Struggling to Survive: One Family's Daily Battle Against Hunger Amid Gaza's Food Crisis

Gaza City — Whenever Mervat Radwan hears that the community kitchen in her displacement camp will serve lunch, she breathes a sigh of relief. She takes a cooking pot and walks to the community kitchen with her nephew, six-year-old Ubay. The meal is rarely enough for the seven people in her household, so she has to supplement it with whatever else she can find. A can of tuna, beans, or peas from an aid parcel can help make the meal stretch further.

“Sometimes they give us a cooked meal, but it isn’t enough for seven people, so I try to find something besides it,” she told Al Jazeera. Community kitchens are a vital source of food for families with little or no income in Gaza, but their operations have fluctuated sharply in recent months. The kitchen near Radwan’s displacement site was closed for almost two months before resuming services for just two days a week.

Daily production in Gaza fell from about 1.5 million meals via 165 kitchens in mid-March to 698,000 served by 102 kitchens by July, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. This substantial reduction in community kitchen operations has been attributed to severe funding shortages and rising operational costs, with charities facing difficulties securing sufficient food or cooking supplies.

Mervat Radwan, 45, became the guardian of her three nephews when an Israeli air attack in northern Gaza on October 18, 2024, killed her 38-year-old brother Mohammad, his wife Anwar, 33, and their one-year-old son, Yosuf. Their three other children survived, but Nayef, now 14 years old, had shrapnel lodged in his head; Habib, 11, suffered burns to his body, while Ubay, now four years old, also sustained severe burns.

For the past nine months, they have lived in a tent in Deir el-Balah with Radwan, her 70-year-old father, and her 40-year-old sister, Sanaa. None of the carers has a regular source of income, leaving them reliant on aid and charity. The children have been left psychologically scarred by the loss of their parents, and their frail state is compounded by the family’s inability to source basic necessities like food.

“It’s not just about taking them in; there is a lot of responsibility … food, drink, expenses, everything they need,” Radwan said. When food is scarce, the adults skip meals so the children have enough to eat. “My elderly father won’t eat until he knows his grandchildren have had enough … Maybe this is the most we can do in these difficult circumstances,” Radwan said.

Meat is an unaffordable luxury, and even fresh vegetables are difficult to find due to scarcity and high costs. For little Habib, his recovery relies on his diet, with a doctor telling Radwan that he must drink water frequently and eat foods with high water content, such as cucumbers. However, 1kg of cucumbers costs about 15 shekels ($4.50) and tomatoes cost 10 to 12 shekels ($3-3.60), prices the family can barely afford.

The World Food Programme reported in July that about 77 percent of households in Gaza struggled to source fresh vegetables, fruit, and protein due to high prices. The family’s limited diet is now affecting the children’s health, as Habib has been suffering from kidney stones for about a year, which doctors attribute to a diet high in salt and almost completely based on canned goods from aid supplies.