Gaza City — Whenever Mervat Radwan hears the community kitchen in her displacement camp will serve lunch that day, 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. 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 the number of community kitchens operating in the Gaza Strip and the meals they serve has been attributed to severe funding shortages and rising operational costs, with charities facing difficulties securing sufficient food or cooking supplies. 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 and 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, who is now aged four, had 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, so they are reliant on aid and charity to make it through to the next day.
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 the basic necessities for existence, including food. When food is scarce, the adults skip meals so the children have enough to eat. Meat is an unaffordable luxury, and even fresh vegetables are difficult to find due to their scarcity and high costs.
Some organisations operating in Gaza occasionally distribute vegetables, but their supply is sporadic. For little Habib, his recovery relies on the food he eats, with a doctor telling Radwan that he must drink water frequently and eat foods with high water content, such as cucumbers, regularly. But 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.
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