Aid group closes soup kitchens across Gaza due to dwindling supplies

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza (AP) — Israel’s ongoing blockade of humanitarian assistance for Gaza forced a leading aid group to shut its community soup kitchens Thursday as it faced empty warehouses and no replenishment of supplies in the war-battered enclave.

U.S.-based World Central Kitchen, which was serving 133,000 meals per day, said there is almost no food left in Gaza with which to cook.

The ongoing hunger is threatening Gaza's population, already battered by 19 months of war. In April, the World Food Program said its food stocks in Gaza had run out under Israel's blockade, ending a main source of sustenance for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the territory.

A UNICEF spokesperson said most of Gaza’s water system is damaged, while fuel shortages make it harder to operate desalination plants or water trucks.

Malnutrition and hunger are becoming increasingly prevalent in the Gaza Strip as Israel’s total blockade enters its third month, and aid agencies say supplies to treat and prevent malnutrition are running out.

Israel imposed the blockade on March 2, then shattered a two-month ceasefire by resuming military operations in the territory on March 18. It said both steps aim to pressure the militant Hamas group to release hostages. Rights groups call the blockade a “starvation tactic” and a potential war crime.

With restaurants and bakeries closed, community kitchens are often the only way for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza to eat a daily meal. But a third of those supported by the U.N. have closed in the past 10 days for lack of food or fuel, according to the U.N. humanitarian office, or OCHA, which said more closures could be imminent.

“The hot meals provided by these kitchens constitute one of the last remaining lifelines” for Palestinians, OCHA said.

At those still open, chaotic scenes of desperate men, women and children fighting to get meager rations are common.

UNICEF spokesperson Jonathan Crickx on Thursday said 65-70% of Gaza’s water system is damaged. Aid workers have instead set up water distribution points that rely on trucking.

But it's difficult to reach people when fuel has become scarce, Crickx told The Associated Press.

“The children are, of course, bearing the brunt of this war,” he said.

Water availability has plummeted to an average of 3-5 liters per person per day, according to the Palestinian Water Authority. That’s less than the 15 liters that the World Health Organization says people need to survive.

A pipeline operated by Israel had been supplying 70% of Gaza City’s water since the war began, but it was damaged with the renewed Israeli offensive in April. Desalination plants had supplied about 7% of Gaza’s water needs before the war, until the aquifer became contaminated and depleted.

Since the start of the war, World Central Kitchen said it has served more than 130 million meals and baked 80 million loaves of bread. On Thursday, the group said it had no flour left in their mobile bakery.

“Our trucks — loaded with food and supplies — are waiting in Egypt, Jordan and Israel, ready to enter Gaza,” said José Andrés, the celebrity chef who founded the organization. “But they cannot move without permission. Humanitarian aid must be allowed to flow.”

COGAT, the Israeli defense body overseeing aid to Gaza, said the blockade would continue unless the Israeli government changed its policy.

Israeli government spokesperson David Mencer said the government was concerned that Hamas controlled the humanitarian aid, and that Israeli officials were exploring ways to get it only to “those in need.”

Mencer said the hunger had been "engineered by Hamas,” and said the blockade would end when the group lays down its weapons, he said.

However, Israel has provided no evidence that Hamas syphons off aid. The U.N and aid workers deny there is significant diversion of aid to militants, saying the U.N. strictly monitors distribution.

Since the start of the year, more than 10,000 children have been treated for acute malnutrition, according to the World Health Organization. The number climbed dramatically in March, to 3,600 cases from 2,000 the month before, UNICEF reported.

Nearly half the 200 nutrition centers around Gaza have shut down because of displacement and bombardment.

World Central Kitchen had previously suspended operations in April of last year after seven aid workers were killed in Israeli strikes on their convoy, before resuming weeks later.

The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said Thursday the bodies of 106 people killed by Israeli strikes have been brought to hospitals over the past 24 hours.

Hospitals also received 367 wounded, the ministry said in its daily report.

The overall Palestinian death toll from the Israel-Hamas war rose to at least 52,760 since Oct. 7, 2023, the ministry said. Another 119,264 have been wounded, it said.

It said the tally includes 2,651 dead and 7,223 wounded since Israel shattered the nearly two-month ceasefire on March 18.

The ministry does not differentiate between civilians and combatants, but says more than half of the dead were women and children.

The Israeli military said they are targeting Hamas infrastructure in Gaza. On Wednesday, chief of staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir told commanders that Israel plans to “expand and intensify our operations” in Gaza.

Also on Thursday, a series of Israeli airstrikes hit hilltops in the vicinity of the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh, killing at least one person and wounding eight others, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

The Israeli military said it bombed infrastructure that belonged to the Hezbollah militant group and included weapons and tunnels. Israel said that Hezbollah's activities at the site violated a November ceasefire.

Hezbollah did not immediately comment on the strikes. Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said public institutions in the area were closed after the attacks as families rushed to schools to take their children home.

Since the U.S.-brokered ceasefire in November stopped the war between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli strikes on southern Lebanon have continued. Hezbollah says its has largely disarmed south of the Litani River, while Israel insists the militants are rearming themselves. Some 4,000 people in Lebanon were killed during the war, including many civilians.

A renowned Palestinian journalist arrested by the Israeli military and suffering from multiple chronic illnesses has been placed on six months of administrative detention, the Israeli military said.

Ali Samoudi, who has worked for international news outlets including CNN and Al Jazeera, was detained late last month by the Israeli military from his family home in the city of Jenin in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and has spent part of the time in the hospital due to chronic health issues.

The Israeli military said Samoudi was detained based on involvement in “actions endangering regional security" but that a police investigation did not find sufficient evidence against him to issue an arrest. However, on Thursday, a military court decided to place him under administrative detention for six months.

Israeli authorities can renew administrative detentions indefinitely. Detainees are held without charge or trial. Israel says the controversial tactic is necessary for security reasons, but Palestinians and rights groups say the system denies due process and is widely abused.

Chehayeb reported from Beirut. Associated Press writer Melanie Lidman in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Sally Abou AlJoud in Beirut, Lebanon contributed to this report.

Workers close a crater following Israeli airstrikes that targeted hilltops near Nabatieh town, south Lebanon, Thursday, May 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Mohammed Zaatari)

Palestinians struggle to get donated food at a community kitchen in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Monday, May 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Palestinians struggle to get donated food at a community kitchen in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Monday, May 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

Palestinians struggle to get donated food at a community kitchen in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, Monday, May 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)