A Gazan family's descent towards starvation

New Straits Times

25-05-2025

MERVAT Hijazi and her nine children didn't 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," said Hijazi in their tent pitched amid the rubble of Gaza City. "I cry at night when my baby cries and her stomach aches from hunger."
Zaha, 6, can't sleep because of Israel's bombardment.
"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.
Sunday, May 18: Her family was given about half a kilogramme of cooked lentils from a community kitchen run by a charity, half the amount she would normally use for a single meal.
Monday: A local aid group was distributing some vegetables in the camp but there wasn't enough to go round and Hijazi's family didn't 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.
Tuesday: The family received about half a kilogramme of cooked pasta from the kitchen. One daughter was also given some falafel by an uncle who lived nearby.
Wednesday: A good day, relatively. They received a bowl of rice with lentils at the community kitchen. It wasn't 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."
Thursday: The kitchen was closed, the family couldn't find out why. They had nothing to eat except for the peanut sachet for 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.
Their plight is a snapshot of the misery plaguing the Palestinian enclave of Gaza. A global hunger monitor warned this month half a million people face starvation while famine looms.
Israel has been bombarding and besieging Gaza since Hamas launched a surprise attack against Israeli border communities on Oct 7, 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, an accusation the group denies.
Last week, Israel started allowing some food to enter the territory for the first time since March 2, including flour and baby food but it says a new United States-sponsored system run by private contractors will begin operating soon.
Hijazi said her family had seen no sign yet of the new aid and she was consumed by worry for her baby, Lama, who was 5kg when weighed two weeks ago.
That's about half the average for a healthy 1-year-old girl, according to World Health Organisation charts.
United Nations aid chief Tom Fletcher said 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 her dead husband Mohammed hanging on one side above a thin mattress and some mostly empty jars and stacked plastic bowls.
Hunger made them all listless, said Hijazi, and they often lacked enough energy even to clean their tent. But they still have jobs to do. Menna is often sent to queue at the food kitchen.
She would arrive more than an hour before it opened, knowing that otherwise she would stand no chance of getting food, and often waited another hour before she was served, said Hijazi.