Recently, an invitation arrived from my wife Leila’s distant aunt, beckoning us—me, my wife, and our three children—to her home nestled in Cairo’s Faisal neighborhood. Her promise? To prepare maftoul, a cherished Palestinian dish, a flavor we hadn’t experienced since our departure from Gaza last December. In our homeland, crafting maftoul was often a family affair. Each member had a role: one stewing pumpkin, onions, tomatoes, and chickpeas into a rich base; another kneading wheat flour into dough; a third sifting the dough through a sieve, creating tiny, pearl-like couscous. Finally, these delicate balls were steamed and lavished with the hot, fragrant stew. The prospect of tasting it again filled us with anticipation.
Leila’s voice carries the same warmth as my mother’s, her cooking echoes the familiar tastes of home. Stepping into her sixth-floor apartment, a sense of shared history enveloped me, a comforting embrace. Just months prior, my family weathered Israel’s bombardment in northern Gaza, and I myself had been detained by Israeli forces. Leila’s husband, deaf since birth, tragically perished during Israel’s 2014 offensive in Gaza. Barely seated, their eleven-year-old son, who grew up fatherless, presented a box of dominoes, patiently teaching me the game. It struck me then, the unintentional path that led us to Egypt. Leila and her brother sought refuge here for her son’s medical treatment, a journey that became indefinite exile, barring their return home.
As the maftoul simmered, its inviting aroma permeating the apartment, a video call from my brother Hamza, a father expecting his fourth child, flashed on my screen. He stood amidst the rubble of our childhood home in northern Gaza, the ominous drone of military aircraft a constant background hum. I urged him towards safety, but instead, Hamza passed the phone to my mother, who stood beside him, her face etched with weariness. She spoke of dwindling food supplies, yet her voice held gratitude for what little they possessed. She was foraging for edible plants, cheeseweed among them, a testament to their resilience in the face of scarcity.
The taste of Leila’s maftoul was a poignant reminder of home, a rare find in Egypt. I savored it alongside my wife and children, a moment of shared normalcy. However, recent news of unprecedented starvation in Gaza cast a shadow over my meal, breeding a bitter resentment towards the abundance before me. Simple family meals of chicken, rice, salad, and olives became laced with thoughts of hunger in my homeland, of loved ones I longed to share these meals with. My deepest yearning was to return to Gaza, to sit at our kitchen table, surrounded by my mother and father, to brew tea for my sisters. Food itself became secondary; their presence, their well-being, was all I craved.
Growing up in northern Gaza, food was interwoven with the fabric of our lives, marking both sorrow and joy in our family’s journey. Funerals were signaled by processions of neighbors bearing trays laden with sustenance: bread, boiled eggs, fried potatoes and eggplant, pickles, falafel – a neighborhood’s collective effort to nourish grieving families and their mourners. Weddings, too, were punctuated by food, refreshments delivered before and after celebrations: coffee and tea in winter, soda, juice, and ice cream in summer. Ramadan, the month of fasting, instilled in us a visceral understanding of hunger. Yet, after evening prayers, our family would gather for iftar, the meal that broke the fast, a moment of unity and gratitude.
Until recently, Gaza had access to flour. Before the war, approximately five hundred supply trucks entered daily, and every three months, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) provided rations to most families in my neighborhood: flour, rice, sugar, milk powder, lentils, sunflower oil, and canned goods. I only began purchasing flour after UNRWA employed me as a teacher, as I was no longer eligible for aid. As recently as last year, twenty-five kilograms of flour cost around ten U.S. dollars. My mother and I would use it to bake sfiha, flatbread topped with minced meat. I relished tearing off a warm piece, scooping up falafel, avocado, or cheese.
Even after Israeli forces initiated their 2023 offensive, following Hamas’s October 7th attack, bread remained relatively accessible, a kilogram costing about a dollar. UNRWA played a crucial role in price stabilization, releasing flour reserves to bakeries. However, with Israel’s invasion, food lines lengthened dramatically; Gaza’s northern borders sealed shut. Hours-long waits often yielded only a few loaves, and bakery fuel shortages sometimes meant returning empty-handed. Reports of airstrikes decimating bakeries in Gaza City and central Gaza instilled a chilling fear of even joining the queues.
In the agonizing weeks before my family and I fled south, desperation gripped my neighbors. In the Jabalia refugee camp, police sirens pierced the air, leading me to a street thronged with people. Driven by hunger, they had stormed a bakery. I witnessed three individuals concealing sacks of flour on a donkey cart, hidden beneath a blanket. Among those apprehended by two policemen, held by the neck, I recognized a former student. “I want to feed my family,” he pleaded, “You cannot do this to me.”
A U.N. report in December revealed a staggering truth: ninety-three percent of Gaza’s residents—over two million people—were facing crisis levels of food insecurity, or worse. “In Gaza, pretty much everybody is hungry,” Arif Husain, chief economist at the U.N. World Food Program (W.F.P.), stated in The New Yorker in January. Aid organizations needed to triple or quadruple supply flows to meet the dire need, a feat seemingly contingent on a humanitarian ceasefire. “In my life, I’ve never seen anything like this,” Husain confessed. Shortly after, Hamza sent a video of our parents, sheltering with relatives in the Jabalia refugee camp. My mother was meticulously sorting clean grains from a contaminated pile of rice, salvaged and sold to my family at the market.
