“Everyone risked their lives for a little bag of flour,” he recalled. At that moment, he said, he felt like he was either destined to be run over by truck wheels or killed by Israeli forces.
Mr. Barda said that at one point during the winter, he managed to seize two bags of flour from the convoy. He was then threatened that strangers would take both by force if he did not hand over one of them.
In February, Barda was grabbing a bag of flour from a United Nations truck when he collided with another man who was cutting a rope for aid supplies. In the chaos, the blade sliced Mr. Barda’s finger and blood splattered on his trophy. But it’s a great day. It took his family two months to make the 25kg bag.
Before the war, Barda worked as a baker for a pastry chain, but even if he still had a salary, the informal street markets that sprang up around Gaza City were prohibitively expensive. Desperate for food and baby formula, he said he sold Ms. al-Arqan’s jewelry — two rings and a bracelet — for about $325. Their income was minuscule compared to before the war.
He encountered a lucky opportunity: rice looted from the destroyed store was temporarily affordable on the black market. He bought two bags for about $13.
when ramadan comes In March, conditions were dire but not unthinkable when Mr. Barda and Ms. Arkan decided to take refuge in Al-Shifa Hospital, the birthplace of the jihadist group. By then, they had nothing but za’atar (Palestinian thyme) and khobeza ( wild green Gazans are always looking for food and eating it at night. Mr Barda said they ate nothing else for ten days.
On day 11, with no food and no water to mix the jihadi formula, they decided to leave. That day, Jihad weighed just under nine pounds, well below normal weight for that age.
Barda said that after they left Shifa, they threw away the dirty white baby shirts they had used as a flag of surrender.
Hope broken
In mid-March, at a field hospital in Rafah, doctors gave Mohamed Najjar fortified milk and peanut nutritional supplements and told his mother to bring him back for a check-up in a week.
Two days later, he was able to eat a packet of peanuts, drink some milk, and more water than usual: a good sign. Ms. Najjar said she let him sleep for a few hours in her sister-in-law’s tent because the flies would not disturb him there.
When she returned, she said, something seemed wrong. She tried to give Muhanid a little fortified milk. His little face turned pale.
She screamed and ran to find her brother-in-law. She said they tried two hospitals before doctors admitted Muhanned to the intensive care unit of the European Gaza Hospital, where he received oxygen. The staff asked her to come back the next day and took down her sister-in-law’s phone number in case she needed to be contacted.
When Ms. Najjar returned, Muhanned was dead. The hospital called her sister-in-law to break the news, but Ms. Najar’s relatives were unable to tell her. She saw her son again before he was buried in a makeshift cemetery near the hospital.
She has not heard from her husband since he was detained in February. There was no way to tell him what happened.
“I feel lost,” she said. “My children feel overwhelmed without their father with us during this difficult time.”
Amid her grief, she still had to worry about her 7-year-old child, Mohammed. After being hospitalized again, he wasn’t eating much, like Muhanid had been for the past few weeks. And Muhanned – he’s gone.
