Gaza City, March 11 (RHC)-- The holy fasting month of Ramadan has started in the Gaza Strip as Israel is pressing ahead with its genocidal war on the besieged Palestinian territory exacerbating a humanitarian crisis there.

Monday marked the beginning of Ramadan, during which Muslims abstain from food and water from sunrise to sunset, in Gaza, where the entire 2.2 million population are unable to meet their food needs.  More than five months of brutal Israeli attacks have caused extreme hunger among the Gazans.

At least 25 people, most of them children, have died from malnutrition and dehydration in the Palestinian territory in recent days.  Israel has blocked the entry of food and aid supplies into Gaza draining its limited health services.

The head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said Ramadan comes in Gaza at at a time when “extreme hunger spreads, displacement continues, and fear and anxiety prevail.”  “This month should bring a ceasefire for those who have suffered the most,” Philippe Lazzarini wrote in an X post.

Diab al-Zaza, a 77-year-old Gaza resident, told the Middle East Eye (MEE) news portal that the Palestinians are living in conditions “worse than the Nakba (Catastrophe).”  He was referring to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian natives by the apartheid Israeli regime in 1948.

“I have been through many hardships, but in all my life I have never lived more difficult days than these because of hunger, thirst, loss and separation,” he said.  “Ramadan this year will be sad because the war has not left us anything. They [Israeli army] destroyed the mosques; they even destroyed the Al-Omari Mosque, which was more than 1,400 years old.”

Fatima Madoukh, a mother of six children, said she does not feel ready for Ramadan.  “Although it is a month of goodness and blessings, I and my family are all hungry. I never used to work before the war, but now, all my children and I work because of this situation,” she said.

Madoukh also noted that she was forced to mix flour with barley, wheat, corn and bird seed to feed her children, one of whom has heart problems.

On Monday, Israeli warplanes bombed a home in the Sabra neighbourhood of Gaza City, killing at least 16 people and injuring dozens more.  Most of those killed were women and children, the Wafa news agency reports.

Meanwhile, mediators Egypt, Qatar and the United States, failed to broker a pre-Ramadan ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinian Hamas resistance group.

Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said on Sunday that the truce talks had failed because Israel “evaded giving clear guarantees regarding the ceasefire, the withdrawal of its forces or the guarantees for the return of the displaced Gazans.”

Citing sources, Qatari newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reported that the head of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had recently made a secret trip to Egypt.  During this trip, the report said, William Burns had discussed the possibility of a two- to four-day Gaza humanitarian ceasefire at the beginning of Ramadan.

Israel waged its brutal US-backed war on Gaza on October 7 after Hamas carried out its historic operation against the occupying regime in retaliation for its intensified atrocities against the Palestinian people.

So far, the Tel Aviv regime has killed at least 31,045 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured 72,654 others.