Gaza Journalist Diaries| I'm not okay, please don't ask!

“I swear, I don’t know what to feed them anymore.” A woman in her thirties told me two months ago in Mawasi —a sea of tents west of Khan Younis— while holding a child no older than five.

I didn’t dare ask any questions when my eyes fell on her. Instead, she looked at me, and the words tumbled out. She had sent her eldest to a nearby communal kitchen, hoping he might bring something back for them to eat.

 I felt a brief, flickering relief—a glimmer of hope that they might get some scraps. But that was extinguished when her son returned with his small hands holding nothing but an empty container. 

Her expression was a complex tapestry of rage, grief, and confusion. It was a moment before she broke the silence in a raw voice, “Where’s the food? What am I supposed to feed you today?”

He whispered, “There was nothing left. They had lentil soup, but I didn’t get any.”

This moment was not special; it is a story I witness every day. This brutal cycle of hope turning to ash has become too familiar, it became the landscape of my life in besieged Gaza.

Trapped among the trapped

I couldn’t finish my assignment that day. I just kept walking, moving through the labyrinth of tents, my ears attuned to the hushed conversations and the unspoken stories etched on every face. Food consumed every thought, whisper, and desperate glance.

Two months earlier, a profound weariness began to settle over me. After a year and a half of documenting the unfolding tragedy against 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza, I found myself questioning the very purpose of my work. 

What good did it do to bear witness to this relentless siege and starvation? What truth were we truly conveying to the world, and what, if anything, would change if it was told? 

My energy, once boundless, now felt like a dwindling ember.

I was physically worn down, often dizzy, sometimes seeing double. I became irritable, even at the simplest questions from friends. “What did you eat today?” or “Are you okay?” 

There’s no food. There’s no “okay” in a famine.

Eventually, my body simply gave out, and with it went my ability to report. I no longer had the strength to walk long distances to visit sites of massacres or interview victims and eyewitnesses.

I am caught in the same relentless current with dozens of my fellow journalists, and our sources. We are all being swept away by a tide of hunger and impoverishment that has stripped away life’s most basic necessities. 

Each morning, I wake up to the same impossible question of how to secure food, water, medicine, and fuel when prices have soared 300 to 500 times their normal rate. The day ends only to bring the same nightmare the following day, and I greet it with the same numb disbelief. 

It feels like a long, unending nightmare, with no waking—except the one death may bring.

The siege tightens

In early March, Israel reimposed a complete closure of all border crossings. Gaza was sealed off once more. No aid trucks were allowed in—no food, no medicine, no fuel, no tents.

Nothing that we, as displaced civilians, need after losing our homes.

Just two and a half weeks later, the Israeli occupation army resumed its assault, expanding operations until it controlled more than 80% of Gaza’s 365 square kilometers.

Some people had managed to store small amounts of aid received during a 42-day ceasefire in January and February. But when forced to flee again, they abandoned everything behind, only focusing on saving their children. 

The perilous journey itself claimed some lives, while others were killed after reaching western Gaza.

With no aid entering, the markets became ghosts of their former selves. The very staples of life—flour, rice, pasta, lentils, sugar, and cooking oil—rarely appeared on the shelves. Fruits and frozen meat vanished, utterly gone. Only a few types of locally grown vegetables remain, a small green testament to the life that once was.

Like other citizens and journalists, the question of food consumes every waking moment of my life. I count myself among the privileged few who can still scrape enough money to visit the market. We prepare what we call “fake maqluba,” the traditional dish but stripped-down of chicken or meat that used to define the dish.

Mistake this not for a complaint. On the contrary, very few people still have the means to buy vegetables and cook fake maqluba. The vast majority have nothing left to survive on.

They send their children to the nearest Tekkya—a place that offers free meals to the displaced. The young ones wait in long lines hoping to receive a scoop of lentils, pasta, or rice cooked with canned vegetables.

However, even this miserable situation didn’t last. Within weeks, most Tekkyas and communal kitchens had run out of food or been looted, and now, after more than two months, only a handful still stand.

The crisis deepened when flour vanished from the markets and the bakeries shut down. Now, families can’t afford bread, and a mother's embrace cannot silence a child's cry of hunger. 

How do you explain to a five-year-old that bread is now a luxury only the rich can afford?

Sharing hunger

After leaving the mother and son who couldn’t find lentil soup, I sought refuge among my fellow journalists at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, our usual gathering place in central Gaza.

The air was filled with the same silent questions, a low hum of anxiety, until a colleague finally voiced the question we all carried, “So, what are we eating today?”

Silence fell over us. We looked at each other, and I offered a hollow optimism, “We’ll manage something. A can of fava beans will do.”

His reply was a swift, cutting blow. “Easy for you to say—your kids are in Egypt and safe. I’m thinking about what I’ll feed mine at home.”

He didn’t mean to hurt me. Maybe he was right. But the sting of his words drove me away, a new burden to carry.

I isolated myself for days in a rented apartment I share with my wife Nour, a TV reporter. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was unable to work.

Nour and I have navigated being alone since our children found a path to safety in Cairo 16 months ago. Our days are a quiet testament to scarcity. If we find flour, we bake our own bread, a small act of normalcy. More often, we ration a single meal of rice, pasta, or lentils, a fragile survival that we know is still a privilege compared to the desperate hunger around us.

The physical cost of this life is undeniable. Hours vanish waiting in line for bread at a clay oven, only to return and coax a fire from wood for cooking. The constant smoke, the relentless effort, began to consume me.

 A severe lung infection took hold, and treatment was a luxury beyond reach. My body failed, my work became impossible, yet the daily rhythm of survival demanded my presence in those lines, at that fire, for that one meal.

Clinging to life

I returned to work not by choice, but by a necessity that dragged me back to my duties. I still talk to my kids every day. I check on their health, their schooling, and feel happiness blossoming within when I hear what they’ve eaten. I avoid their questions about our meals here—just like I dodge them from strangers. 

I often thank them when they ask, “What did you eat today?” without answering. The question makes me angry. What would they do if they knew I was hungry? Cry? I appreciate their concern, but it won’t feed me!

My body’s dwindling energy forced me to stop walking distances under the scorching sun hoping to preserve what little calories I get. I now contact sources and eyewitnesses to Israeli crimes via phone, from the small world of my apartment.

On the rare occasions I go out and walk among the people, I see my own reflection in their faces. They look thinner, their cheekbones and hand veins protruding like stark lines of suffering. I wonder what the rest of their bodies look like—and my own.

I try not to think about my mother, who needs kidney dialysis sessions she no longer receives. 

Each day, danger tightens its grip. I go to bed fearing what tomorrow might bring.

I am not OK! So, please, don't ask!