Children and parents now eat once a day. In Jordan, warehouses are overflowing with food that isn't delivered to Gaza residents because Israel prevents it.

FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT

JERUSALEM - The Palestinians have run out of supplies, used up their money to buy what's still available on the black market. First they reduced the portions on their plates, then they gave up one, two meals, and finally they were reduced to eating once a day. Rice or lentils. Nothing more. The Palestinians have lost weight. Their skin color has changed, it has become ashen. Now is the time for what UN Secretary General António Guterres calls the horror show, the spectacle of horror. For a week, many parents have been giving up what little they have to give to their children. But nothing satisfies. As in Ethiopia in times of drought, in Burkina Faso in famine, in Gaza come photos of children with large heads on withered shoulders, eyes lost in crater-like sockets and all their ribs exposed. Starving.

It is unacceptable to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza in dribs and drabs, 28 Western countries have written. Here are the drops: 18 trucks a day when at least 500 are needed to feed the two million Palestinians imprisoned in the Strip. The horror the UN Secretary General speaks of is that in Jordan there are warehouses overflowing with food that is not being delivered to the residents of the Strip because Israel is preventing it.

Cardinal Pizzaballa, a man who could have become Pope, spent two days in Gaza after the bombing of the only remaining Christian parish. Upon returning to Jerusalem, he said his heart was in turmoil over what he witnessed. Hunger is visible, he said at a press conference. It's in the way people walk, tired, hunched over. You see hunger because they forget things, they have to sit while they talk to you, they doze off every moment without strength. You see it in the way children ask for food, resigned, without really believing they'll get anything.

Yesterday Gaza hospitals took stock: 15 people had died from lack of food in the previous 24 hours. An unprecedented surge. The total number of deaths has reached 101. Among the new victims, 11 adults and only 4 children. This means that the man-made famine (according to an explicit definition by Doctors Without Borders) is also decimating other age groups.

As of Monday, the total had remained at 86, but only six were adults. The horror is that people are being killed in search of food. More than a thousand since the end of May, says Philippe Lazzarini, director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). People have died while queuing at the distribution centers of the infamous GHF, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Killed by Israeli gunfire or bombs, but also by the crush or sunstroke while waiting for food parcels. It's not strange. It's not an accident.

Previously, Lazzarini, with UNRWA, managed over 400 distribution centers. Now, the GHF is opening four intermittently. The Palestinians are hungry and jostle to get a package. Then, because it contains flour, lentils, seed oil, biscuits, and canned tuna, it's too heavy, the box gives way, and they have to stop to collect it.

The line breaks, people push behind, someone grabs a box, and there's an argument. The Israeli soldiers or American mercenaries on guard feel threatened and shoot. The space in which Palestinians are allowed to live is barely a fifth of what it was before, but the Foundation's centers are still few in number. Palestinians travel miles to get there, and if they manage to, they get something to return. Along the way, other hungry people ask for a share of the package. There is no longer any law in Gaza. In this sense, Israel has won, it has eliminated the order imposed by Hamas, but the result is this horror. Only the strongest manage to get packages, explains Mara Bernasconi, just back from Gaza. Women and the elderly are effectively excluded from the GHF's distribution.

Bernasconi works for the French NGO that won the Nobel Prize for its work against landmines, Humanity & Inclusion-Handicap International: We have always worked extensively with disabled people. 80 percent no longer have crutches or wheelchairs, so how can they fight in the lines for parcels? They're simply dying out. Iba is a Palestinian prosthetics technician who has worked extensively with the French NGO. Married, 34, she speaks in a weak voice on the phone: We still have some lentils, but we give them to the girls. They're two and six years old, what do we do? Let them die? Every time I leave the house, I don't know if I'll still find them alive. They could be killed by a bombing, or I could be the one to collapse from hunger. For now, my husband and I are getting by with a teaspoon of salt and a teaspoon of sugar. We've been going on like this for days. Now I'm afraid I'll faint if I walk more than ten meters. Diego Regosa is currently in Deir al Balah, the humanitarian area that came under Israeli attack on Monday. He works for the NGO Cesvi. He has no doubts. The population is completely exhausted; we can't even find water because Israel is blocking the fuel supply and the desalination plants are shutting down."I've known Sharaq for years," Bernasconi explains,"at least 90 kilos, he's our"area manager." Now he weighs less than 60 and his hair has suddenly gone white. I saw him on Zoom. I didn't recognize him. Horror show.