Yas­min Eid coughs and cov­ers her face, cook­ing a small pot of lentils over a fire fed with twigs and scrap pa­per in the tent she shares with her hus­band and four young daugh­ters in the Gaza Strip.

It was their on­ly meal Wednes­day — it was all they could af­ford.

“My girls suck on their thumbs be­cause of how hun­gry they are, and I pat their backs un­til they sleep,” she said.

Af­ter be­ing dis­placed five times, the Ei­ds re­side in cen­tral Gaza, where aid groups have rel­a­tive­ly more ac­cess than in the north, which has been large­ly iso­lat­ed and heav­i­ly de­stroyed since Is­rael be­gan wag­ing a re­newed of­fen­sive against the mil­i­tant group Hamas in ear­ly Oc­to­ber. But near­ly every­one in Gaza is go­ing hun­gry these days. In the north ex­perts say a full-blown famine may be un­der­way.

On Thurs­day, the In­ter­na­tion­al Crim­i­nal Court is­sued ar­rest war­rants against Is­raeli Prime Min­is­ter Ben­jamin Ne­tanyahu and his for­mer de­fense min­is­ter, ac­cus­ing them of us­ing “star­va­tion as a method of war­fare” — charges Is­rael adamant­ly de­nies.

In Deir al-Bal­ah, the Ei­ds are among hun­dreds of thou­sands shel­ter­ing in squalid tent camps. The lo­cal bak­eries shut down for five days this week. The price of a bag of bread climbed above $13 by Wednes­day, as bread and flour van­ished from shelves be­fore more sup­plies ar­rived.

The Unit­ed Na­tions hu­man­i­tar­i­an of­fice warned of a “stark in­crease” in the num­ber of house­holds ex­pe­ri­enc­ing se­vere hunger in cen­tral and south­ern Gaza. It ap­peared to be linked to the rob­bery at gun­point of near­ly 100 aid trucks last week­end in south­ern Gaza, close to Is­raeli mil­i­tary po­si­tions. Is­rael blamed Hamas but ap­pears to have tak­en no ac­tion to stop the loot­ing, while Hamas said it was the work of lo­cal ban­dits.

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Aid groups say the loot­ing is one of many ob­sta­cles to get­ting food and oth­er vi­tal aid to the ter­ri­to­ry’s 2.3 mil­lion Pales­tini­ans. They al­so have to con­tend with Is­raeli move­ment re­stric­tions, on­go­ing fight­ing, and heavy dam­age wreaked by the Is­raeli bom­bard­ment of roads and crit­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture.

By  WAFAA SHU­RAFA and FAT­MA KHALED

DEIR AL-BAL­AH, The Gaza Strip (AP)