“We’re starving”: A Gaza journalist’s dispatch from the midst of starvation

This dispatch from my colleague and friend Ruwaida Amer speaks more powerfully than anything I could write alone.

I don’t usually share other people’s writing here. But this personal account from my friend and fellow reporter in Gaza, Ruwaida Amer, captures the suffering of our people surviving starvation in Gaza now. Ruwaida was feeling dizzy and exhausted when we worked on the piece. I helped her write and edit it so her voice could still be heard.

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Abed Rahim Khatib/Anadolu via Getty Images

“My body is breaking down. My mother is collapsing from exhaustion. My cousin cheats death every day for a morsel of aid. Gaza's children are dying in front of our eyes, and we are powerless to help them.”

I am so hungry.

I’ve never meant those words in the way I do now. They carry a kind of humiliation that I can’t fully describe. Every moment, I find myself wishing: If only this were just a nightmare. If only I could wake up and it would all be over.

Since last May, after I was forced to flee my home and take shelter with relatives in Khan Younis refugee camp, I’ve heard those same words uttered by countless people around me. Hunger here feels like an assault on our dignity, a cruel contradiction in a world that prides itself on progress and innovation.

Every morning, we wake up thinking only of one thing: how to find something to eat. My thoughts go immediately to our sick mother, who had spinal surgery two weeks ago and now needs nutrition to recover. We have nothing to offer her.

Then there’s my little niece and nephew — Rital, 6, and Adam, 4 — who ask for bread all the time. And we adults try to withstand our own hunger just to save whatever scraps we can for the kids and the elderly.

Since Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza in early March (which it eased only marginally in late May), we haven’t tasted meat, eggs, or fish. In fact, we’ve gone without nearly 80 percent of the food we used to eat. Our bodies are breaking down. We feel constantly weak, unfocused, and off-balance. We grow irritable easily, but most of the time we just stay silent. Talking uses up too much energy.

We try to buy anything available from the markets, but the prices are becoming impossible. A kilo, or two pounds, of tomatoes now costs NIS 90 (over $25). Cucumbers are NIS 70 a kilo (around $20). A kilo of flour is NIS 150 ($45). These numbers feel outrageous and cruel.

We survive on only one meal a day: usually just bread, made using whatever flour we managed to find. If we’re lucky, lunch may include some rice, but even that doesn’t fill us up. We try to set aside a little food for my mother, maybe some vegetables, but it’s never enough. Most days, she’s too weak to stand, too drained to even perform her prayers.

We rarely leave the house anymore, afraid our legs might give out. It already happened to my sister: while searching on the streets for something, anything, to feed her children, she suddenly collapsed to the ground. Her body didn’t even have the strength to stay upright.

We began to sense the depth of the hunger crisis when the baker Abu Hussein, known to everyone in the camp, began scaling down his operations. He used to bake for dozens of families a day, including ours, who no longer have cooking gas or electricity to bake for themselves. From morning til night, his wood-burning ovens kept running.

But recently, he was forced to start working fewer and fewer days each week. My sister would come home and say, “Abu Hussein’s is closed. Maybe he’ll work tomorrow.” Now, trying to get dough and flour has become its own kind of suffering.

Three generations of hunger

In the camp, I came to understand the true cruelty of this genocide: the suffocating overcrowding, the mass of refugees forced out of their homes, and the endless stories of hunger.

I’m currently staying at my aunt’s house, who took us in after we were displaced and has sheltered us for the past two months. Like nearly every other building in the camp, her home was almost completely destroyed by Israel’s attacks. My aunt’s siblings worked around the clock to repair what they could, managing to make one room livable.

The house overflows with grandchildren, each undergoing their own struggle with hunger. My oldest cousin, Mahmoud, is father to four of them. He himself has lost nearly 40 kilos (around 90 pounds) over the past few months. The signs of malnutrition are visible everywhere on his pale face and emaciated body.

Every day before dawn, Mahmoud sets out to the American-run aid distribution centers, risking his life to try to bring home some food for his starving kids. Since I arrived to stay with them, he has told me the same harrowing stories day after day.

“Today I crawled on my hands and knees through a crowd of thousands,” he said recently, showing me a bag with scraps of food that he’d managed to scavenge. “I had to collect whatever had fallen to the ground — lentils, rice, chickpeas, pasta, even salt. My bones ache from being stepped on, but I have to do it for my children. I can’t bear the sound of their hunger.”

