In an investigation, The New York Times describes how Fadia Nasser, a Palestinian widow who has taken refuge in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, has been surviving on a small sandwich of herbs for breakfast and a tomato that she shares with her daughter for lunch over the past few weeks.

For the past few weeks, eleven miles away in a tent camp in southern Gaza, Saeed Lulu, who used to run a small coffee stand in Gaza City, says he has been suffering from kidney pain but has no access to the clean water doctors say he should drink to prevent his condition from worsening, the newspaper reported.

Ola Moein, in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, is also afraid to go outside because of the frequent airstrikes. But she doesn’t feel she has a choice: She says she spends her days searching pharmacies for burn creams and painkillers for her 9-year-old nephew, whose legs were broken and burned in an Israeli airstrike last October.

As mediators try to secure a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, which now seems far-fetched, Palestinians and human rights organizations say the humanitarian situation is growing increasingly desperate.

In the 14 months since Israel launched its invasion, military bombardment has turned cities into rubble-strewn wastelands, and 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.1 million people have been displaced at least once. Winter adds to the misery. A doctor at a hospital in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, said four babies in tent camps had died of the cold in the past week.

Israel says its target is Hamas and that it is doing everything it can to minimize civilian casualties. But the increasingly deteriorating humanitarian situation has prompted harsh condemnation of Israel by the United Nations and international human rights organizations.

According to the newspaper, the following is a closer look at three parts of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza:

Food

Yasser Shaaban, a 58-year-old civil servant for the Palestinian Authority who lives with six people in a tent in Gaza City, relies on limited supplies of food — beans, lentils and pasta — brought in by humanitarian organizations.

When those supplies run out, he begs for food or uses the few shekels he has left to buy items from the market at vastly inflated prices. Fruit and meat are out of reach, he said. Eggs, which cost 15 shekels, or $4, are a rare treat. “I’m not looking for delicious, healthy or fancy food,” he said. “The goal is just to beat hunger.”

The United Nations warned in November that 1.95 million people were at risk of famine and that without a significant increase in food aid, people would begin to starve to death. On December 24, it said that humanitarian deliveries remained inadequate, especially in the north, where Israel has ordered evacuations and imposed severe restrictions on access. Israel is pressing Gaza to launch a new offensive there in an attempt to crush what it calls a resurgence of Hamas, which has unleashed some of the most devastating military offensives yet.

Even when Israeli authorities allow humanitarian aid shipments in, they sometimes strip the shipments of vital components, such as fuel needed to power generators in hospitals and shelters, said Georgios Petropoulos, a senior U.N. official based in the southern city of Rafah. Israel says the fuel cannot be sent to areas where militants are active.

“From where we are in Gaza, it feels like the aid system has been weaponized,” Petropoulos said. “Every day as an aid worker in Gaza, you are forced to make horrific decisions: Do I let people die of hunger or of cold?”

On December 5, Amnesty International accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, citing widespread hunger, the risk of famine and lack of access to aid as contributing factors. Israel has rejected the claim, and the Israeli body that coordinates the flow of goods into Gaza said on social media that the group’s accusation that it was obstructing aid deliveries and causing famine “deliberately and inaccurately ignores Israel’s extensive humanitarian efforts,” listing recent deliveries of food, fuel and medical supplies.

There is no doubt that aid to Gaza has been greatly reduced, both because of Israeli restrictions and because of fears of looting. For Ms. Nasser, what matters is that she still doesn’t have enough food. There is food on the market—often smuggled in or looted from aid convoys—so to outsiders it may not look like famine, she said.

“But when food becomes so expensive that most people can’t afford it, is it still available?”

Water

“Lulu, a former coffee vendor, does not have regular access to a water tap,” the paper says. “He lives in a tent camp in Rafah, in southern Gaza, and water there is delivered by tankers to a central area, where residents wait in lines for hours to fill their jars and buckets, for two shekels or fifty cents a gallon.”

But the quality is questionable: it’s foul-smelling, cloudy, and stained with debris. “The only good thing about it,” he said, “is that it’s less bad than seawater.” He knows drinking the water would aggravate his kidney problems, but bottled water is expensive.

It wasn’t always this way. Gaza has water treatment plants, desalination facilities, and three pipelines carrying fresh water from Israel. But in a report released on December 19, Human Rights Watch said that Israel is deliberately depriving Palestinians in Gaza of adequate access to safe water for drinking and sanitation.

The report found that pipelines were closed and damaged by shelling early in the war and only partially reopened a month later. Israeli restrictions on fuel imports have all but halted desalination activities. Water and sanitation infrastructure has been severely damaged, the report found. Israel has also blocked the import of equipment and chemicals, such as chlorine, needed to purify water, saying they risk being used by Hamas.

As a result, Gazans have little access to clean water. The report recorded 669,000 cases of acute watery diarrhea since the war began, and more than 132,000 cases of jaundice, a symptom of hepatitis. Both diseases are spread through contaminated water.

The Israeli Defense Ministry said in response to the report that Israeli pipelines send millions of gallons of water to Gaza, and that Israel has helped repair damage to water infrastructure caused by Hamas. Human Rights Watch noted that water from the pipelines has not been enough to make up for the decline in water production from other sources.

Moein says she spends two hours a day waiting in line to buy drinking water — at 19 shekels a gallon, or more than $5, in northern Gaza. She still has to boil and filter it. “At least I don’t see worms in it,” she said. “That’s our standard now.”

Treatment and medicine

When Alaa Moein’s home in Beit Lahia was bombed last October, most of her immediate family members died. Others were injured and still need medical treatment. But painkillers, antibiotics and medications for chronic conditions like diabetes are impossible to find.

She fears getting sick or injured. She says going to the hospital is out of the question. They are unclean, smell of death and blood, and lack the most basic supplies. Few are functioning properly. On Friday, the Israeli military forced patients and staff to leave one of the last functioning hospitals in northern Gaza, saying it was a Hamas stronghold. Fighting around the facility, Kamal Adwan Hospital, has raged for nearly three months. On Saturday, the Israeli military said it had arrested about 240 militants in and around Kamal Adwan over the past two days and found weapons in and around the hospital. It said the hospital’s director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, had been detained for questioning, saying without providing evidence that he was a suspected militant. A December 19 report by Doctors Without Borders described repeated Israeli military attacks on civilians and medical infrastructure in Gaza, along with “the systematic denial of humanitarian aid,” as “clear signs of ethnic cleansing.” Israel’s foreign minister criticized the report as “bloody slander.”

Alaa Moein said she doesn’t need a report to tell her what’s happening in Gaza. She also doesn’t think the report will make a difference.

“It has been more than a year of mass killing, famine, displacement and misery, and no one seems to care,” she said.