The Daily Hunt for Food in Gaza

For two million hungry Gazans, most days bring a difficult search for something to eat. Amany Mteir, 52, scours the streets north of Gaza City, where people sell or trade what food they have. This was the scene along Saftawy Street two weeks ago.

Farther north, in Beit Lahia, Aseel Mutair, 21, said she and her family of four split one pot of soup from an aid kitchen twice last week. One day they had nothing but tea.

Nizar Hammad, 30, is sheltering in a tent in Rafah with seven other adults and four children. They have not gotten aid in two weeks, and Nizar worked two days at a market to earn enough money to buy these bags of rice from a street vendor.

As the war in Gaza enters its sixth month, the risk of famine and starvation is acute, according to the United Nations. Aid groups have warned that deaths from malnutrition-related causes have only just begun.

The war, including Israel’s bombardment and siege, has choked food imports and destroyed agriculture, and nearly the entire population of Gaza relies on scant humanitarian aid to eat. The United States and others are looking for ways to deliver supplies by sea and air.

The problems are especially worrisome in the north, where aid has been almost nonexistent. U.N. agencies have mostly suspended their aid operations there, citing Israeli restrictions on convoys, security issues and poor conditions of roads.

The New York Times asked three families to share photos and videos of their search for food over the past few weeks. They all said that food was getting harder to find, and that most days, they did not know whether they would eat at all.

One meal a day

Humanitarian aid convoys do not reach Aseel and Amany’s homes in the north, and they have decided it is too dangerous to travel to seek them out. Instead, they head out early most mornings to survey informal street markets like this one.

Some vendors used to run grocery stores and are selling what stock they have left. Others buy and resell humanitarian aid. An average of just six commercial trucks carrying food and other supplies have been allowed to enter Gaza each day since early December.

One of the cheapest foods Aseel’s family can find is ground barley, which before the war was used in animal feed. Corn flour is sometimes available but is more expensive.

Aseel’s mother used these ingredients to make a piece of palm-sized pita bread for each of them. “I can’t even describe how awful it tastes,” Aseel said.

Even when Aseel’s family finds food before the afternoon, they wait to eat their single meal until dinnertime so they can sleep better.

On a recent day, her father found this small amount of rice at a street vendor’s table, and a day later found this portion of flour — after a five-hour search. The discovery made the family feel festive, but the inflated prices chipped away at their savings.

Aseel’s parents were unemployed before the war, but received some social services support because her mother is a cancer patient.

One night, Aseel, her parents and her brother, Muhammad, split a can of mushrooms to go with the rice. Aseel said she tried to convince herself it tasted like chicken.

With the flour, they made traditional pita bread, eating it with this soup from the leaves of a wild plant known as khubeiza.

Last week, they had no luck at the markets. So on Monday, Muhammad, 16, stood in line for two hours at a tekeyah, a charity kitchen, at a nearby school. He brought home a bowl of rice soup for the family, but Aseel said he told her he did not like to be seen as begging.

Aseel ate five dates from the family’s stash and had a cup from her last container of instant coffee, a reminder of her life as a university student before the war.

The next day, Aseel’s father and brother spent hours on their feet searching for supplies. They visited Aseel’s aunt and reluctantly asked her for food. She shared a small amount of lentils. They ate them that evening and finished the dates they had planned to save.

They were too weak the next day to check the markets again, and there was no food at the aid kitchen. Instead, they drank tea.

“Human beings are energy, and my energy is depleted,” Aseel said. “I can’t endure more than this.”

Like Aseel, Amany’s family drinks tea to feel full. They used to fetch water from a nearby mosque, but since it was bombed, they have been buying water from trucks that pass by most days.

Her family — seven adults, including her three sons and their wives — has been surviving on a broth made with water and cubes of chicken bouillon.

“When I can’t think and I don’t know what to do, I focus on the kids, but it’s especially hard when they tell you at night that there’s no food,” Amany said.

Many to feed

In Rafah, where Nizar is sheltering, there have been more aid deliveries than in the north. But the amount of food provided to each family — a bag of flour or a few cans of beans every few days — has not been enough, he said.

Over the past two weeks, Nizar’s family has not gotten any aid at all. They have just one bag of flour left.

The family used to draw on its savings to buy ingredients from street vendors, and Nizar’s mother would then prepare one meal to split among 12 people.

But Nizar said his family’s situation was getting worse. The money he was saving for his wedding is gone, and the prices at street markets keep rising, he said.

Nizar took this photograph of a street shop near the Rafah border crossing on Saturday where humanitarian supplies were being resold. “Everything you see here is mainly aid,” Nizar said, adding that most people could not afford the products on the shelves.

He explained that some people sold aid when they had more than they needed. It is harder for people without connections to aid organizations or shelters to get assistance, he added.

“This is tiring and disgusting,” Nizar said.

Whenever they can, the adults in his family save extra food for the children. The children also visit a tekeyah, shown in this photo that Nizar took in late February, where they wait hours for a container of soup or grains.

On Saturday, with no other food available, the whole family ate their day’s meal from the tekeyah.

For all three families, splitting limited food among so many people is a challenge. Amany, whose family of seven stays in an apartment with 23 others, said that life in close quarters was chaotic.

“People start criticizing each other and keeping track of everything, trying to hide things for fear they’ll run out,” she said. “Some sneak out in the middle of the night to eat everything before anyone notices.”

Makeshift kitchens

At Amany’s home, each person takes turns in the morning to search the streets for wood to burn. The work keeps them busy, but it is tiring.

They build a fire in a room where a wall was blown out, giving them a view of the ruined buildings outside.

“We’ve regressed to the era of firewood and smoke,” said Amany, who worked as a school administrator before the war.

Aseel moved back to her home in Beit Lahia in January after being displaced five times. Her family’s apartment has no power and their refrigerator and stove sit empty. But unlike many in Gaza, her family still has access to a water tank fed by a municipal source.

Now they cook outside, making scrap-wood fires to brew tea and boil water for drinking and washing.

“This used to be our garden, it used to be filled with olive trees where our entire family would gather,” Aseel said. “But now it’s all been swept away.”