Tuesday, 5 August 2025

How one Gaza family dedicates each day to finding enough food to survive

 

Image credit: religionnews.com

The following is an extract from an article in RNS, Religion News Service by Magdy reporting from Cairo. Read the original article hereHow one Gaza family dedicates each day to finding enough food to survive.

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Every morning, Abeer and Fadi Sobh wake up in their tent in the Gaza Strip to the same question: How will they find food for themselves and their six young children?

The couple has three options: Maybe a charity kitchen will be open and they can get a pot of watery lentils. Or they can try jostling through crowds to get some flour from a passing aid truck. The last resort is begging.

If those all fail, they simply don’t eat. It happens more and more these days, as hunger saps their energy, strength and hope...

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The family wakes up in their tent, which Fadi Sobh, a 30-year-old street vendor, says is unbearably hot in the summer. With fresh water hard to come by, his wife Abeer, 29, fetches water from the sea. One by one, the children stand in a metal basin and scrub themselves as their mother pours the saltwater over their heads. Nine-month-old Hala cries as it stings her eyes. The other children are more stoic.

Abeer then rolls up the bedding and sweeps the dust and sand from the tent floor. With no food left over from the day before, she heads out to beg for something for her family’s breakfast. Sometimes, neighbors or passers-by give her lentils. Sometimes she gets nothing.

Abeer gives Hala water from a baby bottle. When she’s lucky, she has lentils that she grinds into powder to mix into the water.

Fadi heads to a nearby soup kitchen. Sometimes one of the children goes with him. “But food is rarely available there,” he said. The kitchen opens roughly once a week and never has enough for the crowds. Most often, he said, he waits all day but returns to his family with nothing “and the kids sleep hungry, without eating.”

Read the full article hereHow one Gaza family dedicates each day to finding enough food to survive.