On February 9th, a WhatsApp voice message from Hamza brought a sliver of news. He had managed to procure three kilograms, six and a half pounds, of wheat flour from the black market. The exorbitant price of forty U.S. dollars, he explained, meant it would vanish quickly. Yet, a note of triumph laced his voice.
Three days later, social media bore witness to Hamza’s daily sustenance: a desolate, brown morsel, charred black on one side, speckled with coarse fragments. “This is the wondrous thing we call ‘bread’—a mixture of rabbit, donkey, and pigeon feed,” Hamza wrote in Arabic. “It holds no goodness, save for filling our bellies. It defies accompaniment with other foods, even breaking it requires forceful bites.”
In his post, Hamza offered glimpses into his children’s resilience. “When you bring the new bread, I want to hide it so it doesn’t run out,” his youngest daughter, Awatef, confided. “Dad, God willing, today we will eat bread like the bread of the past,” his eldest, Razan, added, her hope unwavering. His two-and-a-half-year-old son, Hayyan, simply placed a hand over his rumbling stomach, a silent testament to his hunger. Hamza’s wife, Kawthar, was nearing her ninth month of pregnancy.
The baby arrived on the evening of February 16th. Hamza, alongside Kawthar and her mother, journeyed from his in-laws’ home to Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia, our hometown. Fear was their companion, the drone of warplanes and distant airstrikes amplifying their anxiety. Just two months prior, Israeli forces had raided the hospital, rendering it, in the World Health Organization’s assessment, non-functional.
Reaching the hospital around 9 P.M., they found no doctor. A nurse ushered them into a windowless room, blankets in short supply. “Kawthar gave birth amidst the bombardment,” Hamza recounted. Ten agonizing minutes later, their son, Ali, was born.
The hospital, Hamza explained, offered no sustenance for Kawthar, no diapers for Ali. A woman provided a single syringe of milk. Then, hospital staff urged them to return home. “Ali continued to cough and vomit for hours after his birth,” Hamza shared, his voice heavy with concern for his newborn son’s fragile start to life.
From a tent in Rafah, Mohammad, our brother, now a refugee among over a million others displaced within Gaza, sent congratulations. In a voice note, Mohammad spoke of a “gift” for his nephew. “I told Hamza about two sacks of wheat flour in my bombed apartment,” Mohammad said, “I had a feeling they survived the airstrike.” A testament to the enduring hope and resourcefulness within our family, even amidst devastation.
February 18th brought a wave of relief. “The baby has brought luck,” Hamza declared. Returning to our destroyed home, he discovered one sack intact within the rubble. “I split it with my parents and sisters, though rainwater had spoiled part,” he explained. During our video call, a teenage cousin was visible, sifting through stones and glass with bare hands, searching for the second sack, a poignant image of their relentless pursuit of survival. Days later, Hamza announced on social media a small gift for his wife: rice and beef. A single plate of uncooked white rice cost twenty-five U.S. dollars, a fist-sized portion of raw beef, a staggering seventy dollars, highlighting the exorbitant cost of basic necessities in a land starved of resources.
U.N. agencies no longer risked sending aid trucks north. In early February, CNN reported Israeli forces firing upon a UNRWA food truck in central Gaza, prompting a halt to northern deliveries. The W.F.P. briefly resumed deliveries last weekend, only to be met by desperate crowds, one driver assaulted, food seized. Convoys are again suspended for safety. “The decision to pause deliveries to northern Gaza was not taken lightly, knowing it will worsen conditions and increase starvation risk,” the W.F.P. stated. “Gaza is hanging by a thread,” a stark warning of the precipice Gaza teeters on.
Days ago, I sat with my wife, Maram, in our Cairo apartment’s backyard, sprinklers hissing life into the grass. Our youngest, Mostafa, played on a swing, his siblings at school. “The sprinklers remind me of my family’s farm,” Maram murmured, “My dad, uncles, cousins—watering strawberries, cornstalks.” A nostalgic echo of a life where abundance was ordinary, where family farms thrived.
Memories flooded back of strawberry and corn harvests from her family’s fields, of corn barbecues under grapevines at night, images preserved in photographs. This year, the fields may lie barren, no harvest to gather. Looking into Maram’s eyes, I see a shared sadness, a silent acknowledgment of the chasm between our present safety and our family’s struggles back home.
Last Monday, Dr. Bahaa al-Ashqar, the ear doctor who once treated me in Gaza, crossed into Egypt through Rafah. A 1 A.M. call jolted me awake, and two hours later, a taxi delivered him to our doorstep.
Overjoyed to see Dr. Bahaa alive, we embraced. Yet, his gaunt frame, his weakened state, was a shock. This was not the man I knew. Thirty-seven pounds shed since the war’s onset, his survival in Rafah sustained by canned food alone, a stark reminder of the war’s pervasive toll, even on those who escaped its immediate clutches.
