CNN —

The bright pink jumper with a picture of Cinderella hangs off Jana’s skinny shoulders as she walks through the northern Gaza moonscape, piles of rubble, dirt and dust all around her. Clutching a large tub in her hand, the 12-year-old is on a mission: find food and water.

Jana Mohammed Khalil Musleh Al-Skeifi and her family say she has been responsible for getting supplies for them all since an Israeli sniper killed her older brother more than a year ago. Her parents are in poor health, so it now falls on her to provide for them.

“I don’t want my father to get tired. That’s why I’m strong. I want to be strong, so my father doesn’t suffer,” Jana told CNN while waiting in a queue at a water distribution spot in Gaza City. “My father is elderly and has heart disease. If he tries to carry the bucket, he’ll fall.”

Sparing her father the strenuous work, the slight girl carried two heavy buckets full of water all the way home, the knuckles of her fingers turned white from the heavy load, jeans soaked from the precious water sloshing about.

Finding food and water became difficult after Israel launched its brutal war in Gaza following the October 7 terror attack by Hamas and its allies. But the situation has become catastrophic since Israel imposed a total blockade on all aid more than 11 weeks ago.

A United Nations-backed report published earlier this month said that one in five people in Gaza are facing starvation as the territory, home to 2.1 million people, edges closer to man-made famine.

Israel said the blockade, along with a new military campaign, is intended to pressure Hamas to release hostages held in the enclave. But many international organizations have accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war.

Getting clean water has been difficult for months because Israel restricts access to water treatment and desalination equipment, claiming that these items can be used to manufacture weapons.

Jana’s family live in a half destroyed building in Gaza City. They fled there after their home was destroyed. CNN

Doctors without Borders, the humanitarian organization, said that more than two-thirds of the 1,700 water and sanitation items it sought to deliver to Gaza between January 2024 and early March 2025 were rejected by Israeli authorities.

“You can barely fill one bucket, because there’s no proper queuing system, and if you wait, you might not get anything. Sometimes we have to go without,” Jana said.

“I sit there for hours just waiting to fill one bucket. It’s an awful feeling.”

The family told CNN it has resorted to using salt water to clean and cook in the past.

‘Drop in the ocean’ of need

The Israeli military announced Sunday it would allow a “basic amount of food” to enter Gaza as it launched its new major offensive in the strip. The reason, the military said, was the fact that a “starvation crisis” in Gaza would “jeopardize the operation.”

The following day, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated Israel had taken the step because its Western allies, including the United States, were threatening to withdraw their support for the country if it allowed Gaza to descend into a famine.

But only five trucks were allowed in on Monday, when humanitarian organizations said 500 a day were required just to feed those who need it the most. UN aid chief Tom Fletcher described the delivery as a “drop in the ocean of what is urgently needed.”

The hunger is becoming catastrophic. The Ministry of Health in Gaza said that at least 57 children have died from the effects of malnutrition since the start of the war.

Jana’s baby niece Janat was one of them, her family says.

People wait to see if they can collect water at a camp for displaced people in Gaza City, on May 20, 2025. Bashar Taleb/AFP/Getty Images

‘Everyone was just watching’

While Janat was born small, weighing just 2.6 kilograms (5 lb 12 oz), her mother Aya told CNN the baby girl was growing and putting on weight. She became a healthy baby, reaching a weight of around 4 kilograms (8 lb 13 oz). She learned to smile, she was alert.

But things changed when Janat was six weeks old.

On March 2, Israel imposed its total blockade on Gaza, preventing even the most basic supplies, including baby formula and medicines, from entering the strip.

Aya said that when food became scarce, she began to struggle to breastfeed Janat, who started to lose weight. The baby developed chronic diarrhea, became dehydrated and was soon so poorly that she needed medical attention.

“(At the hospital) they said there was a special medical milk that would help her gain weight and stop the diarrhea — but we couldn’t find it. We searched all over Gaza, hospital by hospital, pharmacy by pharmacy. Even the Ministry of Health told us it wasn’t available,” Aya told CNN.

A CNN video of Janat from mid-April shows the tiny baby wrapped up and held tightly by Aya. Her tiny face is all bones beneath the skin, and she looks more like a newborn than a four-month-old. Her skinny, long fingers are poking out of the blanket, and she looks sleepy. Her big brown eyes are the only part of her exhausted body that seem able to move, her gaze following people as they move around her.

