Two years is a long time in the life of a 7-year-old. Maria Al Fiqi’s mother has found her a coloring book with pictures of fruit in it. But she’s stuck on one page. “What is this?” she asks her mother. She doesn’t know what color to use. “Yellow,” her mother says. It’s a pineapple.
Over the past two years of the war in Gaza, her mother told me, Maria has “forgotten the colors and even the shapes of food.”
As of May, more than 50,000 children had been killed or injured, according to UNICEF, since Israel’s bombardment of Gaza began. A panel of food-security experts backed by the United Nations declared last week that there is famine in Gaza City and nearby areas, and it says that half a million people face “catastrophic” conditions. The panel projects that famine will spread south in the coming weeks, to areas such as Deir al Balah, where Maria and her family live in a tent camp with hundreds of other families.
Israel’s bombardments have damaged or destroyed most of the housing in Gaza, including Maria’s. Her family—her mother, Islam; her father, Rami; and her siblings, Bayan, Malak, and Fida—moved here after they lost their home, a rented apartment in Jabalia refugee camp. The camp was established by the UN in 1948 and had been built up over the decades into an urban neighborhood, before being largely demolished early in the war.
This month I visited their family. Soon after I arrived, early one morning, Islam woke up her 14-year-old daughter, Fida. “Yalla,” Islam said—let’s go. “The water truck has come.”
“Whenever I have nice dreams, you wake me up and ruin them,” Fida mumbled. “When I have no dreams, no one wakes me up.” Still, she didn’t linger. She pulled on a hoodie and ran out behind Rami, lugging two pairs of empty jerricans.
By the time Fida reached the street, she was not alone. In every direction, tents extended into the dusty distance; I was told that more families were arriving all the time. Out of every tent, barefoot children were emerging, clutching gallon jugs, plastic bottles, old cooking pots, buckets whose holes had been patched with scraps of heated plastic.
Parents hustled behind them, shouting instructions or warning the children to stay in line. Many children do this chore because they are smaller, are better able to slip through crowds, and might get quicker service at the taps. Some older youths pushed ahead, trying to reach the truck first. Fida had seen it all before, but familiarity never made the scene feel safer or less chaotic. She wove her way to the spout, filled her cans, and sprinted back toward the tent, where Islam and her older daughters emptied the containers into a larger tank. Without pause, Fida ran back out again.
Islam pressed two smaller jerricans into Maria’s hands: “Go with your sister.” Maria was slower, so she waited on the edge of the crowd with the extra cans while Fida darted back and forth to fill them. The plastic handle cut into Fida’s palms; her arms trembled. She wanted to rest for a moment but couldn’t risk the truck leaving before she’d filled the tank.
Finally she dropped the last cans and collapsed in her family’s tent. Above her cot, she had taped fragments of another life: drawings, paintings, and pictures of her favorite Korean pop band, BTS. “I know all the songs,” she told me; her favorite is “Life Goes On.” “It says that life keeps moving, even when things are hard. I feel like they are talking to me. We wake up, we fetch water, we stand in line for bread—and the next day, it starts again. Life goes on.”
Fida didn’t have long to rest. At 10 a.m., she and Maria took a small metal plate to the community kitchen, where a volunteer serves meager rations—lentils, rice, sometimes pasta. “I wish they’d make something different,” Fida sighed. “It’s always the same. And it’s never enough.”
Back at the tent, Fida and Maria collected wood scraps to feed the fire. “We burn anything we find,” Islam told me. She was making dough for the flatbread they cooked on a scorched metal sheet over the flames. The scraps weren’t enough: Fida would have to go to the market to buy more wood.
On the way, Fida paused by a charging stall. Israel cut off all electricity to Gaza in the opening days of the war, as well as fuel for the only power plant. Since then, people have mostly relied on scattered solar panels to keep a few cellphones alive and to charge batteries for lamps. Fida handed her mother’s and sisters’ phones to the man running the charging stall, where phones and tablets were stacked on top of one another, each device waiting its turn in the sun’s current.
Fida came to a wood stall where the owner offered her a kilogram for 10 shekels—almost $3. Too expensive, she thought, and moved on—only to find another stall charging 11 shekels. She went back and grudgingly handed over the 10. Back at the tent, Fida told her mother, with a mix of pride and resignation, “I bargain twice only. No more than that.”
By midday, the heat was unbearable. Maria, like many of the younger children here, has bumps and rashes on her face and body—little eruptions from heat, dirt, and sweat. “She tries to scratch them, to rub them off her skin,” Islam told me, “but we tell her not to.” She begged for a shower, but “there isn’t enough water,” Islam said.
When the sun finally softened, Fida improvised a game. She had found two abandoned truck wheels and scrubbed them until they shone. “I cleaned them like no one cleaned them before,” she told me. She stacked them and covered them with her mother’s scarf—they were now a desk in a pretend school. Later, the children gathered outside around a small fire. Three cats crept near—Simba, Mishmish, and Ghaddoush. Their fur was matted, their bodies thin. The girls laughed softly as the cats stumbled over one another for attention.
Islam told me that she is watching her daughters’ childhoods slip away. They are either exhausted by the chores of survival, or bored. Before the war, her oldest daughter was going to university. Now “there are no options for them.” Fida was a good student; she learned English, practiced rapping in Korean. Now she is “our hands and feet; she carries the family.” Islam feels Maria has had no childhood at all.
When we first heard the sound of an Israeli air strike, it was only a low, distant hum—the growl of a heavy engine in the sky. Maria came and stood beside her mother. As the missile drew closer, the noise deepened, filling the air with a sharp, rushing weight. Maria clung to her mother, her small body pressed tight.
“She thinks holding me will make the sound go away,” Islam whispered.
The post Water, Bread, Boredom, Fear appeared first on The Atlantic.
