We don’t have any bread. We don’t have gas. My mother cooks our last bag of lentils over an open fire. Photo: Islam Ismail

Since the fifth day of Ramadan in early March 2025, the border crossings have remained shut tight. Not a single aid truck has entered. No flour. No fuel. Nothing.

Bread has become a distant dream for the people of Gaza. The bakeries, those small places of hope where people once lined up just to get a simple piece of bread, have all stopped working. They’ve run out of everything they need to function: no diesel to power the ovens, no flour to knead, nothing to bake.

Imagine living in a place where the price of a single bag of flour could climb to $100 if you’re lucky enough to find one in the first place.

Vegetables have all but vanished from the markets, and if you do come across a tomato or a cucumber, it will likely cost more than a full meal used to.

To cook a meal that’s as simple as a salad, something that should be a daily basic, now costs no less than $50. That’s not luxury dining; it is survival disguised as simplicity.

Because people can no longer afford to buy even the bare minimum, many have turned to takkayas, charitable community kitchens that hand out whatever humble meals they can prepare. These aren’t special occasions anymore. Plates of lentils, beans, and boiled pasta have become the standard daily fare. What used to be emergency food, handed out during brief crises, has now become the main source of nourishment for thousands.

It’s hard to imagine, but many people in Gaza have gone for more than two months without eating any kind of meat or fish. Not even a small piece. Not even once. Protein has become a memory. Luxury, in its most painful form. And now, out of desperation, some people have started cooking sea turtles. Others go to the sea and catch jellyfish, then grill them over open flames.

Just think about that for a second: parents roasting jellyfish over scraps of wood, simply to try and fill their children’s empty stomachs.

This morning, I woke up with a strange emptiness inside me. Not the kind of hunger that makes your stomach grumble but a hollow, silent ache. I no longer long for good food, because the idea of “good food” has completely lost its meaning. It’s no longer real. It’s something we remember, something we dream about, something we imagine in the quiet moments when our bodies have grown numb from hunger. It’s a picture in our minds more than a lived experience.

Our neighbor came to our door today. She didn’t have to say much; her eyes spoke for her. There was a heaviness in her gaze, the kind of sorrow that words can’t really hold. Her voice cracked as she spoke: “My son wants to eat bread. But we have no flour…”

Then she told me she did something that I still can’t believe. She had gathered the remains of boiled pasta that had been given out by one of the charity kitchens, yes, the same pasta covered in cheap tomato sauce. She washed off the sauce. She laid the pasta out to dry, patiently, carefully. And then, with her own hands, she ground it down until it resembled flour. She did all of this just so she could bake a few small pieces of bread for her hungry little boy.

This is the kind of strength people here have had to summon. It’s heartbreaking. It’s heroic in the quietest, saddest way.

Even the leaves of the mulberry and grape trees, once seen as a last resort for those who had nothing else, have now become a commodity. People used to pick them freely off trees in the countryside. Now? They’re being sold for up to $40 per kilogram. Leaves. Not meat, not fruit, just leaves.

Hunger has turned everything around us into something to be bought and sold. Something valuable. Something rare. Everything that was once natural and abundant has been swallowed up by scarcity. The very basics of life that the world takes for granted have become treasures, fought over and traded like gold.

This is what it means to be hungry in Gaza. This is what it means to live through a siege not just of land, but of daily life. Food has become a memory. Water has become prayer. And hope … hope is a fragile thing we still hold onto, even as everything else slips away.