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As the truce between Israel and Hamas extends into its sixth day, aid groups are warning that the war-battered Gaza Strip is on the brink of a full-scale humanitarian crisis.

After nearly two months of Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the “humanitarian pause” was brokered to allow the release of Israeli captives in exchange for Palestinian prisoners. As part of the agreement, more humanitarian aid has been allowed into the Palestinian enclave that has been under near-total siege.

But while United Nations agencies and groups like the Palestine Red Crescent Society have been able to scale up aid entering the enclave through the Rafah border crossing with Egypt, the temporary increase has been insufficient to meet the now critical needs of Gaza’s population of 2.3 million, nearly 80 percent of which is now displaced.

Here’s a breakdown of the aid that Gaza needs, and what it is receiving — even during the truce.

What has the truce changed?

The humanitarian pause began at 7am local time on Friday. Initially brokered for four days, it was extended on Tuesday for two days, which will expire on Thursday morning. As of Tuesday night, Hamas had released 81 of the 240 hostages taken captive while Israel had freed about 180 Palestinian prisoners.

Aid distribution efforts had previously stalled, with agencies warning that perishables were spoiling at the Egyptian border. Now, amid the logistic chaos of the renewed flows, they have been able to deliver limited assistance to the population.

How much aid is entering Gaza

Reporting for Al Jazeera from the southern town of Khan Younis, Hind Khoudary said on Tuesday that at least 750 trucks had crossed the Rafah border into Gaza since Friday.

That works out to roughly 150 trucks per day.

However, on Monday, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) told Al Jazeera that 200 trucks of aid would be needed daily over a period of two months to meet the population’s basic needs. Much more fuel is needed to enable the UN agency to power vital services such as sewage treatment plants and water desalination plants.

Even that — 200 trucks a day — falls far short of what Gaza, under a land, sea and air siege by Israel since 2007, was receiving before October 7. Before the current war, 500 aid trucks would enter Gaza daily on average, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Last week, Oxfam described the pause as “a band-aid to a bleeding wound”.

What is the humanitarian situation?

The war has devastated Gaza, killing nearly 15,000 people, with at least 6,800 presumed dead under the rubble. Tens of thousands of injured people have suffered due to medical shortages. While the truce has enabled Palestinians in the besieged enclave a little breathing space and some respite from the constant din of drones and warplanes, the humanitarian situation is dire.

Israel’s war has split the territory of 2.3 million people in two. As its attacks on the north intensified, the Israeli military forced people to move south, where supplies of food, fuel and water have been scarce.

International NGO ActionAid said deliveries were largely limited to the south, where 1.8 million people are now displaced. “For many women propping up households and facing more mouths to feed in Gaza’s overstretched shelters, renewed pauses will not come anywhere near close to helping improve the situation they’re facing,” said the NGO.

Al Jazeera’s Khoudary said: “[Palestinian] people are starving, they are striving to find food in the supermarkets and people don’t have the basic needs to continue and to help themselves to survive from starvation…”

OCHA said aid had reached heavily damaged northern areas, where many have remained – including vulnerable groups such as the elderly, injured and disabled people – amid intense air raids on homes, schools and hospitals. But it acknowledged that most of the assistance had reached only Gaza’s south.

The situation in the north remains dangerous, with concerns about dehydration and outbreaks of disease.

Deliveries of fuel to the north have been severely restricted by Israeli forces. The Kamal Adwan Hospital, the only medical facility still operating in the zone, has been starved of supplies necessary for operations.

“If the hospital is not supplied with fuel within hours, the department is at risk of losing those in it, including premature babies, under our care,” Dr Hossam Abu Safiya, head of the paediatric intensive care department, told Al Jazeera.

On Sunday, Cindy McCain, director of the UN World Food Programme, said the entire enclave was “on the brink of famine”. “This is something that … will spread. And with that comes disease and … everything else that you can imagine,” she told CBS, the US network.

What next?

As the truce inches to a possible end, residents fear the bombing will resume.

Israel, which is intent on obliterating Hamas’s presence in the enclave, has been briefing that the armed group has a command and control centre in southern Gaza.

While the south has been dubbed a “safe zone”, the Israeli military had repeatedly attacked Khan Younis prior to the truce. People in the south had been ordered to move towards a slice of the territory, called Muwasi, along the coast.

Stephane Dujarric, spokesperson for UN chief Guterres, said negotiations must continue so that the truce in Gaza could be upgraded to a full humanitarian ceasefire. “This aid barely registers against the huge needs” of Gaza, he said.

Hamas and Israel released more captives and prisoners under a fragile truce that held for a fifth day as international mediators in Qatar worked to extend it.

Israel said on Tuesday that 10 of its citizens and two Thai nationals were freed by Hamas and had been returned to Israel, bringing the total number of freed captives to 86 from about 240 people taken to the Gaza Strip after Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel.

Soon after, Israel released 30 Palestinians from its jails, bringing the total number of freed prisoners to 180.

The list of released Palestinians included the names of 15 children – 12 from Jerusalem and three from the occupied West Bank – and 15 women – five from Jerusalem and 10 from the West Bank.

Late on Monday, Qatar announced an agreement to extend the initial four-day pause for an additional two days, under which further prisoner exchanges will be carried out. The truce is due to end after one more exchange on Wednesday night.

