Updated August 19, 2025 at 2:20 PM PDT
ZIKIM CORRIDOR, Gaza Strip — Thousands of men, women and children are covered in dust. Exhausted and hungry, many are carrying large sacks of white flour over their shoulders. This flour has become Gaza's white gold as starvation spreads and desperation grows due to Israeli restrictions on aid.
People here call those lucky enough to walk away with flour "Gaza's White Walkers," a term that's sprung up at this northern corridor referencing the chilling, zombie-like characters of the far north in the television show Game of Thrones.
But most people leave empty-handed. Some return, carrying not flour, but the wounded and dead from this border crossing, known as Zikim. Their bodies are lofted atop empty flour crates or hauled in open and torn flour sacks.
While much attention has been given globally to the few U.S.-funded food distribution sites run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in southern and central Gaza that are overseen by Israel, there is a sometimes even deadlier dash for food in the north, at Zikim.
NPR obtained a recent breakdown of death tolls from Gaza's Health Ministry. It shows that since June 12, when the first aid trucks were allowed into northern Gaza after a nearly two-month-long Israeli blockade, more than 550 people have been killed trying to get food aid from this northern border crossing. In its deadliest day yet, more than 80 people were killed at Zikim on July 19 while trying to get flour, most of them shot by Israeli forces near the border, according to doctors and survivors.
Still, the flour trucked in from Israel with the U.N. World Food Programme is drawing tens of thousands of people, knowingly, to within range of Israeli troops at Zikim every day.
"Show us mercy"
Mohammed Abu Tarabish is among the thousands running to WFP trucks that have just rolled into northern Gaza, between rounds of Israeli gunfire.
"For God's sake, show us mercy," he says, while running. "I'm just trying to feed my kids. I need this flour to feed them."
"Gunfire or not, I will die to feed them," Abu Tarabish tells NPR, adding that his wife is nine months pregnant. "God willing I will feed her and my kids today."
Gaza's Health Ministry has recorded more than 100 deaths in the past two months from hunger and malnutrition, a dramatic spike since the start of the war nearly two years ago.
"This is the price of flour," a young man rushing to the trucks yells out. "We're dying and tanks are firing at us," he says.
It's a mad scramble to grab flour off the trucks here. People are shot by Israeli snipers and tanks, knifed by looting gangs and sometimes crushed under the trucks. That's according to NPR's reporting over the course of several trips to Zikim, as well as to the hospitals and morgues in Gaza City where those killed and wounded are taken.
Bullets whizz overhead
The bullets come in bursts from visible Israeli tanks nearby. When the gunfire starts, people drop to the ground and try to take cover. In one searing video last month, a distraught father wails over the body of his young son who's just been shot dead. There are others on the ground. The boy is still wearing the empty book bag he'd hoped to fill with flour.
This is the price Palestinians say they are forced to pay in Gaza in order to take a sack of flour from the trickle of aid coming in.
NPR has asked the military what its operating procedures are at Zikim for crowd control and what steps, if any, it's taking to prevent harm to civilians at this crossing, as well as why there are snipers.
The military did not respond to those specific questions. Instead, it said it's unaware of hundreds of fatalities from troop fire at Zikim, describing the death toll as "exaggerated and false." It attributed casualties to accidents from trucks and gangs fighting for flour.
It says the military's rules of engagement "strictly prohibit deliberately targeting civilians" and that in cases where a threat endangering troops arises, warning shots are carried out in the area. The military added that it conducts "systematic learning processes" to improve responses in Zikim and to minimize friction with civilians in the area.
The Israeli military also said it "enables unlimited entry of humanitarian aid by international organizations."
More than 100 aid organizations published a statement last week, saying that despite claims by Israeli authorities that there's no limit on aid entering Gaza, the nongovernmental humanitarian groups have not been able to deliver a single truck of supplies since early March due to what they called "Israeli obstruction." The few dozen trucks of flour coming in through Zikim are from the U.N.
It's there that Israeli tank fire rings overhead as Umm Hamdi al-Nahal ducks behind a sandy hill for cover.
"Who's going to feed us and feed our kids at home? What are they still negotiating and talking about?" she says, referring to stalled ceasefire talks between Hamas and Israel.
She says she has to fight to climb onto trucks to grab flour for her kids and her cancer-stricken husband.
"We are tired. Enough! Enough! I am tired!" the mother of four yells.
The World Food Programme's flour entering through Zikim has not reached warehouses.
In the north, the WFP's flour is immediately offloaded at Zikim Corridor by hungry crowds, according to the U.N. agency.
Out of breath and exhausted, al-Nahal says there's nowhere to turn to.
"If I don't face death, no one will feed my kids," she says.
Israeli drone strikes have also killed local security forces affiliated with Hamas and local clans trying to secure this route from looting and chaos. Israel has said throughout the war that it considers police and other security bodies in Gaza an arm of Hamas, and has targeted local clans working with them to secure aid throughout the war.
Israel accuses Hamas of systematically diverting humanitarian aid, which U.N. agencies say has not happened. Aid groups say humanitarian supplies are being looted by organized gangs, particularly in southern Gaza where they are openly backed by Israel to fragment and undermine Hamas's grip on Gaza.
A pause is no solution
The WFP says at most Israel allows 45 trucks to enter from Zikim daily, but that most of the time it's less, leading to desperation and looting.
The WFP's country director for Gaza, Antoine Renault, told NPR the agency continues to bring in flour this way, despite the daily lethal attacks on people trying to get aid there, because there is both a "moral imperative" to continue trying to feed starving people and a "dilemma" of how to do so.
"We reiterate that no violence should be around our convoy. At the same time, you have a wave of starvation within Gaza," he says. "The World Food Programme is actually the largest in terms of any actor that is providing food into Gaza."
He cited the most recent report by U.N.-backed experts on hunger who said a famine is unfolding in Gaza.
"This is where we are caught into this dilemma and this imperative about the population that currently is only in survival mode if our systems are not reaching them," Renault says.
He says the way that the WFP's flour and aid is entering Gaza is not "aligned with the way we operate."
He says a ceasefire is needed to bring in the hundreds of trucks that are needed into Gaza every day. Renault says the pause by Israel, a unilateral daytime halt in airstrikes announced in recent weeks, is not enough.
"The pause is not a solution at all," he says. "The security conditions that are on the ground are not at all aligned with what we require to reach the population."
Still, the WFP continues to bring its flour through Zikim.
Atop of one of the WFP's trucks, now emptied of flour, is 16-year-old Khalil al-Bilbasy, who has been shot in the leg. He cries out in pain as he tells NPR he had no choice but to come to Zikim to try and get a sack of flour.
"My brother was killed a week ago here," he says, yelling for the truck to move. He says all his family, except for one remaining brother, have been killed in the war.
"I had to come back because there's no flour. If I don't get any, we don't eat."
Aya Batrawy reported from Atlanta.
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