Jana plays with her baby niece Janat on April 12. Janat died of the effects of malnutrition three weeks after this video was filmed. CNN

At the same time, Janat’s mother was struggling too, weakened by the lack of food and clean water. Like many new mothers in Gaza in these conditions, she lost her milk – leaving her unable to feed her baby. The UN-backed hunger report said that almost 11,000 pregnant women in Gaza are already at risk of famine, and nearly 17,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women will need urgent treatment for acute malnutrition over the coming months.

Janat kept deteriorating. Her mother told CNN the baby began to struggle to maintain her body temperature and doctors said her blood sugar level was dangerously low. Her oxygen levels were dropping. The malnutrition caused her kidneys and liver to malfunction and her blood became acidic as a result.

“I pleaded to the whole world to save her. I just wanted someone to save her, to provide the milk she needed. But no one could help. Everyone was just watching,” Janat’s mother said.

Janat’s mother told CNN that doctors at the hospital had recommended Janat for medical evacuation abroad. The family even managed to obtain the necessary paperwork, including a referral and a permit for Janat to leave.

But the baby girl died on May 4, before that was possible. At four months old, she was only 2.8 kilograms (6 lb 3 oz), barely more than her birth weight.

Medical evacuations from Gaza have been extremely rare, even more so since Israel restarted military operations after the collapse of the ceasefire in March.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said last week that some 12,000 patients in Gaza need medical evacuation, and that only 123 people have been evacuated since hostilities restarted in March.

Following the publication of this article, Israel’s Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the government agency which manages the flow of aid into Gaza, told CNN that “nearly 800 patients in need of continued medical treatment outside the Gaza Strip” were evacuated since March, including during the ceasefire which ended on March 18.

Flicking through photos of Janat, the day after the baby’s death, Jana became teary and upset. “They told us she couldn’t be treated unless she traveled abroad. We waited, they kept saying ‘Saturday’ and ‘Sunday,’ we waited until she died,” Jana said.

Israel launched a devastating new ground offensive in Gaza over the weekend Bashar Taleb/AFP/Getty Images

‘I feel like I’ve died’

After 18 months of war, every aspect of Jana’s life is filled with hardship.

She has too little food to eat and water to drink, no school to go to, no safe space to sleep. There is no electricity and the place she calls home is a half-destroyed house in Gaza City. Its walls are charred black from fire.

Jana used to live in a house where water came from a tap and light appeared with the flick of a switch. There was food, there was school, there was a dance performance during which she and her friends got to be the center of attention, wearing matching outfits and dancing as everyone clapped along.

A family video from the event looks like any other taken by proud parents of a child performing in public. It’s a bit shaky, zoomed in on Jana as she hops around.

Jana takes part in a dance performance before the war in Gaza. Courtesy al-Skeifi family

Watching it amid the destruction, surrounded by bombed-out homes and piles of rubble, the footage looks like it came from a different universe.

“I have no one left. I feel like I’ve died,” the 12-year-old told CNN, tears rolling down her cheeks. “Emotionally, I’m dead.”

Jana’s large family has been decimated by the war. She has lost a brother, a brother-in-law, a cousin and a niece, and is terrified of losing her mother who has thyroid cancer that cannot currently be treated in Gaza.

According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 53,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war over the past 18 months, roughly 4% of the strip’s population. This means that out of every 40 people living in Gaza before the war, one is now dead.

But there is little time to grieve for them when survival takes so much effort.

On the last day CNN spent with Jana, she was lucky. A community kitchen received supplies and she was able to get a meal for her and her siblings, nephews and nieces. CNN

Hungry children jockey for food

On May 12, the day before CNN last met with Jana, she managed to find food to buy: 500 grams of pasta for 50 shekels ($15).

Like many families in Gaza, they ground the pasta into flour to make bread, an attempt to make it last longer. Gaza has long since run out of flour.

The next day, when a nearby community kitchen gets supplies, a large crowd of hungry children assembles within minutes.

They watch the workers’ every move, eagerly awaiting the moment when the food is ready.

It is clear there isn’t enough for everyone, so the children jockey for the best spot, stretching their arms to get their pot as close as they can to the front, desperately trying to get the attention of those distributing the meals. Some are screaming and crying.

Jana is lucky. Two scoops of pasta with watery tomato sauce land in her tub. She looks exhausted and hungry, but happy.

As she walks home with the tub of steaming food, she does not touch it. Not until she gets home where her hungry siblings, nieces and nephews await.

Only then, sharing it with them, does Jana allow herself to tuck in.

In a statement on Friday, the BBC said it had commissioned the documentary over a year ago, but paused the film in April, “having made a decision that we could not broadcast the film while a review into a separate Gaza documentary was ongoing”.

