'Maybe we'll eat sand'
What starvation is like
IN APRIL, THE ELEVEN members of Mariam al-Najjar’s family still had some canned food. Peas and carrots, boiled with spices. They would eat this makeshift stew with rice, under the tarpaulin of their makeshift home in a makeshift tent city outside Khan Younis. “We can’t get anything that provides any protein or nutrients,” al-Najjar explained, back then. She worried what would happen when whatever food was left in Gaza finally ran out. “Maybe we’ll eat sand,” she said.
Hind al-Nawajha is a mother with four children. She once had a home in a place called Beit Lahia, in Gaza’s north. Since June she has been camping on the roadside near Gaza City. As a woman, she struggles to muscle her way into the vast queues for aid. Men, larger in size and more assertive, usually get there first. “Our feet are bruised and our shoes are torn off,” she says. “You either come back carrying food for your children and they will be happy, or you come back in a burial shroud. Or you go back upset and your children will cry. This is life…we can’t do it anymore.”
Mohammed Mhawish escaped Gaza for Egypt. But he remembers what it was like to starve. It was, he describes, not just a pain but a kind of silence. “My head throbbed constantly. When I stood up, the room spun. My mouth tasted like metal. My limbs felt heavy, like I was wading through water. I stopped feeling hunger as a craving; it became something else—a slow shutting down.”
By Ramadan last year, the poet Samah Zaqout had been displaced ten times. She left the Jabalia camp, in the far north, for the al-Mawasi “safe zone” on the coast. “My father, responsible for nine of us, went to the market every day, desperately searching for something to break our Ramadan fast. Most days, he returned with nothing but a small bag containing perhaps two cans of lentils or a tray of rice. The market was stripped bare,” Zaqout writes. “I remember the day my father came home with a handful of dried fruits and nuts—there wasn’t a single fresh one left in the market. He divided them between us, making scarcity feel like a feast.”
Ruwaida Amer is thirty-years-old, a science teacher and part-time journalist. She lived in the farming town of al-Fukhari, in the southeast of Gaza, just over the fields from the border fence with Israel. In May, Amer and her family obeyed an IDF evacuation order to leave their town. She now lives with her aunt in a camp in Khan Younis, and sometimes teaches children with a salvaged whiteboard, in a pale blue headscarf. “Our bodies are breaking down,” she writes late in July. “We feel constantly weak, unfocused, and off-balance. We grow irritable easily, but most of the time we just stay silent. Talking uses up too much energy.” Amer reports the prices in the markets. A kilo of tomatoes is around $25, cucumbers $20, a few pounds of flour: $45. “These numbers,” she says, “feel outrageous and cruel.”
“My mouth tasted like metal. My limbs felt heavy, like I was wading through water. I stopped feeling hunger as a craving; it became something else—a slow shutting down.”
Amer’s oldest cousin Mahmoud has four children. He has, she notes, lost forty kilograms in a few months. Mahmoud goes out into the heat and dust of a dawn, to a feeding centre operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. “Today I crawled on my hands and knees through a crowd of thousands,” he reported. “I had to collect whatever had fallen to the ground—lentils, rice, chickpeas, pasta, even salt. My bones ache from being stepped on, but I have to do it for my children. I can’t bear the sound of their hunger.”
Abdulrahman Ismail is a journalist. All the things reporters like to tell themselves about the nobility and purpose of their trade are really true, in Gaza. “Some of us drink salt water just to remain standing while we work,” he told the Columbia Journalism Review. “Others chew dried herbs or wild leaves to quiet the screaming inside. There are moments when my hands tremble too hard to hold a pen, when I can’t focus my eyes on the camera lens in front of me…The hunger scrambles everything—thought, memory, even language.”
Omar Hadad took a picture of a piece of flatbread, eight months ago, and shared it on social media. It is no bigger than a side-plate. In happier times, this wheel of bread was a good way to mop up a rich and spicy sauce, or for folding over fatty chicken and pickles. Hadad didn’t want to eat that bread, back then: “I wanted to keep it. I didn’t know why I wanted to hold onto it. Maybe I wanted it to bear witness to what we had come to…so that one day, I could show my children when they grow up that life wasn’t what we had hoped it would be.”
Gaza is very hot in July. The problem, in the chillier months, was finding good enough fuel to warm a room. The cardboard boxes branded with the name of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation are just as useful as the food they contain, to light a stove. Now there are no fans, and no electricity. Rida Abu Hadayed is thirty-two. She doesn’t have enough hands to waft a pot lid or a piece of plastic over the faces of all her seven children, to cool them. “There is no electricity, there is nothing,” she says, sweating. “They cannot sleep. They keep crying all day until the sun sets.” Mohammed al-Awini, 23, thinks the heat isn’t as bad as the insects. They feed on the trash in the streets, then torment him at night: “We are awake all night, dying from mosquito bites. We are the most tired people in the world.”
Razan Abu Zaher was four-years-old. For a month she had a bed in al-Aqsa Hospital, Gaza City. The only thing that entered her small body was the oxygen pumped through a nasal cannula. “Her health was very good before the war, but after the war, her condition began to deteriorate due to malnutrition,” Razan’s mother Tahrir told CNN. There was no money to buy milk, if milk was available. “There is nothing to strengthen her.” Razan died on Sunday, July 20.