PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — A crowd of about 100 people tried to shove through a metal gate in Haiti’s capital as a guard with a baton pushed them back, threatening to hit them. Undeterred, children and adults alike, some of them carrying babies, kept elbowing each other trying to enter.

“Let us in! We’re hungry!” they shouted on a recent afternoon.

They were trying to get into a makeshift shelter in an abandoned school. Inside, workers dipped ladles into buckets filled with soup that they poured into Styrofoam containers stuffed with rice to distribute to Haitians who have lost homes to gang violence.

About 1.4 million Haitians are on the verge of famine, and more than 4 million require food aid, sometimes eating only once a day or nothing at all, aid groups say.

“Haiti is facing a protractive and mass hunger,” Jean-Martin Bauer, Haiti director for the United Nations’ World Food Program, told The Associated Press. He noted that Croix-des-Bouquets, in the eastern part of Haiti’s capital, “has malnutrition rates comparable with any war zone in the world.”

Officials are trying to rush food, water and medical supplies to makeshift shelters and other places as gang violence suffocates lives across Port-au-Prince and beyond, with many trapped in their homes.