All there is to eat in Gaza – bird-feed loaf, date wrapped in gauze
DEIR AL-BALAH: After surviving on bitter loaves made from animal feed instead of proper flour, three young brothers who fled their home in Gaza City for a tent further south were tucking into a tub of halawa, a sweet crumbly paste.
Seraj Shehada, eight, and his brothers Ismail, nine, and Saad, 11, said they had run away in secret to take refuge with their aunt in her tent in Deir al-balah, central Gaza, because there was nothing to eat in Gaza City.
“When we were in Gaza City, we used to eat nothing. We would eat every two days,” said Seraj, speaking as the three boys ate the halawa straight out of the tub, with a spoon.
“We would eat bird and donkey food, just anything,” he said, referring to loaves made from grains and seeds meant for animal consumption. “Day after day, not this food.”
Food shortages have been a problem across the Palestinian enclave since the Oct 7 start of the war between Israel and Hamas, but are particularly acute in northern Gaza, where aid deliveries have been rarer for longer.
Some of the few aid trucks to reach the north have been mobbed by desperate, hungry crowds, while aid workers have reported seeing people thin and visibly starving with sunken eyes.
In central Gaza, the situation is marginally better, but still far from easy.
At Al-nuseirat refugee camp, just north of Deir al-balah, Warda Mattar, a displaced mother sheltering in a school with her twomonth-old baby, was giving him a date wrapped in gauze to suck on, for lack of any milk.
“My son is supposed to have milk as a newborn, be it natural milk or formula milk, but I wasn’t able to get him milk, because there is no milk in Gaza,” said Warda.
“I resorted to dates to keep my son quiet,” she said.
In the tent in Deir al-balah, the three brothers said they had lost their mother, another brother and several aunts in the war. They were left with their father and grandmother, and almost nothing to eat apart from loaves made from animal feed, said the eldest brother, Saad.
“It was bitter. We didn’t want to eat it. We were forced to eat it, one small loaf every two days,” he said, adding that they drank salty water and got sick, and there was no way to wash themselves or their clothes,” he said.