One day, Mahmoud came back with nothing. His face was drained of color, and he looked like he might collapse. He told me the Israeli army had opened fire without warning. “The blood of a young man beside me splattered on my clothes,” he said. “For a moment, I thought I was the one who’d been shot. I froze — I was sure the bullet was in my body.”

The young man fell to the ground right in front of him, but Mahmoud couldn’t stop to help. “I ran more than six kilometers without looking back. My children are hungry and waiting for me to bring back food,” he said, his voice breaking, “but they won’t be happy if I come home dead.”

My other cousin, Khader, is 28. He has a 2-year-old daughter, and his wife is pregnant. He’s consumed with worry about their unborn child, who is due two months from now. His wife isn’t eating properly, and every day he sits in silence, tormented by the same questions: Will this famine harm my wife? Will the child she gives birth to be healthy or sick?

His 2-year-old, Sham, cries all day from hunger. She begs for bread — anything beyond the tasteless, heavy staples of rice, lentils, and beans that have upset her stomach and made her sick multiple times.

One day, a friend of Khader’s gave him a handful of grapes for her. It was a small miracle. Khader knelt down beside Sham and offered her the grapes, but she only stared at them, playing with them in her tiny hands and refusing to eat them. She didn’t recognize them: not once in her two years of life in Gaza had she seen grapes before.

It wasn’t until her father put one in his mouth and smiled that she hesitantly copied him. She chewed. Then she laughed.

Bodies shutting down

I often stand at the door of the house, watching the children in the camp. They spend most of their time sitting on the ground, staring blankly at passersby. When I ask one of them to buy me an internet card so I can work, or call my niece from the neighbor’s house, they respond in low, tired voices. They tell me they’re hungry. That they haven’t had bread in days.

I’m only 30 years old, but I’m no longer the energetic woman I once was. I used to work long hours between teaching and journalism, but since this war started I haven’t had a moment’s rest. I juggle exhausting household duties — caring for my mother and family — while simultaneously trying to keep documenting and writing about everything that’s happening around me.

For about a month now, though, I’ve lost the ability to follow the news. My focus is slipping. My body is breaking down. I suffer from anemia as a result of eating only lentils and other legumes for months. And for the past two days, I’ve been unable to swallow due to severe throat inflammation — a consequence of relying on dukkah and spicy red peppers to try to quell my hunger.

Mahmoud, a 28-year-old photographer who works with me on video stories, is struggling too. “I haven’t eaten anything in two days except soup,” he told me recently. “I don’t have the energy to work.” No one does. Working during a genocide requires a level of strength that is impossible to sustain. Starvation has crippled the productivity of every working person in Gaza.

Yesterday, I accompanied my mother to Nasser Hospital for a physical therapy session after her surgery. On the way, we saw dozens of people who couldn’t walk more than a few meters without having to rest. My mother was the same: her legs were too weak to carry her. She sat on a plastic chair by the roadside, gathering what little energy she could muster to go on.

As we continued walking, we heard shouting. Young men and women ran past, crying out in jubilation: “There are flour trucks on the street!” A huge crowd had formed. People were desperately sprinting toward the trucks for a chance at a bag of flour.

It was chaos. No one was escorting the trucks to ensure that everyone could get their share safely. Instead, we watched the crowd race toward dangerous areas under the control of the Israeli army, just for flour.

“Some people made it back with bags. Others were killed. We saw bodies being carried away on men’s shoulders, shot dead in the very places where aid was meant to save them.”

18 deaths in 24 hours

After the therapy session, we left the hospital and passed women crying over their starving children, dying right before our eyes. One woman, Amina Badir, was screaming, clutching her 3-year-old child.

“Tell me how to save my daughter Rahaf from death,” she cried. “For a week she’s eaten nothing but a single spoon of lentils each day. She’s suffering from malnutrition. There’s no treatment, no milk at the hospital. They’ve taken away her right to live. I see death in her eyes.”

According to the Health Ministry in Gaza, the death toll from hunger and malnutrition since October 7 has risen to 86 people, 76 of them children. Yesterday, it reported that 18 people had died of starvation in the previous 24 hours alone. Medical personnel staged a stand-in at Nasser Hospital to appeal for international intervention before more people starve to death.

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This story was first published by the author, Ruwaida Amer, in +972 Magazine.