Do’a Atef, 12, spends her days knocking on doors to beg for food or collecting firewood on a dusty hillside near a refugee camp outside Rafah, southern Gaza , to cook the few tomatoes and peppers given to him by strangers.

Do’a told NBC News that she was displaced from her home in Beit Lahia in northern Gaza with her parents and seven siblings, and they now sleep in tents. They are so thirsty that “we drink dirty water,” she said. “My brothers and sisters cry all day.”

They couldn’t find flour, they were cold, there were no toilets available to them, no diapers for his little brother and no milk to give him. Two months ago, Do’a said, she was reading at school and playing with her friends. “Now all we do is bring firewood and walk barefoot. »

Do’a’s situation underscores a grim reality for many in Gaza, as the Israeli army’s ground invasion and aerial bombardments continue, displacing an estimated 1.9 million Palestinians into dwindling “humanitarian zones.” mainly in southern Gaza. A severe shortage of food and water is putting many people at risk of infection and death, according to humanitarian aid groups who have highlighted difficulties in delivering aid due to the intensity of hostilities.

Israel continued to intensify its offensive in southern Gaza until Sunday.

“A scarcity of aid has led to desperate struggles for water, destroying our social fabric,” said Bushra Khalidi, policy manager at Oxfam. “The situation in Gaza is not only a catastrophe, it is apocalyptic.”

Aid agencies have described children and families wandering the streets, unable to find food and with nowhere to go. Drinking water pipes can last for hours, and some have turned to collecting rainwater, which is also scarce in these semi-arid lands. The supermarket shelves are empty. People arrive at bakeries before dawn, with no guarantee that they’ll end up with a bag of bread before the store sells out.

The price of a 25-kilogram (55-pound) bag of flour rose to $100, from about $15 before the war.

“Numbers that are really beyond capacity,” said Najla Shawa, a Palestinian aid worker who recently left Gaza, of the wartime price surge. Other necessities and commodities, down to the containers that Gazans use to collect water, she explained, have also become dangerously expensive.

“Even if you have money,” Shawa said, “the journey to get it is very dangerous and it’s really difficult and humiliating.”

Shawa said people she spoke to in Gaza are rationing water. “They really try to consume very little,” she said. “A cup a day. A few cups a day for adults, giving priority to children.

Hazem Zarifa, a 24-year-old university student sheltering in the southern town of Khan Younis, said he had walked miles looking for some bread or canned goods.

“I have so far lost more than 10 kilos,” or about 20 pounds, Zarifa said. He felt sick with hunger.

Representatives of several international aid groups are struggling to describe the new lows after spending much of the last two months of war sounding the alarm about the situation on the ground in Gaza.

“Those who survived the bombings are now at imminent risk of dying from hunger and disease,” Alexandra Saieh of Save the Children said at a press briefing on Thursday.

“The lack of water and hygiene aggravates illnesses: diarrhea, vomiting, skin allergies, lice in children’s hair,” said Chiara Saccardi, regional manager of Action Against Hunger.

During the temporary pause in fighting last month, the World Food Program conducted a rapid food assessment, which it released on Wednesday, concluding that the situation in Gaza was “alarming.”

In a statement released Friday after a visit to Gaza, WFP deputy executive director Carl Skau said: “Gazans are simply not eating.”

He described “the confusion in warehouses, distribution points with thousands of hungry and desperate people, supermarkets with empty shelves and overcrowded shelters with bathrooms full to overflowing. The dull sound of bombs was the soundtrack to our day.

According to the report, 83 percent of households in southern Gaza have insufficient food consumption, and 38 percent suffer from “severe levels of hunger.”

At a news conference with international journalists on Thursday, Oxfam’s Khalidi and others described conditions in Gaza as “unsurvivable.”

“Oxfam categorically considers these actions, including the use of starvation as a weapon of war, mass massacres of civilians and collective punishment, to be war crimes,” she said, referring to the siege imposed by Israel cutting off food, water, electricity and fuel. since the start of the war.

On Thursday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that the humanitarian support system in Gaza was at serious risk of collapsing: “We anticipate that this will lead to a complete breakdown of law and order.”

NBC News has reached out to the Israeli government for comment.

Although humanitarian aid has since arrived in the Gaza Strip, it is only a fraction of what is needed.

Around 500 trucks enter Gaza daily before the hostilities and during the seven-day truce, this number was around 300. Since the breakdown of the ceasefire, aid distribution has declined again.

According to the United Nations aid agency, only a limited amount of aid entered Gaza on Friday and distribution is limited to a small area around the town of Rafah on the Egyptian border. Aid to Khan Younis and central Gaza “has been largely interrupted in recent days due to the intensity of hostilities and restrictions on movement along main roads,” the situation report said.

There is too little help and too many people, leading to despair, the organizations said.

Last week, a group of residents looking for food rushed a humanitarian truck and prevented it from disembarking in Al Mawasi, a Bedouin town in southern Gaza, said Isabelle Defourny, president of Médecins Sans borders.

The truck was only carrying medicine, but the incident “reflects the terrible situation people are in and the real lack of food and everything,” Defourny said.

And the chaos compounds the dangers of Israeli bombing, making it even more difficult to deliver what little humanitarian aid is available.