In famished Gaza, the daily battle for survival is now shared by the very people who rush to save lives.
The same rescuers who pull survivors from the rubble are fighting their own slow death from starvation, unable to find food or rest, operating on empty stomachs and pure willpower. Their patients, injured and weak, lie in makeshift hospital beds, denied even the basic nutrition their bodies need to heal.
“There is nothing in the markets. Not for civilians. Not for hospital workers. Not for ambulance officers or civil defence teams,” said Fares Afaneh, who oversees emergency and ambulance services in northern Gaza.
“Famine is hitting Gaza now with its most severe intensity,” he told The National, delivering his words with a steady urgency forged under fire and by desperation.
As Gaza’s health system collapses under relentless Israeli bombardment, famine has emerged as a silent killer, and its cruelty is indiscriminate.
“It’s become normal now,” Mr Afaneh said. “If no one brings us food, our medics survive their entire shifts on water. And when there is food, it’s rice, if we’re lucky.”
Across Gaza, the connection between saviour and saved is brutally visible. It is a shared suffering, a mirror image of exhaustion, of skeletal arms and hollowed eyes, of men and women whose bodies are shutting down while duty compels them forward.
More than 100 humanitarian organisations warned this week that their own colleagues in Gaza, as well as those they seek to serve, are “wasting away” from mass hunger. News agencies AP, Reuters and AFP, as well as the BBC, said their reporters were “increasingly unable to feed themselves and their families”.
In March, Israeli troops killed 15 Palestinian emergency workers near their ambulance, in a shooting that drew international condemnation. Israel said a commander mistook them for Hamas militants due to “poor night visibility”.
Carers struggling
Twenty days ago, 11-year-old Yousef Abu Shanab was playing beside his home in Gaza city when a quadcopter drone dropped a bomb near him. The explosion left shrapnel lodged in his spinal cord, paralysing the lower half of his body.
Now, he lies still, not only paralysed but starving.
His 20-year-old brother Wasim tries to care for him. “He needs protein, calcium,” Wasim said. “Anything to help his body fight, but there is nothing.”
Yousef’s fate is heartbreakingly common. Doctors know what he needs: surgical follow-up, rehabilitation and above all, nutrition, but Gaza offers none of these. The system designed to save him is itself on life support.
Meanwhile, ambulance crews such as Mr Afaneh’s risk their lives daily to reach patients like Yousef. But even these front line stalwarts are falling.
“Three of my team members have already been hospitalised because of starvation,” Mr Afaneh said. “They were too weak to continue. We had to give them IV fluids. How can we help others if we can’t even stand?”
In Al Shati Camp, 33-year-old Moamen Balha and his wife were struck by a shell while sheltering inside a tent. His injuries were serious, but survivable. What he didn’t expect was how hard it would be to recover with nothing to eat.
“I need food to heal – protein, calcium, something to give me strength to walk again,” Mr Balha told The National. “But there is nothing. This is a slow death.”
The men who once would have rushed to help him – medics and emergency responders – are now in the same condition. Many are working 18-hour shifts or worse without food, without sleep, with no fuel for their ambulances and no certainty they’ll make it home alive. Gaza’s rescue workers are running on pure grit, and some have nothing left to give.
“It’s not that they don’t want to work,” Mr Afaneh said. “It’s that they physically cannot continue.”
He supervises 20 officers. He says it plainly: “I am powerless to provide what they need, even bread. We’re under siege, forgotten. This is not just neglect. It’s a crime.”
In another part of Gaza, Osama Abdullah, 30, watches his daughter fade. She suffered a spinal fracture from an air strike and needs surgery, but the medical system cannot help her. She also needs something simpler: food.
“She cries from the pain of her injury, and from hunger,” Mr Abdullah said. “I can’t even find her bread. Her healing is impossible like this.”
He dreams of getting her out of Gaza, but for now, he shares the same fate as the paramedics and the wounded across the strip: helplessness.
There are no safe zones in Gaza, where hunger has not just blurred the line between rescuer and rescued, but erased it. Paramedics are collapsing before they can reach the injured.
The injured are dying slowly because there is no food to power their recovery. Parents, doctors, children and civil defence workers are trapped in a cycle of suffering that deepens each day.
Mr Afaneh issued a final plea, not just as a commander but as a human being: “We hold the international community responsible. Our medics, our injured, our people, they need support, they need food, they need medicine. And they need it now.”
