AT the end of July, I went to a makeshift tent camp in Deir al-Balah called al-Masmiyya. The camp is named after al-Masmiyya al-Kabira, a Palestinian village northeast of the Gaza Strip that was depopulated in 1948. Most of the people living in the camp today are descended from refugees who were forced out of the original village. Israel’s relentless military campaign in Gaza has long since displaced the descendants of those original refugees from their homes.
By Ghada Abdulfattah
Al-Masmiyya camp was first established at the beginning of the war to shelter families fleeing from northern Gaza. Many of its original residents later left and attempted to return north. Almost all have been caught in the endless cycle of displacement that has consumed the lives of many people in Gaza over the past 23 months.
I went to the camp, which was housing just a few families at the time, to meet Sahar al-Qassas, a 45-year-old mother of eight. She and her family have been displaced multiple times – from Gaza City to Rafah, from Rafah to Khan Younis, and from Khan Younis to Deir al-Balah. During the ceasefire earlier this year, they returned to Gaza City, only to be displaced again to Deir al-Balah once it ended.
As man-made starvation grips Gaza ever more tightly, I wanted to follow Sahar for a day to observe what she and her family eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and to tell her story.
What I found was how hard it is to do journalistic interviews the way I was taught. When I asked, “What did you eat for breakfast?”, Sahar laughed and bounced the question back to me: “What about you – what did you eat?”. Directed towards me – or anyone else living in Gaza – the question is equally as relevant.
And it’s not just Sahar. This happens all the time when I interview people about their lives. I try to remind them – and myself – that I need to hear their stories, not just for the record but out of a sense of journalistic responsibility.
But the truth is, we’ve all been through the same things. There’s barely a line between the journalist and the subject anymore. We have lived through everything – together. It’s not just one person who is being forced to endure this. It’s all of us.
“You came to his wedding”
I was reminded of the erasure of this line as soon as I arrived at the camp. Salah Abu Khaddoura, who is known as Abu Mustafa, came up to welcome me. Abu Mustafa, 48, is the self-appointed representative of the camp who often interacts with aid groups, advocating for the needs of the people who live there. He sometimes helps me out with stories, too.
“Do you remember my son, Mureed?” he asked. “You came to his wedding.”
I did. I remembered the joy on that war-strained day – his son in a borrowed suit, music echoing weakly between tents. Back then, on 27 July 2024, I was reporting on why people still get married in Gaza in the midst of war.
“He was killed,” Abu Mustafa said softly.
I froze. “He was killed?” The words felt wrong in my mouth.
He nodded.
Mureed was just 25. A little over three weeks before his first wedding anniversary, he had gone to one of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) food distribution sites by the Netzarim corridor to try to get food for his pregnant wife. Like so many others, he didn’t return. When she gave birth, Mureed’s widow named the baby boy after his slain father.
Abu Mustafa’s grief when telling me this was quiet, deep, and uninterrupted.
Later, I watched TikTok videos on the father’s phone that Mureed had made before his death. Mureed’s voice was raspy, eyes hollowed out by exhaustion.
“When gunfire breaks out in Israel,” he had said, “the world holds its breath. But when children starve to death in Gaza, the world doesn’t even blink.”
It stuck with me because the bombs and bullets are no longer even the most threatening killers. Starvation is. Often, they work in tandem – the hunger driving people to aid distribution sites where they are gunned down.
“It’s hard to get displaced when your children are starving”
Sahar had also gone to one of the GHF distribution points in Rafah shortly before my visit. “I have nothing to feed my children. They cry all day and all night,” she explained. “I keep distracting them by saying the food might enter tomorrow. Drink some more water. Let us have tea.”
How many tomorrows had there been before she decided to risk trying to get aid from the GHF?
When she arrived near the site, people had already been killed. She saw their lifeless bodies being carried away on donkey carts.
“Do I want to get food or do I want to get killed trying to get food for my children?” she thought. “If I die, who will they have during this famine?”
Even after making the dangerous journey, Sahar decided the GHF site wasn’t worth the risk. She instead approached relatives and people she knew living in al-Mawasi, the coastal area of central and southern Gaza, where Israel has pushed so much of the Strip’s population. Al-Mawasi is closer to the GHF distribution sites, she reasoned, so maybe people there would have more food. But the people she asked had nothing to give.
While there, Sahar heard that Israel had issued evacuation orders for the southwestern parts of Deir al-Balah close to where al-Masmiyya is located. She rushed back to find out that the area where her family lives had not been designated as an evacuation or combat zone. But Israeli tanks soon began rolling into neighbouring areas, and shrapnel from their firing started to reach their tent.
Sahar and her family heard an explosion just behind them – one of the buildings had been bombed, killing many people. A young girl in one of the neighbouring tents was wounded too. She had been sitting outside when an Israeli quadcopter drone fired at a gathering. A bullet struck her in the thigh. She was only seven years old. The whole camp started panicking and began evacuating.
“It’s hard to get displaced when your children are starving,” Sahar told me. “You ask them to walk, but they cannot. There is no energy.”
