Opinion

Our northern Gaza family will feed our neighbors — until we can’t

By now, the daily routine is dignifying and familiar. Our mother wakes at the crack of dawn to peel and prepare produce, my father sources spices, and I work as operations manager. By 7 a.m., a seemingly endless line of hungry families appears, pots in hand, outside the house where we prepare food. Pulling off each day’s meal requires a series of small miracles.

My family is among the about 300,000 Palestinians who remain in the far north of Gaza and are facing what rights groups and the United Nations have called deliberate starvation by Israel. Israeli forces long ago destroyed our bakeries and much of our cropland and chicken farms and fishing fleet. By January, we had resorted to eating animal feed to survive. Over the past weeks, we have seen infants die of hunger, their bodies shrunken into skeletons, and once thriving children reduced to skin and bones.

For some time, I lost all hope. The litany of horrors has been relentless: In late November, an Israeli airstrike killed my brother, his wife and their four children in the middle of the night as they slept in their home. In December, I was abducted by Israeli soldiers, stripped to my underwear and paraded with other blindfolded men in the cold like circus animals. I have nothing to do with the fighting in Gaza; I am a shopkeeper, but then, neither did the men around me who were also randomly rounded up that day. We Palestinians understand that the sole purpose of these practices is to humiliate us. To break, silence and shrink us. But it didn’t break me, and today, I stand on Gaza’s deadliest battleground: the front lines of hunger.

There is virtually no aid entering northern Gaza. As of this writing, both Anera and World Central Kitchen have suspended operations, the latter after seven of its workers were killed in an IDF attack. Some 2 million Gazans rely on the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the U.N. agency responsible for the welfare of Palestinian refugees, for their survival. Israel ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza on Oct. 12, after destroying and damaging hundreds of the UNRWA’s installations in airstrikes there. Since then, little to no aid has been allowed to enter Beit Lahia, where my family continues to live.

One day, having learned that the public kitchen our family relied on for food had run out of rice and closed, I hatched the idea of starting a family-run soup kitchen.

It is next to impossible to buy legumes or grains right now, and spices are a luxury item. But living in Beit Lahia, once considered the breadbasket of the Gaza Strip, I recognized an opportunity in our local farmers. With a list of old contacts, I set out to source basic ingredients like potatoes, carrots and onions — now rare commodities that most residents of the north can only dream of. I secured and paid hundreds of dollars for bundles of firewood — difficult to find since Israel has prevented cooking fuel from reaching us — foraged for seasonal edible greens like common mallow and wild chard, bought canned mushrooms for added protein at seven times the old price, purchased a few bags of smuggled tomatoes at $27 a pound, and found some overgrown zucchinis that looked like pumpkins — zucchinis that should have been picked weeks ago. (Because Israeli snipers have been firing at farmers, no one has felt safe enough to tend to their farms.) I joke that we finally have a stock exchange in Gaza — for vegetables.

Our reality remains dark. Israel has reduced our once lush and beautiful town, famous for its apples and strawberries and citrus, to piles of rubble. There are no mosques to worship at, no schools for our children to learn in, no shops to speak of but rather a makeshift black market for those lucky enough to have gotten their hands on small amounts of aid to barter with.

We are using the little we have left to keep this makeshift soup kitchen open. We hope that before these dwindling resources run out, President Biden steps up to prevent the imminent famine that the United Nations says a quarter of Gaza’s population faces — instead of sending more bombs to kill us with.

Airdropping food or building a floating pier controlled by Israel, which is preventing the aid from reaching people to start with, is a dangerous and wholly insufficient solution and, from our vantage point, feels like little more than a publicity stunt. My friend Mouin Bayk was among those killed by a drone last week as he attempted to reach some of this aid for his family. I appeal to Biden to call for an immediate cease-fire, to exercise the influence and power he has on Israel, to hear our pleas and insist that the borders be opened and that aid be allowed to flow into Gaza, and to demand that police officers responsible for overseeing the distribution of aid be allowed to do their jobs without fear of being targeted and killed.

Our kitchen is now operating daily during Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. This week, we ran out of mallow and squash, and with the few lambs remaining being sold at a whopping $2,500, we decided to offer lemon juice and wild purslane stew instead. Ours is a necessary but temporary solution to a horrific situation. I dream of a future in which we are not dependent on foreign aid and in which our natural resourcefulness and bountiful land are put to rightful use. In which there is no suffocating blockade — now in its 17th year — controlling the movement of everything that leaves and enters Gaza.

Until then, we will keep serving our community, remembering that when all else has failed the Palestinians, the land did not.