"Food Has Become a Memory": My Hunger Diary in Gaza

This is my attempt to document what it feels like when your stomach rumbles, becoming louder than your thoughts. 

Here in Gaza, we are enduring the suffocating siege imposed by the Israeli government in order to make us starve, in a deliberate attack against us Gazans. 

Today marks the 89th day of the starvation war. I woke up with a dizzy feeling in my head as I had not eaten anything since yesterday morning. My stomach needed its sense of normalcy. 

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My family and I poured our energy into securing the only meal of the day. We often spend approximately half a day only thinking about what our meal will be. My family is making every possible effort to fill our hungry stomachs, but I can see their powerlessness on their faces. My thoughts go immediately to my youngest siblings Ahmed, 10, and Yame, just 4 years old. They cannot endure or understand that no food is available to eat, and I feel helpless when I do not have anything to offer them. I have always wondered why children must suffer! What do they do to deserve this denial? 

The only food for the day for a family of eight.Photo: Sara Awad

My mom baked eight pieces of bread, one for each of our family members, and each one of us chooses the way to eat it. For me, I choose to separate it into two portions — the second is for dinner. Very small portions for a person who does not eat enough for months. And we do not know when the next bread will come along.

After spending hours lost in thoughts and planning on what we will do for food, my family gave in to paying impossible prices. A single kilo of flour, if we are lucky to find it, now costs us nearly 90 shekels (around 25 U.S. dollars) when it used to be only 3 shekels ($1). This price doesn’t stay stable; some days, it reaches more than $40 for a kilo. These are unthinkable prices for most Gazan families, already overwhelmed by the destroyed economy, living without livelihood for months. 

Even if we can reach that one kilo of flour to fill our stomachs, reaching paper cash is an impossible task. ATM machines and bank branches have been mostly destroyed by Israeli bombs, and mobile payments are hardly used. So we have to exchange money, and are forced to pay the enormous commission fees, which nowadays reach up to 40 or 45 percent. Just to secure our only meal of the day, we have to sacrifice more and more to get our basic needs met. 

I hope our suffering ends with bread, yet even bread is no longer enough. Our bodies need more. The most luxurious food available in Gaza’s markets come in just a few varieties. Eggplant, rice, unripe tomatoes and little else. All the items I mentioned are overpriced, and families who have the luxury of putting the food on tables are very rare and lucky. 

Food itself is now “luxurious,” and most of it has vanished in Gaza: Milk, meat, vegetables, fruits have all become a daily dream, not a daily reality. Only some beans and lentils remain in Gaza’s streets. They absolutely will run out at any given moment, just like everything else does. 

My Body Speaks

From the body’s perspective, we are all off-balance, dizzying, with foggy eyesight. Not from illness, but from the feeling of hunger. 

I am currently working as a freelance writer beside my studies at university, yet I cannot pour energy into fulfilling my duties. My brain is forgetting more than I remember; my body is constantly weak from the lack of essential nutrients and vitamins I have lost throughout this ongoing starvation. Studying and writing is costing me a lot of energy, and I’m trying my best to save my energies for studying and writing, but all my trying is just getting failed by hunger. I tend to be silent rather than talking, as talking requires power that I do not have these days. 

And that is about my body — just 21 years old — but what about the elderly people, the injured in hospitals, and the disabled people who are dying of this hunger? What is happening to their bodies? My thoughts are on those people starved by the hour.

The daily bread, baked.Photo: Sara Awad

My mother is one of the injured. She had spinal cord surgery back in February, and she is going through a physical therapy session, so she is in the most serious condition to require healthy food. The fact that I do not even have the option to provide her with food is killing me every single time I see her in her fragile body. Then there is my father. He has hypertension and he must balance his food, but he refuses to eat all his portions of bread; he sacrifices it to my mother. Even in war, love is stronger than suffering itself. 

Food has become a memory. I dream of a big family meal, multiple meals filled with meat and chicken, and I dream of cooking my favorite meal again. I am fed up with empty plates. I am tired, tired of looking at past meals on my photo albums. I long for my past days, when food was a routine, not a matter of bare survival.

The post “Food Has Become a Memory”: My Hunger Diary in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.