“Market of hope and lies”
The first night after they evacuated, Sahar and her family slept in a tent so close to the beach that the tide was practically knocking on the door. The second night, the family returned to Gaza City. But when they got there, “it was all fire, bombing, and airstrikes”, Sahar said.
And on top of that, there was still starvation.
Sahar wandered from home to home, knocking on doors to ask for bread, but everyone had the same reply: “If you have any, share it with us.”
A few days later, Sahar and her family decided to return to Deir al-Balah. They went on foot and pitched their tent in the same spot they had recently fled.
All of this happened about a week before my visit. Sahar told me the story as I followed her around the camp.
At this time in Gaza, even dugga – the traditional spice blend of sesame, wheat, sumac – had vanished. During the peak of the famine, people started roasting lentils and calling it spice. More than anything, bread was a central fixation. There was no bread.
During the worst moments, Sahar remembers soaking dumpling-like tubes of pasta overnight, crushing it, and kneading it like dough. If there was no pasta, she used lentils or beans. She would add a plateful of flour to make it sticky enough to hold together. “It has no taste, but it keeps their stomachs quiet,” she said, referring to her children.
Still, her children, ranging in age between six and 24 years old, asked for bread every day.
“Bread isn’t just food,” Sahar explained. “It’s our culture. Our life. We were raised on bread. It sustains you when there’s nothing else. It’s simple, filling.”
Bakeries had been shuttered for months, fuel was gone, flour had nearly vanished. The 25-kilo sacks, once distributed as aid, became currency. Prices swung like moods in a collapsing world. One day, a kilo might cost 200 shekels (about $54). Another day, 40 ($12). Even those swings depended on politics – rumours of a ceasefire, whispers of a US envoy visiting. Sahar calls it the “flour market of hope and lies”.
Israel has since allowed some aid and commercial trucks into Gaza. Now, a bit more food is available. Prices have come down, but they are still too high for the vast majority of people, who have been made jobless and run out of money since the beginning of the war – including Sahar and her family. Even if you have money, fruit, vegetables, and milk are virtually non-existent.
So Sahar improvises – we all do.
“Mama, what can we eat?”
On the day I spent with Sahar, she was doing the laundry in the early morning – scrubbing her children’s clothes with seawater. The aid water truck had come and gone in an instant, too quickly for her to fill even a single container.
Her children began asking for food again. She tried to distract them by telling stories, pointing to the sea – about 200 metres from the camp – and making promises she knew she couldn’t keep. Still, they kept tugging at her dress, clutching their bellies, and asking again and again: “Mama, what can we eat?”
“It is soul-crushing to be a mother; to hear your child say, ‘I’m hungry’, and you have nothing,” she said.
Unable to bear it any longer, Sahar stepped inside the tent. A moment later, she began to cry – silently at first, and then more openly.
Her youngest child, six years old, followed her inside the tent and saw her face streaked with tears. “Are you crying because I’m hungry?” he asked.
Sahar didn’t answer.
The boy took her hand and said, softly, “I’m not hungry anymore. See? I’m not hungry.”
Her children went outside the tent and started picking some fruits from palm trees next to their tent, still green and unripe.
“Sometimes, I wish I wasn’t a mother. I wish I could return them to my body. At least there they wouldn’t suffer,” Sahar said.
“He risked death to come back with only lentils”
Around noon, Sahar asked her sister-in-law, Sobhiyya, who lives in the neighbouring tent, if she had anything to feed her children. Sobhiyya said her son, Mohammad, 20, brought some lentils from the GHF distribution point.
“Only lentils,” Sobhiyya, also in her 40s, said. “He risked death to come back with only lentils.”
Sobhiyya gave Sahar a small amount of lentils. Nesma, Sahar’s eight-year-old daughter, joined her in making the fire to cook them. Sahar did not have a lighter, so she sent Nesma to borrow one from Abu Mustafa and added a small amount of lentils and lots of water to a pot to start making a thin soup.
Sahar and Nesma started the fire with cardboard, two pieces of cloth, and some wood shavings. They then added nylon and plastic bottles to keep it going.
“Wood is unaffordable now,” she explained. “I ask my children to bring anything they find – wood, nylon, rubbish, bottles, old clothes, anything that keeps the fire going.”
After a while, Nesma said the fire had gone out. Sahar told her to blow on it and then went to help. She stood and fanned a weak flame with a piece of cardboard, panting, sweat streaking down her face. She added a pair of torn pants to the flame. “Why did you throw the pants in the fire?” Nesma asked.
I chuckled to myself. At my home, we also burn everything we can – plastic, fabric, shredded clothes, bags – but we prefer jeans. Denim lasts longer in the flame. We tear apart broken sections of plastic water pipes and feed them into the fire. “Use less of the pipes,” I always tell my sister-in-law. “They create too much smoke.”
I’ve burned things I could have never imagined before this war: my books. Some I bought as an undergrad at the Islamic University of Gaza, scrawling notes in the margins during late-night study sessions. Others, I bought when I had a job and my life was not all-consumed by war.
