The Electronic Intifada 17 July 2024
Children secure food for their families on 27 June in Zawaida in the central Gaza Strip.
APA imagesAmal recently went to a charity kitchen in the Jabaliya camp market to get a cooked meal for her family.
She lives with her mother and five siblings in a tent on the rubble of their destroyed home. The family has no breadwinner after the Israeli military killed Amal’s father in one if its many invasions of the camp during this genocide.
Amal, just 10, has become accustomed to going to charity kitchens. Famine has stalked northern Gaza since December with Israel preventing the entry of food and other aid since last October.
And though occasional supplies do come through with aid organizations, the northern markets of Gaza are long closed.
On this particular day in June, hundreds of children were carrying bowls in their hands, lining up to get a meal at the kitchen. Occasionally, disagreements broke out over who stood where as the children jostled to ensure their bowls would be filled before the food ran out.
Amal waited in line for an hour. She smiled when she saw that the meal was pasta, her favorite.
But while returning home, she stumbled, and the pasta fell out of the bowl and onto the ground.
Amal cried as she picked up the remains of the meal, now mixed with sand and gravel, and put it back in her bowl.
She didn’t feel her leg bleeding until she returned home and her mother saw the injury.
Amal’s mother ate only bread that evening, as the pasta meal was too little for her children to abate their hunger. Normally, the family only eats two meals a day: a breakfast of bread stuffed with cheese or four pieces of ka’ek and a lunch from a charity kitchen.
“We don’t have dinner and thus sleep hungry,” Amal told The Electronic Intifada. “The flour we have now is barely sufficient for the end of the week, and flour is scarce and expensive in the market.”
Only bread left
Omar Saher gets up early every morning to find food, and goes to the al-Zawya market, 20 minutes away from the al-Zaytoun neighborhood of Gaza City where he now lives with eight family members.
Most of the shops have little, if any food. Some might still carry a few vegetables or fruit.
“But vegetables are getting more scarce in the north,” Saher said. “I was shocked about the unbelievable and fantasy costs of vegetables I purchased.”
He was left speechless, he told The Electronic Intifada, when being presented with a bill of $200 for a bag of vegetables that included cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, molokhia and some peppers for a Friday meal.
“I expected prices would be high but not in such a crazy way. I expected my bill maybe to jump up from 50 shekels [$10] to around 200 shekels [$42], not to $200!”
He had to give up the purchase, plumping instead for “three cans of cheese and peas for $12.”
Many people in Gaza cannot even afford the price of canned foods. They have to gather in front of charity kitchens to get cooked meals delivered by aid organizations.
Saher and his family have been surviving on canned cheese and peas, but even these have become scarce and prices have increased to $4 per can.
His two nieces, Sara, 5, and Rama, 2, whose father was detained during the invasion of al-Shifa hospital in December, have missed eating healthy food and have been losing weight.
Sara had told her uncle: “Bring me some apples and potatoes to let my mum make me my favorite fried chips.”
“I don’t know what to say to her,” Saher told The Electronic Intifada. “But I fear not finding those canned foods in the coming days. We have only bread to survive.”
During previous food shortages, the Saher family “made stew of khubeza, a type of mallow that grows wild in Palestine.
But it only grows in winter and people are desperately seeking alternatives.
“Many neighbors I know are searching for tree leaves,” Saher said. But these too are hard to find. Many trees have been chopped down for firewood.
Eating leaves
Um Ahmad, a mother of four living in the Jabaliya camp in northern Gaza, is struggling to provide food for her children.
Her husband was killed during the genocide, and she is now her family’s sole provider.
She barely manages to provide a meal for her children every two or three days. She either gets cans of food from an aid organization or she secures a cooked meal from a charity kitchen.
On other days, Um Ahmad’s family members eat only bread … that is, when flour is affordable and available.
She always looks for a vendor who will sell her flour at a fair price and attempts to bargain with dishonest traders who control the entire market and the prices of supplies, she told The Electronic Intifada.
Sometimes, she fails and is left without any food.
Um Ahmad waits for hours to get water from a destroyed well just to make bread for her hungry children.
“The men of the camp are always digging around the well with their hands until they reach one of the pipes pumping water to the well,” she told The Electronic Intifada.
“One of the men gets my gallons filled with water. It’s salty and untreated. But there is no other water for cooking, drinking, bathing and other uses.”
When they fail to get water from the well, Um Ahmad’s children turn to the sea to fill up their buckets with seawater to help make bread.
She bakes the bread on a wooden fire because the family has no access to cooking gas.
But she doesn’t always find wood and when she doesn’t, her children go to bed with empty stomachs.
“When nothing was available in the market at an affordable price, I purchased the leaves of cherry trees from a seller to make a stew for my children,” she said, adding: “This time, the starvation, however, is different from last time.”
With no more airdrops in the north, there is “nothing available now. And the flour and cherry leaves are about to run out.”
Um Ahmad said she feared for her family if that happens.
“We are starving and suffering from anemia,” she said. “What about after it runs out? We will die of course.”
Food poisoning
On a single day in June, nearly 60 cases of food poisoning were reported at Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia. Most were caused by the consumption of expired food or drinks and the lack of clean water.
Rana said she had three children come down with food poisoning a few hours after drinking an expired juice.
One of her children, 9-year-old Omar, had picked up a few packets of juice from under the rubble of a destroyed house near the al-Shaimaa school in Beit Lahia where the family has sought refuge.
Omar rushed to the school to share the precious juice with his family.
“Everyone had two glasses of juice. At that moment, we felt we owned the world,” Rana said. “My children asked for more after not having had any juice for nine months.”
“We are not dying only of hunger but also of thirst,” she added.
A few hours later, however, Rana’s children started to suffer so severe a pain in their stomachs that it left them crying unstoppably. They all began vomiting and contracted diarrhea and fevers.
At Kamal Adwan hospital they were given some fluid solutions and nutritional supplements as well as other medications to tackle the symptoms.
“We, thankfully, survived this time, but who knows if we will survive it next time as long. We are drinking polluted water, and eating expired food. And there is no fresh food in the north,” Rana said.
Osama Abu Jaser is a writer based in Gaza.
