Rafah, Gaza – A tiny girl called Wafaa sits outside a tent in Tal as-Sultan, playing nonchalantly in the sand as she cries from hunger.
It’s difficult to tell how old she is, given her emaciated figure, but her mother, Tahrir Baraka, 36, tells Tel Aviv Tribune that Wafaa is two years old.
Baraka sits despondently in the worn family tent, clutching a can of peas and trying to start a fire to cook something for her five children.
“I worry so much about my children. I don’t care if I eat, I worry about them, they didn’t do anything wrong by starving like this,” she says.
Hunger stalks children
Children across the Gaza Strip go hungry every day, as do their parents who often go without in an attempt to give their children at least one meager meal a day.
With Israeli bombing overhead and a severe shortage of aid in this already aid-dependent and besieged enclave, families are dividing their waking hours between wondering where they can keep their children safe and where they can find a little food or a little water.
Baraka and her family were displaced from Khan Younis, where they had a home in the refugee camp west of the city.
“It was difficult to find enough flour to make bread for the children,” Baraka said. “Then our displaced family members from Bani Suhaila also came to live with us and things got worse.
“I gave my share of bread to my children to satisfy their hunger. We couldn’t buy any other food because everything was becoming very expensive and my husband, an electrician, had no work since the start of the war.
Across from Baraka’s tent, a similar situation has arisen for Marwa Talbani, 32, and her family, as displacement affects all of these mothers and their children in the same way, the only difference being how they try to feed their children.
Hope against hope
“We were displaced from Tel al-Hawa in Gaza City, fleeing bombings and making a grueling journey south. But at the time, it was still the start of the war, at the end of October.
“I managed to put a few things in my bag for my children to eat on the way and now my daughter Kenzi, six, opens the bag every day, hoping to find something to eat.
“She’s hoping she forgot a piece of biscuit or a cheese sandwich, but unfortunately it’s all been eaten since we got to this tent.”
Rafah is extremely overcrowded, with nearly 1.5 million people crammed into a tiny space, some having managed to find tents, others setting up precarious shelters, and even more sleeping outside, unable to find anything to protect themselves and their families from the elements.
Available resources in this region are now exhausted and displaced people are largely dependent on sporadic and scattered aid deliveries and meals prepared by voluntary organizations.
“The people of Gaza are known for their generosity and they like to feed everyone,” Baraka said sadly. “But in this war, no one can even feed their family. »
When Baraka and her family left Khan Younis, she was only able to take with her a piece of bread, a can of sardines and a bottle of water.
The family was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint while heading south, and soldiers let her and the children pass, but turned her husband back, leaving her to wander, afraid and aimless. , until she reached makeshift shelters by the sea.
There she shared the piece of bread among her children, giving each a small pouch containing sardines, and she herself remained without food or water for three days.
“I don’t like the sea anymore after the two freezing days and night we spent there,” Baraka said.
“My husband, however, joined us the next day. I cried in the cold by the sea and my son Jawad, aged nine, comforted me by telling me that his father would catch us when he appeared.
“I’m going to starve”
Today, Baraka and Talbani fight daily in the camp, trying to find something to feed their children.
“I have to tell my children every day that we cannot buy this or that food. Cookies are expensive, but they love them. Instead, I give them a few tomatoes just so they have something to eat today, and so on,” Talbani said.
“Children cannot resist hunger for long. I try to distract them, by playing with them in the sand or running between the tents. But it doesn’t work for long. »
Baraka tries to keep her children busy with errands and projects, and when all else fails, she says, “I am forced to delay their meals later and later in the day, closer to evening, when it gets dark outside, and they sleep. early.
But that doesn’t really help him either.
“Sometimes my son Amer tells me, ‘I feel like I’m going to starve.’ »
Talbani shares this despair, as do all the families around him. “We can hear it in dozens of tents around us, children crying because they are hungry. It’s a hunger war.
“We only find canned food, and not much. Prices are skyrocketing and no one has any money. How can we feed our children? Getting just one bag of flour takes hours and hours in line and that bag doesn’t make enough bread for us, we have to strictly ration it.
“We don’t think about saving ourselves, we constantly worry about saving our children from death, from hunger.”