'I cry when my baby cries from hunger': Diary of a Gaza family

CAIRO/GAZA CITY: 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,” Hijazi told Reuters from their tent pitched amid the rubble of Gaza City. “I cry at night when my baby cries and her stomach aches from hunger.”

Six-year-old Zaha 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 kilo 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 kilo 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.

The Hijazis’ 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, killing more than 53,000 people.

This 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 U.S.-sponsored system run by private contractors will begin operating soon. The plan will involve distribution centres in areas controlled by Israeli troops, a plan the U.N. and aid agencies have attacked, saying it will lead to further displacement of the population and that aid should flow through existing networks.

Hijazi said her family had seen no sign yet of the new aid and she is consumed by worry for her baby, Lama, who was 5 kg when weighed last week. That’s about half the average for a healthy one-year-old girl according to World Health Organization charts.

This week the family have had, at most, a single meal a day to share, the mother added.

U.N. aid chief Tom Fletcher said this week that the amount of aid Israel was proposing to allow into Gaza was “a drop in the ocean” of what was needed.

WE HAVE NO SAY IN THIS WAR

The tent shared by Hijazi and her children is large and rectangular with a portrait of their dead husband and father Mohammed hanging on one side above a thin mattress and some mostly empty jars and stacked plastic bowls.

The family is from the Sabra district of Gaza City, in the north of the enclave, where Israel’s first assault was concentrated. They decided to flee the district on the day Mohammed was killed – November 17, 2023.

They went south to the central Gazan area of Deir al-Balah, first staying with family and then moving to an encampment for the displaced. They returned to Gaza City after a ceasefire was agreed in January, but their home had been damaged and they are now living in a camp for the displaced.

Hunger makes them all listless, Hijazi said, and they often lack enough energy even to clean their tent. When Reuters visited, some of the children lay sprawled silent on the floor. But they still have jobs to do.

Menna is often sent to queue at the food kitchen. She arrives more than an hour before it opens, knowing that otherwise she would stand no chance of getting food and often waits another hour before she is served, Hijazi said.

On days when a tanker does not bring water to their part of the camp, Mustafa, 15, and Ali, 13, have to walk to a standpipe in another district and lug heavy plastic jerrycans back to the tent – a chore made harder by their hunger.

Everyone remembers life before the war and they talk about the meals they used to enjoy. Mohammed Hijazi was a plumber and earned a good wage.

“People used to envy us for the variety of food we had,” his wife said, recalling breakfasts of eggs, beans, falafel, cheese, yoghurt and bread, and lunches and dinners of meat, rice, chicken and vegetables.

“We are civilians. We have no say in this war. All we want is for the war to end,” Hijazi said. “We want to go back to live in homes – real homes. We want to sleep with full stomachs and in peace, not scared of dying while we sleep.”