However, the heads of the US and Israeli intelligence agencies were in Qatar, a key mediator with Hamas, to discuss extending the truce and releasing more people.

Information minister says 13 military officers arrested in relation to the weekend assault in capital Freetown.

A series of attacks on military barracks and prisons in Sierra Leone over the weekend was a failed coup attempt, according to police and government officials in the West African country.

Information Minister Chernor Bah said that 13 military officers and one civilian have been arrested following the incident.

“The incident was a failed attempted coup. The intention was to illegally subvert and overthrow a democratically elected government,” Bah said on Tuesday.

“The attempt failed, and plenty of the leaders are either in police custody or on the run. We will try to capture them and bring them to the full force of the laws of Sierra Leone.”

The inspector general of police said the attempted coup “failed in the early hours of the 26th of November”.

William Fayia Sellu told reporters that “a group of people” had tried to illegally “unseat” the government with force.

Police have published photographs of 32 men and two women it said were being sought in connection with the unrest. They include serving and retired soldiers and police, as well as some civilians.

Government authorities have said at least 20 people were killed in the attacks and about 2,200 people also escaped from prisons that were attacked.

In televised remarks on Sunday, the country’s President Julius Maada Bio said that “most of the leaders” of the attack had been arrested, and that the government would continue to pursue the rest.

Those killed include 13 soldiers, three assailants, a police officer, a civilian and someone working in private security, according to authorities. Eight people were also seriously injured.

Tensions remain in Freetown, where checkpoints have sprung up and schools and banks remain closed, while a curfew is in place from dusk until dawn.

Frictions in the West African nation have been building since a contested election in June, with President Bio winning reelection amid concerns about the transparency of the election from European Union observers and United States officials.

Samura Kamara, candidate of the opposition All People’s Congress (APC), rejected the results and said that the election had not been credible.

The country has also struggled with the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and police opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators protesting high food prices last August.

Many of us did not dare go out on the first day of the temporary truce in Gaza. We were too afraid it would not hold. On the second day, we gathered our courage and stepped out.

The daylight illuminated the destruction caused by Israel’s non-stop bombardment of Gaza over the past seven weeks. We did not recognise our neighbourhoods and streets.

There are whole stretches of land where there is not a single building standing. Nothing has been spared: houses, residential towers, shops, bakeries, cafes, schools, universities, libraries, children’s centres, mosques, churches.

The destruction was the first thing we saw. Then came the pain.

Amid the panic, alarm and scurrying to survive the bombs, many of us did not fully grasp the loss of loved ones, the wounds sustained, the lives, bodies and dreams shattered and destroyed. Many could not bury their dead. Many could not grieve.

As Sabri Farra, a medical student from Gaza, wrote in a post on social media: “The word catastrophe is insufficient to describe this. It is a collective inferno of extermination against the Palestinian people.”

I left my home in Gaza City during the first week of the war. I was lucky to have made it. On the same day, the Israeli army bombed a convoy of evacuees, killing at least 70 people.

The road that Israel designated as a “safe route” for people to evacuate from the north to the south has been anything but safe. Throughout the past seven weeks, people who made it south reported seeing harrowing scenes of bodies of civilians lying everywhere. The horror was documented on videos circulated on social media.

When the truce came into effect, more Palestinians decided to evacuate from the north, hoping it would be safe to do so.

But as they made their way south, they encountered Israeli army checkpoints, where they were stopped and searched and their belongings confiscated. Women in my family and friends told me that Israeli soldiers even took their gold. They were forced to walk with their hands in the air, carrying nothing but their IDs.

Those who made it through were lucky, as Israeli soldiers have also been systematically abducting evacuees. I have friends with siblings who were taken and are still missing after trying to evacuate through the designated “safe route”. The Israelis arrested even Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. He was let go only after a massive international campaign for his release. We still don’t know the true number of those who have been abducted.

The walk from the north to the south is almost eight hours if you don’t stop. This is a trip many Palestinians are struggling to make as they are too old, too young, too tired, too starved and dehydrated, injured or disabled.

While going north to south can be risky and could lead to abduction, going in the opposite direction can cost you your life. The Israeli army dropped leaflets on us warning us not to attempt that trip. Israeli soldiers killed at least two people trying to go back to the north on the first day of the truce.

I, like hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, am banned from returning to my home in Gaza City. I am heartbroken that I cannot go and check on my house to see if it is still standing. Many others who have family and friends shot in the streets or stuck under the rubble cannot go retrieve their bodies and give them a proper burial.

Israel controls everything: where we go, what we do, how much we eat or drink, whether we can save the wounded or those stuck under the rubble for days. It even decides how we tend to our dead. Its army is forcing more and more of us into an ever-shrinking space before it resumes the indiscriminate bombardment and the genocide.

The trucks of humanitarian aid Israel is allowing to enter Gaza cannot alleviate the humanitarian disaster. We are barely surviving. If the bombs don’t kill us, the hunger, the thirst, the lack of medicine, the cold will.

This pause has been more painful than the 50 days before it. It is the first time the people of Gaza were able to look at their open wounds, martyred children, slaughtered families, destroyed homes and shattered lives. Just imagine living for six days just to prepare and wait for your death on the seventh.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.