Soha Ahmed Hamdouna began her piece by saying that they have gone from aiming to find food to counting their blessings if they manage to come across clean drinking water. She described how entire families are living off of bread and water, with poultry and livestock farms that once fed Palestinians now a thing of the past thanks to prolonged fighting. Missile attacks have left farmers without a single chicken or cow in some cases, while land scattered with rocket ash and explosive residues has been rendered completely unfit to grow crops that can sustain people.
“What hurts me more than my hunger is seeing my children asking for food and clean water. We live in times where even finding vegetables is a dream. I won’t even mention fruit, as it has become a distant luxury we cannot afford to think about,” she wrote.
Hamdouna described using the land where her grandmother’s home stood before it was razed by Israeli bulldozers to try to plant tomatoes. The 80-year-old woman, who was paralyzed, died when the property was bombed and bulldozed last October when Israel raided the area near al-Shifa Hospital.
Of the tomatoes they planted, just three grew, but they consider themselves lucky because so many others there have no access whatsoever to any type of fresh food. Instead, many are trying to survive on canned food and experiencing intestinal infections from the various bits of food they are managing to find.
One man in his 70s who cares for his grandchildren after their father was killed in the fighting explained how they are surviving off of scraps of bread that are left behind by others, soaking them in water so they can chew them.
With winter approaching, the situation will only intensify. Hamdouna wrote: “We are now living through the harshest chapter of our lives, as winter has arrived with empty stomachs, cold bodies, and partially destroyed homes or tents that give us neither security nor warmth; inside, it is colder than outside.”
She lamented the fact hat her children’s dreams have now been reduced to hoping to find a roasted chicken rather than the typical hopes and dreams of young people growing up in places not torn apart by war. They spend their nights listening to warplanes and hoping the morning will bring news the war is over, but the cycle repeats, day after day.
86% of Gaza population at crisis level of hunger
Hunger experts have warned that the Gaza Strip remains at a high risk of famine, with hundreds of thousands of people currently displaced from their homes and living in squalid and cramped conditions, often in tents. Although shipments have been resumed, Israel previously blocked all food from entering the north for the first two weeks of October. Just 5,800 tons of food managed to enter the enclave last month, versus nearly 76,000 in September.
An international authority on hunger made up of UN agencies, governments, and aid organizations known as the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has warned repeatedly of famine in Gaza, and they report that 86% of Gaza’s population is currently experiencing a crisis level of hunger, while 6% are at the highest level, known as catastrophic hunger; nearly a third were at this level earlier in the war. However, they warn that conditions could deteriorate quickly depending on how things progress, and the IPC expects the level of people at catastrophic hunger to double as winter closes in.
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