After 18 months of punishing airstrikes, raids and an increasingly restrictive siege in Gaza, the United Nations on May 20, 2025, issued one of its most urgent warnings yet about the ongoing humanitarian crisis: an estimated 14,000 babies were at risk of death without an immediate influx of substantial aid, especially food.

The assessment came a day after Israel allowed the first trickle of aid back into Gaza following its nearly three-month total blockade imposed on March 2. But on the first day of that resumption, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that only nine trucks were allowed into Gaza, when around 500 are required every day. The U.N. called it “a drop in the ocean of what is urgently needed.”

As an expert in Palestinian public health, I and others have long warned about the potentially devastating humanitarian consequences of Israel’s military response to the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, given the preexisting fragility of the Gaza Strip and Israel’s history of controlling humanitarian aid into the territory. Many of those worst-case humanitarian predictions have now become reality.

Israel’s control of food and aid into Gaza has been a consistent theme throughout the past 18 months. Indeed, just two weeks after Israel’s massive military campaign in the Gaza Strip began in late 2023, Oxfam International reported that only around 2% of the usual amount of food was being delivered to residents in the territory and warned against “using starvation as a weapon of war.”

Yet aid delivery continues to be inconsistent and well below what was necessary for the population, culminating in a dire warning by U.N. experts in early May that “

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