I’ve pulled out their pages in small clumps, reading the words on them one last time before feeding them to the flames. Old lecture notes, scribbled poems, and half-finished thoughts have all been tossed into the blaze.
“We never imagined we would be reduced to this”
In the al-Masmiyya camp, Sahar’s fire would not stay lit. “I used to be fat – 92 kilos,” she said. “Now, I’m 60.”
“My father was a butcher in the city. We were the kings and queens of meat and liver. We never imagined we would be reduced to this,” she added.
Before the war, her father – who now lives in the tent next to hers – ran a well-known restaurant. Now, in her dire search for food, Sahar once found an old, rusty can of peas in the garbage. She cleaned it, opened it, and cooked it for her children. “I’ll never forget that day – it was by chance,” she said. “I was digging through trash and suddenly found something edible.”
Sahar’s eldest son, Mohammad, 24, was badly injured at the beginning of the war, in November 2023. He needed 82 stitches and still can’t walk properly. So her second-oldest son, Obaida, who is 17, is the one who often goes to the GHF distribution points, but he usually comes back empty-handed.
“Every time he goes, I keep worrying about him. My mind, my brain, my heart – they stop working from the fear,” Sahar said. “He goes because he knows we are living on the brink of nothing. He’s the only one who can. His elder brother is sick. His father cannot go. And I – after all the scenes I’ve seen there – cannot [go] either.”
As we were talking, Sahar’s husband, Hamed, returned to the camp. He is 49 years old and had gone to the doctor’s clinic because of a persistent stomachache. “What do you usually eat?” the doctor had asked. “Nothing,” Hamed replied. “If there is anything, it would be some lentils.”
“All of our conversations are about food,” Hamed told me. Without food, water, or money, saying the situation is difficult is an understatement, he added.
After a while, the fire died out. Sahar and Nesma tried to relight it again, but it wouldn’t catch. The lentils were not well-cooked, but they had to eat them anyway. Her children were waiting, desperate.
Shame cannot hide this truth
If I had written this story a few months ago, I might have hesitated. In our culture, calling someone hungry is shameful. It is a curse. A humiliation.
But shame cannot hide this truth anymore.
The truth is that Israel has systematically used starvation as a weapon against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since the very beginning of this war, controlling the flow of food and aid. At first, they blocked it entirely. Later, under pressure, limited convoys were allowed – too few and too late. Then came more closures. Gaza’s farmland – once a breadbasket – now lies in buffer zones where anyone who enters is shot.
There is a kind of strength here that defies the language we usually use in journalism. It’s not just resilience – it’s grief, exhaustion, and survival all bound together in a mother’s tears, in a child’s silent hunger, in a fire of burned nylon under a pot of watery lentils.
In January, a temporary ceasefire offered a sliver of hope. Food trucks entered. Smiles returned. Then, in March, the gates closed again.
It was not random. It was systematic. Calculated.
Hunger is slow violence. And it breaks more than the body. It breaks dignity. It hollows out the spirit.
Still, there is a kind of strength here that defies the language we usually use in journalism. It’s not just resilience – it’s grief, exhaustion, and survival all bound together in a mother’s tears, in a child’s silent hunger, in a fire of burned nylon under a pot of watery lentils.
“We no longer look for a ceasefire but for more lentils”
I went back to al-Masmiyya in early August. Sahar was still there. So was Abu Mustafa and the baby boy named after his martyred father, Mureed. This time, however, the camp was far more crowded. Israel’s threats of a large-scale military operation in the north, which is now underway, had forced yet another wave of displaced people to head south, swelling al-Masmiyya once again.
Empty spaces had vanished, replaced by rows of new tents. Families arriving from the north searched for shelter but often found no place left to stay. People described the scene as a repeat of the first days of displacement at the beginning of the war. Many feared the consequences of overcrowding – hunger, disease, and the constant threat of attack. Some worried aloud that after northern Gaza, it could be their turn to be forced out next.
“They starve us to the moment we no longer look for a ceasefire but for more lentils,” Sahar said when I spoke to her, referring to the food Israel had allowed in.
Our dreams used to be about freedom and the future. Now, they’re about getting through the day. This is part of the war, too. Not just the bombs or the destruction.
She is right. They reduce our hopes and dreams. These days, we only talk about two things: What will we eat today? And what aid will get into Gaza tomorrow?
A few weeks ago, the conversations were different: Will there be a ceasefire tonight? Will the bombing stop?
Before that, a few months back, we used to ask: When will we return to Gaza City? Do you think our homes are still standing?
And if you go back even further, before this war, before the displacement, before everything – we were dreaming bigger things: When will I travel abroad? Will I get to watch a sunset somewhere else, outside of Gaza?
That’s what war does. It shrinks everything.
Our dreams used to be about freedom and the future. Now, they’re about getting through the day. This is part of the war, too. Not just the bombs or the destruction. But the way it reduces your life to the smallest, simplest questions. Now, we don’t ask what we’ll eat – we ask if we’ll eat. We don’t ask where we’ll go – we ask if we’ll survive.
Edited by Eric Reidy.
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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