“With both films coming from independent production companies, and both about Gaza, it was right to wait for any relevant findings – and put them into action – before broadcasting the film.

“However, we wanted the doctors’ voices to be heard. Our aim was to find a way to air some of the material in our news programmes, in line with our impartiality standards, before the review was published.

“For some weeks, the BBC has been working with Basement Films to find a way to tell the stories of these doctors on our platforms.

“Yesterday [Thursday], it became apparent that we have reached the end of the road with these discussions. We have come to the conclusion that broadcasting this material risked creating a perception of partiality that would not meet the high standards that the public rightly expect of the BBC.”

The corporation added that, contrary to some reports, the documentary had “not undergone the BBC’s final pre-broadcast sign-off processes”, adding: “Any film broadcast will not be a BBC film.”

It continued: “We want to thank the doctors and contributors and we are sorry we could not tell their stories. The BBC will continue to cover events in Gaza impartially.”

I feel like I’ve been gaslit – like the life I had before the war was made up

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“I don’t think God intended for people in their late 20s to live with their parents,” Hanya Aljamal says. She’s hanging out on the balcony of the tiny apartment where she lives with her mother, father and five grown-up siblings – because it’s the only place she can get any peace and quiet. Two years ago, 28-year-old Hanya was working as an English teacher and lived in a flat of her own. She was applying to colleges in the US to do a Master’s in international development, and on course for a scholarship to pay for it. Things were going well – but life is different now. Like most days, Sunday begins with a morning coffee on the balcony, while Hanya watches her neighbour, a man in his 70s, carefully tending pots of herbs, seedlings and plants in his tidy garden, just across the road from a blown-up building. “It just looks like the purest form of resistance,” Hanya says. “In the middle of all this horror and uncertainty, he still finds time to grow something – and there’s something absolutely beautiful about that.” Hanya lives in Deir al-Balah, a town in the middle of Gaza, a 25-mile stretch of land on the south-eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea that’s been a war zone since October 2023. She has recorded an audio diary which she shared with the BBC for a radio documentary about what life is like there. The school where she taught had to close down when the war started. Hanya has become a teacher with no students and no school, her sense of who she was slipping through her fingers. “It’s very hard finding purpose in this time, finding some sort of solace or meaning as your entire world falls apart.”

Hanya says watching her neighbour gardening from her balcony brings her solace

The apartment Hanya shares with her family is her fifth home since the war started. The UN estimates 90% of Gazans have been displaced by the war – many multiple times. Most Gazans now live in temporary shelters. On Monday, Hanya is jolted awake in bed at 2am. “There was an explosion really close by that was then followed by a second, and a third,” she says, “it was so loud and very scary. I tried to soothe myself to sleep.” The Israeli government says its military action in Gaza is intended to destroy the capabilities of Hamas, which describes itself as an Islamist resistance movement. It is designated a terrorist organisation by the UK, the US, Israel, and others. Israel’s military action began after armed Palestinian groups from Gaza led by Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, killing around 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and taking 251 hostages. So far, the Israeli military has killed more than 56,000 people in the conflict – the majority civilians – according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, which is run by Hamas. Israel doesn’t currently allow international journalists to report freely from Gaza.

The view from Hanya’s balcony

Hanya is working for an aid organisation called Action for Humanity and spends the day at one of their projects. A group of girls wearing white T-shirts and with keffiyehs tied around their waists perform a dance and then take part in a group therapy session. One talks about what it means to lose your home, others talk about losing their belongings, their friends, someone they love. And then one suddenly starts crying and everyone else falls silent. A teaching assistant takes the girl away to comfort her in private. “And then someone tells me that she lost both parents,” Hanya says.

For Hanya kites flying in the sky represent children trying to have normal childhoods

On Tuesday, Hanya is watching five colourful kites soaring in the sky from her balcony. “I like kites – they’re like an active act of hope,” she says. “Every kite is a couple of kids down there trying to have a normal childhood in the midst of all this.” Seeing kites flying makes a nice change to the drones, jets and “killing machines” Hanya is used to seeing above her apartment, she says. But later that evening, the “nightly orchestra” of nearby drones buzzing at discordant pitches begins. She describes the sound they make as “psychological torture”. “Sometimes they’re so loud you can’t even listen to your own thoughts,” she says. “They’re kind of a reminder that they’re there watching, waiting, ready to pounce.”

