Mervat Hijazi and her nine children did not eat at all on Thursday - save her underweight baby who had a sachet of peanut paste.
“I’m so ashamed of myself for not being able to feed my children,” Hijazi said from their tent pitched amid the rubble of Gaza City.
“I cry at night when my baby cries and her stomach aches from hunger.”
Six-year-old Zaha can’t sleep because of Israel’s bombardment.
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“She wakes up terrified, shaking, and then remembers she didn’t eat and is hungry. I put her back to sleep, promising her food in the morning. Of course I lie.”
Hijazi (38) recounted a terrible week.
Last Sunday, her family was given about 500g of cooked lentils from a community kitchen run by a charity, half the amount she would normally use for a single meal.
On Monday, a local aid group was distributing vegetables in the camp but there was not enough to go round and Hijazi’s family did not get any.
Her 14-year-old daughter Menna went to the community kitchen and came back with a meagre amount of cooked potato. Everyone was hungry so they filled up by drinking water.
On Tuesday, the family received about 500g of cooked pasta from the kitchen. One daughter was also given some falafel by an uncle who lives nearby.
Wednesday, she said, was good day, relatively speaking. They received a bowl of rice with lentils at the community kitchen. It was not nearly enough, but Menna went back and pleaded with them and they eventually gave her two other small dishes.
“She is tough and keeps crying at them until they give her [food],” Hijazi said.
The kitchen was closed on Thursday, and the family could not find out why. They had nothing to eat except for the peanut sachet given to 11-month-old Lama, received from a clinic as a nutritional supplement because baby milk formula has all but disappeared.
“I don’t have enough milk in my breasts to feed her because I hardly eat myself,” said Hijazi, whose husband was killed early in the war as he cycled to get food from a charity kitchen.
The Hijazis’ plight is a snapshot of the misery plaguing the Palestinian enclave of Gaza. A global hunger monitor warned this month that half a million people face starvation while famine looms.
Israel has been bombarding and besieging Gaza since the territory’s ruling group, Hamas, launched a surprise attack against Israeli border communities on October 7th, 2023.
The Hamas attack killed 1,200 people, according to Israel, while Gazan authorities say the ensuing Israeli offensive has killed more than 53,000 people.
Israeli authorities have repeatedly said there is enough food in Gaza to feed the population and accuse Hamas of stealing aid in order to feed its fighters and to maintain control over the territory, an accusation the group denies.
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This week Israel started allowing some food to enter the territory for the first time since March 2nd, including flour and baby food. It says a new US-sponsored distribution system run by private contractors will begin operating soon.
The plan will involve distribution centres in areas controlled by Israeli troops, a plan the United Nations (UN) and other aid agencies have criticised, saying it will lead to further displacement of the population and that aid should flow through existing networks.
Hijazi said her family had seen no sign yet of the new aid and she is consumed by worry for her baby, Lama, who was 5kg when weighed last week. That’s about half the average for a healthy one-year-old girl, according to World Health Organisation charts.
This week the family have had, at most, a single meal a day to share, she added.
UN aid chief Tom Fletcher said this week that the amount of aid Israel was proposing to allow into Gaza was “a drop in the ocean” of what was needed.
The tent shared by Hijazi and her children is large and rectangular, with a portrait of their dead husband and father Mohammed hanging on one side above a thin mattress and some mostly empty jars and stacked plastic bowls.
The family is from the Sabra district of Gaza City, in the north of the enclave, where Israel’s first assault was concentrated. They decided to flee the district on the day Mohammed was killed - November 17th, 2023.
They went south to the central Gazan area of Deir al-Balah, first staying with family and then moving to an encampment for the displaced. They returned to Gaza City after a ceasefire was agreed in January, but their home had been damaged and they are now living in a camp for the displaced.
Hunger makes them all listless, Hijazi said, and they often lack enough energy even to clean their tent. When visited, some of the children lay sprawled and silent on the floor. But they still have jobs to do.
Menna is often sent to queue at the food kitchen. She arrives more than an hour before it opens, knowing that otherwise she would stand no chance of getting food and often waits another hour before she is served, Hijazi said.
On days when a tanker does not bring water to their part of the camp, Mustafa (15) and Ali (13) have to walk to a standpipe in another district and lug heavy plastic jerrycans back to the tent - a chore made harder by their hunger.
Everyone remembers life before the war and they talk about the meals they used to enjoy. Mohammed Hijazi was a plumber and earned a good wage.
“People used to envy us for the variety of food we had,” his wife said, recalling breakfasts of eggs, beans, falafel, cheese, yoghurt and bread, and lunches and dinners of meat, rice, chicken and vegetables.
Her 16-year-old daughter Malik talked about burgers, chocolate and Coca-Cola.
“We are civilians. We have no say in this war. All we want is for the war to end,” Hijazi said. “We want to go back to live in homes - real homes. We want to sleep with full stomachs and in peace, not scared of dying while we sleep.” - Reuters
