26-07-2025
I'm safe now but my family in Gaza are starving before my eyes
For a moment, I could not recognise her. The video call had finally gone through after days of failed attempts. The connection crackled, the image was grainy, but then her face appeared and I froze. It took me a few seconds to realise it was my mother.
Her face had changed. The woman I knew — strong, warm, composed — now looked frail and unfamiliar, her skin pale, her eyes sunken. Her voice, once clear and confident, had become raspy and strained.
'Look at my wrinkles,' she said, forcing a smile and pulling at the skin on her cheeks. 'I've grown old in this war.' I tried to keep the tone light. 'You're still the most beautiful woman I know,' I said. 'What's your skincare secret?' She replied: 'We haven't had proper food in days.'
My parents are among many from the town of Khan Yunis in central Gaza who fled west to al-Mawasi — a narrow, overcrowded strip of land by the sea that Israel declared a 'safe zone', though it offers neither safety nor food.
Like everyone else here, they live in a tent, surviving on lentils and rice, if they're lucky. Sometimes they grind lentils into bread.
These are not poor people. My mother was a director at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) Gaza Training Centre. My father worked in public relations at the University of Palestine. Today, they boil water and throw in whatever food they can find to keep hunger at bay.
My younger brother Mohammed, 18, should be in his second year of university. Instead, he often queues for hours in the hope of getting a bag of flour. I worry every time he leaves home not just because of airstrikes: stories abound of young men being stabbed to death and robbed of their flour or trampled in the chaos of the food lines.
This is the worst phase of the war. Not only because the bombings have not stopped — the air rumbles almost constantly with Israel's airstrikes — but because people are also dying slowly. Starvation doesn't scream like missiles. It doesn't flash across headlines. It kills quietly.
In December, I was forced to flee our home in Khan Yunis with my husband and our two children, Maryam, seven, and Wajih, six. I didn't want to leave. I told the children again and again: 'We'll come back soon.' But we never have.
Before that, our home had already become a shelter. My parents, siblings and their children had all taken refuge in our building. My husband's family lived on the first floor. We were upstairs. We sheltered about 100 people in that home.
When the strikes intensified in December 2023, my family moved to the Khan Yunis Training Centre, where we were crammed into a single room. I took our children to Rafah, where we ended up living in a basement with 17 others. There was no running water or toilets, let alone electricity.
Then, in January, an Israeli airstrike hit an apartment next to us in Tel al-Sultan, a neighbourhood we thought was safe. Eleven people were killed, most of them children. That night, I fled again with my children, this time to my sister's home in east Rafah.
Even that area was marked in red on Israeli digital maps, meaning it could be targeted. But we had no choice. Eventually, The Times helped to arrange an evacuation for myself and the children. My husband had to stay behind.
Friday, July 25, was our wedding anniversary — the second we have spent apart. I wish more than anything that he could be with us.
After seven long months in Egypt, I received a Safe Haven fellowship from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, allowing me to continue my work as a journalist in safety in Amsterdam. Here I have shelter, warmth and food — unlike my family.
Communicating with them when they live in a land without electricity can be complicated. Some people in Gaza with access to solar panels charge a fee for an internet password and signal strong enough to allow video calls. My husband is working as a journalist for NBC and living in Khan Yunis.
He tells me that hunger has changed how people look at each other. 'We stare longer,' he said. 'Sometimes we don't recognise faces we once knew. War and hunger have reshaped them.'
My mother, for her part, tells me that she recently went to the market hoping to find something to cook. She came back with one courgette — just one — for 40 shekels (£9). It had to feed ten people.
She told me how she tried to stretch a kilo of flour into enough dough, how she spent hours trying to find something to use as fuel — bits of wood, cardboard, anything that would catch fire, how she eventually managed to bake 12 loaves — one for each person.
My aunt fainted from hunger one day and had to be taken to hospital and fed on a glucose drip. My diabetic uncle, who needs a strict diet, is now at constant risk.
My sister, Riham, also lives in a tent with her husband and children in al-Mawasi after being displaced four times.
Her husband spends his days waiting near the main road where aid trucks might pass. After waiting every day for hours, he came back with a 25-kilo bag of flour on Wednesday night.
Riham sent me a joyful message — not just because they finally had food, but because her husband had returned alive. Their children greeted him as if he had brought home a rare treasure. The family stayed up baking late that night outside their tent. Riham sent me a photo of Baraa, her ten-year-old son, carefully watching the flames as he flipped dough on a blackened metal tray balanced over bricks. With no oven or gas, people rely on open fires like this built from scraps of debris and wood.
Baraa helps to make bread after his father managed to get a bag of flour
'But many nights, all I can give them is soup,' said Riham. 'They fall asleep hungry and wake up the same.'
Even those who still have money, like my husband, cannot find anything to buy. 'We eat olive oil with dry bread,' he said. But even if you can afford the food when it exists it doesn't mean you can get it.
There's a severe cash crisis, too. Many shops and vendors no longer accept banknotes because they are worn out and torn. Israel hasn't allowed any new currency into Gaza since the war began, so most of the remaining bills are damaged beyond use.
This has given rise to a new job in Gaza: banknote repairers. They charge a fee to 'laminate' old banknotes, which is meant to keep them usable. Cash machines have long since ceased functioning. So 'cash brokers' are charging huge commissions to help people access their own money in banks. My mother recently paid them 1,000 shekels (£220) via a banking app. She was given only 600 shekels (£130) in cash.
People have turned to bartering. Several of my friends now use Facebook groups to exchange basic goods — a bag of lentils for a bag of rice, or sugar for flour. A can of fava beans costs 25 shekels (£5.50). A kilo of lentils is 60 (£13). Tomatoes and cucumbers go for 100 shekels (£20) per kilo if they can be found at all, onions for 120 (£26.50).
As for flour, it is gold: 'Before the war, a kilo of flour cost no more than three shekels (65p),' said my sister. 'Now a 25-kilo sack costs up to 2,000 shekels (£440) if you can find it.'
I now live in the Netherlands, far from Gaza. But the hunger is never far. It's in my phone calls, in the words I hear every day: 'We're hungry … there is no food … we are waiting to die.'
ABED RAHIM KHATIB/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES
Since I left, I've learnt how heavy a full plate can feel. I look at food and see faces: my husband, my mother's, my father's, those of my nieces and nephews. I eat only once a day, not because I'm fasting, but because I can't bear to eat when they have nothing.
And beyond the hunger, there's the fear. My husband is still there, still documenting, still surviving. He's come close to death more times than I can count. Our days revolve around short messages, unstable signals and constant dread.