On Thursday morning, Hanya hears loud, consistent gunfire and wonders what it might be. Maybe theft. Maybe a turf war between families. Maybe someone defending a warehouse. She spends most of the day in bed. She feels dizzy every time she tries to get up and puts it down to the effect of fasting ahead of Eid al-Adha, when she’s already very malnourished. Hanya says the lack of control over what she eats – and the rest of her life – is having a big psychological impact. “You cannot control anything – not even your thoughts, not even your wellbeing, not even who you are,” she says. “It took me a while to accept the fact that I am no longer the person that I identify myself as.” The school where Hanya used to teach has been destroyed, and the idea of studying abroad now seems very distant. “I felt like I was gaslit,” Hanya says, “like all of these things were made up. Like none of it was true.”

Action For Humanity/Fadi Badwan Hanya distributes supplies in her role as an aid worker

The next morning, Hanya wakes to the sound of birds chirping and the call to prayer. It’s the first day of Eid al-Adha, when her dad would usually sacrifice a sheep and they’d share the meat with the needy and their relatives. But her family don’t have the means to travel now and there’s no animal to sacrifice anyway. “All of Gaza’s population has been not eating any sort of protein, outside canned fava beans, for three months now,” she says. Hanya’s family discover that one of her cousins has been killed while trying to get aid. “To be honest, I hadn’t known him very well,” she says, “but it’s the general tragedy of someone hungry, seeking food and getting shot in the process that is quite grotesque.”

There have been multiple shooting incidents and hundreds of deaths reported at or near aid distribution points in recent weeks. The circumstances are disputed and difficult to verify without being able to report freely in Gaza. Hanya knows at least 10 people who have lost their lives during the war. This number includes several of her students and a colleague who had got engaged a month before the war started. She was the same age as Hanya and shared her ambition. Hanya is updating her CV to remove her college professor’s name. He was her referee and writing mentor – but he is dead now too. “It’s a huge thing when someone tells you that they see you, that they believe in you, and that they bet on you,” she says. Hanya doesn’t think she’s grieved for any of these people properly, and says she feels she has to ration her emotions in case any of her close family are hurt. “Grieving is a luxury many of us can’t afford.”

Hanya watches the sun rise from her balcony

The war was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, when gunmen killed about 1,200 people and took another 251 hostage.

More than 48,230 people have been killed in Gaza since, according to the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry. About two-thirds of Gaza’s buildings have been destroyed or damaged, estimates the UN.

So far, 16 Israeli and five Thai hostages have been exchanged for more than 600 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel under the ceasefire deal that began on 19 January.

Mr Berger says his daughter, Agam, was threatened by her captors and witnessed physical abuse while in captivity.

“Sometimes they tortured other female hostages in front of her eyes,” he says, referring specifically to an assault on Amit Soussana, a former hostage who was released in November 2023.

Mr Berger says his daughter told him how they were constantly watched over by armed men, “playing all the time with their guns and their hand grenades”.

He says the male captors treated the women with “big disrespect”, including forcing them to clean and prepare food.

“That was really bothering her. She’s a girl that if she has something to say, she’ll say it. She’s not shy. And sometimes she told them what she was thinking about them and their behaviour,” he says.

He adds that in a small act of resistance, Agam had refused to perform any jobs on the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest. The men detaining her accepted this.

They were also not allowed to speak loudly.

“When Agam came [back to Israel] she wanted to speak all the time… After a day, she had no voice because she’d spoken so much,” Mr Berger says.

In a new book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning,” Peter Beinart argues that many American Jews who defend Israel have lost their moral bearings. He makes the case, in a series of linked essays, that Jews in America and around the world should push for a single state comprising Israel and the Palestinian territories which grants everyone equal rights. “This book is about the story Jews tell ourselves to block out the screams,” Beinart writes. “It’s about the story that enables our leaders, our families, and our friends to watch the destruction of the Gaza Strip—­the flattening of universities, the people forced to make bread from hay, the children freezing to death under buildings turned to rubble by a state that speaks in our name—­and shrug, if not applaud.”

I recently spoke by phone with Beinart, whom I met almost twenty years ago when I went to work for The New Republic. He had just stepped down from a tenure editing the magazine, during which it endorsed both the Iraq War and Joe Lieberman’s lethargic 2004 Presidential campaign. After stepping down, Beinart renounced his support for the war and started focussing more on issues having to do with Israel and American Jewry. (His current newsletter is called “The Beinart Notebook.”) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what he misjudged about the U.S.’s unwillingness to change its relationship to Israel, whether a one-state solution is really a more likely alternative than two states living side by side, and how debates over Israel have warped conversations about antisemitism in America.

There was hope about a decade ago among people like yourself that American Jews—especially younger ones—were moving away from ironclad support for Israel. Do you feel surprised or disappointed by the degree to which the United States, and even the Democratic Party, seems to have not moved in that direction after October 7th?

