The Electronic Intifada 4 September 2025
A falafel vendor in Khan Younis on 3 August.
APA imagesI am 19 years old. I have lived through seven wars. I was two during the first one, in 2008-09. I lived through 2012 and 2014. I witnessed the assaults of 2019, 2021 and 2022.
There have been other numerous brutal military assaults on our people in Gaza in my lifetime.
I have lived the latest one over the past nearly two years.
I am still alive, still breathing. But life in Gaza has turned from pain to pure survival. I used to have dreams and books. I used to have plans.
Now, I just want food.
This time is unlike anything that came before. It’s longer, harder, full of hunger and the silence that accompanies starving. It is a genocidal war.
I’m still in northern Gaza. I’ve experienced starvation before. The first time was when Israel closed the crossings for 15 months, from 7 October 2023 until 1 May 2024.
My health has declined. My face has grown thin and pale.
On 2 March this year, Israel closed the crossings again before unilaterally ending a nearly two-month long ceasefire on 18 March.
This is the third time – the second ran from September 2024 until January 2025 – Israel has enforced a famine on us over the past two years.
Lentils only
In March, we tried to preserve some meat. But there is no power and so no refrigeration. We already went through this in the first and second famines. During the first famine, we lived only on mallow.
The flour gradually disappeared, and as it became harder to find, its prices increased.
In March, we could get a kilo of flour for $12.
By mid-June, the price had almost doubled to $22. So we sold the sugar we had to buy flour, which was enough for about ten days.
Luxury items like chocolate and chips also began to disappear. But we don’t attach much importance to such things anymore.
By late June, we had no flour left.
Still we had 10 kilos of rice and 10 kilos of lentils, and we needed a kilo of rice and a kilo of lentils every day to feed the eight of us – my parents, two brothers and three sisters, of whom the youngest, Mariam, is 13.
For nearly a month, we reheated the same pot of lentils and rice over and over. We bascially survived on lentil soup, which was difficult for our stomachs.
At the beginning of July, there was nothing left — no lentil soup, not any kind of food, no aid, no hope.
Our neighbors had nothing as well. Markets were empty.
At home, my family frantically wondered how to get food when there was nothing in the markets and no cash in our hands.
My brothers searched, worked, hoped and still returned with nothing. They drank salty water to trick their stomachs into feeling full.
Hungry and dizzy
On 13 July, I had my final translation exam at the Islamic University, now a bombed out, charred shell of the campus it used to be. I was a hard-working student. I had stayed up night after night, studying, dreaming of a future to build despite everything.
My family tried to offer me anything to eat to give me energy and focus.
That day, however, when I walked through the streets, my eyes could only search for food. The only thing I saw were a few people selling overpriced falafel.
In Gaza, falafel is like gold or meat. It’s all we have of any kind of luxury. People kept making falafel even when the chickpeas ran out, using lentils instead. They did not taste good.
Chickpeas, thankfully, were back, but I didn’t anyway have enough cash to buy a single sandwich, which, even when wrapped in the thinnest of breads, was still selling for more than $3.
I also didn’t have money for transportation, so I walked two kilometers to a space where freelancers could access the internet and where I would sit my exam. I live in al-Daraj neighborhood and had to search for the internet in al-Rimal neighborhood.
I walked to my exam hungry and dizzy. I sat my exam thinking more about food than the questions in front of me.
When I returned home, the hunger hit harder. I was rearranging my university books when suddenly the idea of selling them crossed my mind. I had bought these books at double the price – even books haven’t been spared scarcity price rises – when the semester began in February.
These books were the only thing that reminded me I was a university student. I had highlighted every page in hope. So I gave myself a choice: keep the books or sell them to feed myself and my family.
Hope had a price, I reasoned.
Selling dreams for falafel
I put up my books for sale in my university WhatsApp groups. A friend decided to buy them just to help me out.
I sold my university books… and I bought falafel.
One piece of falafel costs 30 cents now. You used to get 10 pieces for that price. I bought 50 for all of us — without bread, of course.
It didn’t make a full meal, but it kept us alive. We ate that falafel with mixed feelings: happiness and pain and some tears.
Despite their hunger and exhaustion, my father and mother didn’t eat, saving their share for us. It was painful.
I cried when I finished eating.
That night was hard. My mother and sisters couldn’t sleep because they were hungry. They spent the night just drinking water.
The next morning, my father came back from the market after 3 hours. He brought some beans back with him. They were larger and harder than any beans we were used to. We tried to cook them for three hours, but they refused to soften.
We ate them anyway.
They were very difficult to swallow. No one could finish them.
That was our only meal that day, 14 July.
At one point I stood up to wash my hands and drink water with a little salt. Suddenly everything went black.
When I opened my eyes, I was on the floor, having collapsed. I saw my father sitting next to me. He moved my hair from my face and said, over and over, “my daughter…”
It’s not the first time my body has started to give up. I can feel it in how I tremble.
From that day until now, there has barely been any food in our home.
The situation improved in August when rice came back to the market and legumes too.
Prices remain high, and on any given day, we still don’t know if we will eat the next. Our survival is tied to news of aid coming through the crossings.
That news might give us life — or take it away.
I had never felt this kind of hunger before. I also never imagined I would sell the books I studied so hard with — the ones that held my dreams – in order to eat.
What I know is that with genocide comes a monster, that of hunger, eating our bodies.
Eman Murtaja is a journalism student in Gaza.
