Bottles of food thrown into sea from Egypt and Turkey in hopes of reaching Palestinians

People in Egypt and Turkey are desperate to help get food to Gaza, so they're filling up plastic bottles with food and throwing them into the sea with the hopes that it will wash up on the city's beach and feed Palestinians.

For the first time, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) has alerted that "the worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip," as it explained there is "Mounting evidence of widespread starvation, malnutrition, and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths."

Recent figures from the IPC also state that one in three people is now going without food for days at a time, while overwhelmed hospitals have treated more than 20,000 children for acute malnutrition since April.

Since mid-July, at least 16 children under five have died from hunger-related causes.

Meanwhile, more than 100 agencies - including Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam International and Amnesty International - called on Israel to let supplies in to relieve the crisis.

  Bottles of food thrown into sea from Egypt and Turkey in hopes of reaching Palestinians in Gaza  www.indy100.com  

“I don’t know what you would call it other than mass starvation, and it’s man-made, and that’s very clear,” said head of the World Health Organisation Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a virtual press conference from Geneva. “This is because of [the] blockade.”

Despite this, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said, "There is no starvation in Gaza, no policy of starvation in Gaza."

In a bid to help, videos have been circulating online of people in nearby Egypt and Turkey filling up plastic bottles with rice, flour and lentils and throwing them into the sea, hoping there's a chance they can reach starving Palestinians.

"Forgive us brothers, forgive us," said an Egyptian man in a clip compilation shared by Al Jazeera, as he chucked the food-filled bottles into the sea.

"There's nothing we can do for you. This bottle could be the reason you survive."

In another clip, a group of young girls can be seen on Sheikh Zuweid beach in Rafah filling up plastic bottles with food as the cameraman asks one of them the distance to Gaza, to which she informs him it is around 10 kilometres.

A group of people in Turkey can be seen chucking filled bottles into the sea in a third clip

It appears some of the plastic bottle supplies are reaching Gaza, as a clip shared by the Turkish broadcaster TRT World shows a Palestinian man appearing to hold one of them up.

"Say 'Allahu Akbar. Our Egyptian brothers, the bottles filled with lentils and rice have reached the shores of Gaza," he said and explained how it was brought in by a fisherman.

"He [fisherman] says some of the bottles, very few of them have arrived in Gaza which means today we eat lentils."

The man added that there was a note inside the bottle that read 'Long Live Egypt', to which he supported this message.

Are the images of food being thrown into the ocean for Palestine real?

The videos above are legitimate, but there have been some AI-generated photos making the rounds on social media of Egyptians throwing filled plastic bottles into the sea.

"Egyptian youth who put some food Baby formula, rice, and flour in bottles and threw them into the sea, hoping it would reach Gaza," a caption read on one viral AI-image post on X, formerly Twitter.

Underneath the post, the community notes have alerted users that "These images are AI generated."

Meanwhile, other AI-image posts have also popped up on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, according to fact-checking website Politifact.

It highlighted how, in one of the images where a number of people are handling bottles, "a thumb appeared to bend awkwardly," with handles distorted and also an image of the bottle floating on the sea wasn't believable either, as given that the bottles are filled with food, it wouldn't have that amount of buoyancy.

"This real-life event made the AI-generated images seem plausible," Politifact noted.

It even confused X's AI chatbot Grok when a user asked if the images were AI-generated, to which it mistakenly concluded, "No, these images are not AI-generated. They show a real event from July 24, 2025, where Egyptian youth threw bottles filled with baby formula and food into the sea from Sinai, hoping currents would carry them to Gaza amid the ongoing crisis."

Elsewhere, Fashion designer declines working with Rosalía over 'silence' on Gaza, and Trump slammed as he expects another ‘thank you’ for doing a good thing.

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