I think I probably underestimated the degree to which, even inside the Democratic Party, politicians could remain unresponsive to shifts in public opinion, because they don’t really face much of a cost. There are other forces that just matter more than public opinion.

Which are?

Well, the role of money in politics is a really, really big one. And I think that was especially true for Joe Biden, because he didn’t have the capacity to raise money from the public at large. He wasn’t a Bernie Sanders or a Barack Obama who could raise large amounts of money from small donations. It’s also a problem for members of Congress. Except for a small handful of celebrity members, they are not national figures who can raise enough money that they can compete with an organization like AIPAC if AIPAC decides to target them.

But I think there is a danger in focussing too exclusively on money. Money plays a role in this, but there’s also a deep way in which the Israeli story is one that’s very resonant to many Americans, because it’s so similar to the American story. It’s a promised land forged on a hostile frontier. And the more invested you are in America’s own founding myth, the more you’re going to find Israel’s founding myth appealing. I think a lot of people in the Republican Party, even if there was no campaign financing at stake, find this narrative very, very powerful. And Israel, in some ways, is a vision of what they would like America to be, which is a country that’s more nationalistic, more militaristic, has stronger border protection, and has clear hierarchies based on ethnicity and religion.

As Edward Said famously said, Palestinians still lack permission to narrate. Their story is in some ways a threatening story to America’s founding myth. When you start using phrases like “settler colonialism,” it doesn’t take much for Americans, especially white Americans, to get uncomfortable. And beyond that, October 7th was a horror. It was a horrifying event. And so there was a natural desire to express sympathy and solidarity with Israeli Jews in this moment of incredible trauma. And then the Israeli government says, “O.K., you want to show you care about Israeli Jews? Then support us in destroying the Gaza Strip.” It was a little bit like a post-9/11 moment, when it was very difficult in the public discourse to distinguish between the act of horror—what had happened, and empathy for the victims—and a policy response, which was just disastrous.

Why was the Biden Administration so unwilling to really do anything to sanction Israel or to try to stop its behavior?

If you come up in Washington politics and policy circles, you become accustomed to a template for how you deal with Israel. And that template is generally to avoid public fights, because those are not going to go well for you. And I think the people in the Biden Administration remember the Obama Administration. I will never forget the moment when, after Obama basically gave a speech about how there should be a Palestinian state near 1967 lines, Harry Reid, the Democratic leader of the Senate, went before AIPAC and threw Obama under the bus.

If you’re in Washington for a long time, you almost turn off a part of your brain when it comes to the question of Israel and Palestine. You just take the safest political route and you block out some of your human responses to what actually happens to Palestinians. You just become so accustomed to basically just looking away and rationalizing and not doing anything. I think folks in the Biden Administration underestimated the degree to which ordinary progressive Americans who had not undergone that kind of acculturation would simply look at what was happening in the age of social media and say, What the fuck? Why are we supporting this? And they underestimated the degree to which Gaza mattered for American progressives.

One of the things you say in your book is that many American Jews responded differently to this war than they would have if any other country had done what Israel did to Gaza. How do you understand that now?

Well, for most American Jews, it’s not just another country, right? It’s a country that we have been raised to see as deeply, intimately, connected to us, as a central part of our story—our story of genocide and survival and rebirth. And it’s a story of pride and safety. The Jewish tradition has this kind of metaphor of family running through it, this kind of imagined family. Imagine if you start getting pieces of evidence that members of your family are doing terrible, terrible things, right? That’s very painful to acknowledge. Plus, you recognize that generally people in a family don’t take kindly to those members of the family who start saying, “Hey, we’re doing horrible things.”

And this leads to the way the organized American Jewish community really functions. Whatever Israel does, they come up with some post-hoc justification. “It’s Hamas’s fault because it’s using human shields. It’s the people in Gaza’s fault because they voted for Hamas. The numbers are a lie—you can’t trust them.”

What have you made of the response both here and in Israel to President Trump proposing that Palestinians be forcefully kicked out of Gaza and sent to Egypt and Jordan?

I think for Trump it’s an example of his naked imperialism, where America should take territory for itself and he should personally profit. But within Israel and the American-Jewish community it confirmed my worst nightmare, which is that there was no independent moral standard that could be established vis-à-vis Israel. That whatever Israel did, there would be a post-hoc justification. Look at the statement from the American Jewish Committee. They say this is “concerning” but the statement is incredibly weak and otherwise lauds Trump. The Anti-Defamation League statement was also very weak.