,” Mr. Netanyahu said yesterday on the American television network Fox, adding that the impression that there is a gap between Israel and the United States ” does not help’ the Jewish state in the war on Hamas.

As Mr. Netanyahu reiterates that the Israeli military is on the road to “total victory” over the Palestinian Islamist movement, which he says is a matter of “weeks,” the agency that coordinates US intelligence (ODNI) pointed to its report made public yesterday that Israel will “probably” remain faced “in the coming years” with “armed resistance by Hamas”, while underlining the risks of regional escalation with the involvement of the Lebanese Hezbollah in particular.

Last night there were Israeli aerial bombardments in the Baalbek sector, Hezbollah’s stronghold in eastern Lebanon, about a hundred kilometers from the border. It was the second blow to the area since the almost daily exchanges of fire on the Israel/Lebanon border began the day after the outbreak of the war in the Gaza Strip. According to initial reports, at least one civilian was killed and several others were injured in this shelling.