1. The Palestinian Post
The Palestinian Puzzle Piece
Newsletter Date
Volume 1, Issue
1
/
Bombs, Bullets & Our Daily Bread
We highlight one
Tonight, over four million Palestinians, and more than eight million others across the world, will eat supper as
Refugee story a refugees. For this special report, Alex Renton visits Gaza, where every day brings a new struggle against hunger.
Read more from Alex Renton on the food of exiles here and here Rebecca Seal looks at refugee diets from Darfur
to Bangladesh
day, by the end Sunday April 27, 2008
The Observer
of the week you Lunch is whistling: the noise comes from Fathiya's old pressure cooker, which has shuddered scarily on a little gas
hob for nearly two hours. I go out into the narrow alley between the concrete shacks of the refugee camp. Here
will be able see most of the al-Absi family are standing round their home-made oven. From this ancient-looking monument of clay
and straw Fathiya is bringing out perfect round flatbreads, brown-gold on either side. We open the balloons of
bread, and Fathiya's 13-year-old daughter Noura offers round a little box of greenish powder that we sprinkle into
the whole picture the moist interior
Article continues
This is the Palestinian great snack, good for mind and body: the bread is baraka, the same as the word for
of what life is like 'blessing', and the powder is za'atar, a mixture of ground thyme, marjoram, salt and toasted sesame seeds.
Neighbours have gathered, enticed by the smell, and everyone smiles as we sample that basic pleasure: new
warm bread.
in a Palestinian We are in Gaza City's Beach camp, one of the world's oldest and most crowded refugee camps; so it's strange to
be taking part in a foodie idyll straight from the pages of Claudia Roden. The feeling only grows when at last the
pressure cooker is opened, revealing a glorious mess of beans inside: Palestinian foules. Into these Fathiya stirs
Territory dried mulukhiya (a spinach-like leaf, called Jew's mallow in England), salt, chilli and crushed garlic.
I sit down with Fathiya and five of her children, a couple of neighbours, an Oxfam community worker and Jamal,
Fathiya's husband, on the concrete floor of the al-Absis' shack to eat. The dish cost about 10 shekels, £1.40, and it
will make three meals for the family. The bean stew is gorgeous - deep, spicy and satisfying. All it needs is a little
bit of lemon, I say. 'Of course it should have lemon,' agrees Jamal. He used to be a cook in a café in Tel Aviv
before the Israelis closed the border with Gaza and stopped anyone going to Israel to work. Though Jamal hasn't
helped during the long morning's preparation for this meal, he is keen to let me know he is a professional. We all
look at the cook: so where's the lemon, Fathiya? She looks up from spooning beans for her 10-month-old daughter,
Urud, and shakes her head. 'There isn't money for a lemon.'
Tonight, some 4.5 million Palestinians, and 8.4 million others across the world, will eat supper as refugees - people
QuickTimeª and a who, according to the UN's definition, are outside their country of nationality or habitual residence because of 'well-
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor founded fear of persecution'. (There are 23 million more people who are displaced for similar reasons within their
are needed to see this picture.
own countries.) As Observer Food Magazine's survey of refugee camps across the world shows, some of these
people will eat adequately, some quite well, and others hardly at all. Long-term refugees like Fathiya, in well-
established camps, do not live in immediate fear of hunger. But they must devote about every hour of the day to
the job of getting their families fed.
Other refugees live in much worse conditions, of course. Mukishimana Dusabe, a mother of five whom we
interviewed in an 'unofficial' camp aided by Oxfam, in the North Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo,
is too frightened to go out to search for firewood to cook with. Her friend went foraging and was caught by soldiers
who broke her arm and tried to rape her. Her son had disappeared; her young daughters have to work in the fields
all day to get one banana to eat. 'I am a mother; I am scared that I will lose my strength and energy and that I will
no longer be able to look after my family,' she told us.
By definition, refugees are a political problem. Very often the business of feeding them is one, too. Delivering food
to the displaced is always complex: the logistics are usually horrendous - refugees don't naturally settle where it's
convenient. The supplies may be 'taxed' - the word the aid agencies use ironically - looted by whoever wields guns
or power locally. The requirements of rich donors may mean the supplies have to be brought from far away, adding
to the expense. All American food aid, for example, including much that's delivered to Gaza - has to be bought from
American farmers.
2. The Palestinian Post Page 3 of 3
And of course, at all levels, soldiers and politicians oppose the feeding of refugees: if you don't give them aid, runs the
argument, then perhaps they'll go away. Squeezing the rations or hindering the movement of supplies is a way of
applying pressure for political ends - a habitual Israeli tactic in their war with Gaza's militant Palestinian government.
Almost everything in Gaza comes from Israel, but since June last year little other than 'essential humanitarian supplies'
have been allowed in. This blockade is Israel's strategy to force out the Hamas government that refuses to recognise
Israel or stop its militants firing rockets at Israeli towns over the border. Of Gaza's population of over 1.4 million, 1.1
million are dependent to some extent on food hand-outs. According to the UN, there was a shortfall of one-third in
meeting this basic need between January and March this year.
Many observers consider these tactics an abuse of the rights of refugees. These were enshrined by the United Nations
in 1951 when the world was just recovering from the horrors of mass, forced movement of population during and after
the Second World War. One of the most significant of those rights is to 'protection', which states quite clearly that host
governments have a duty to look after refugees. And that includes seeing they get fed. According to the agencies, infant
malnutrition in Gaza is up 60 per cent since the siege - as many call it - began.
Though the Gaza Strip is territory occupied by Israel - which thus has specific obligations under international law to the
refugees there - the business of feeding the 865,000 refugees who need food aid is the job of the United Nations Relief
and Works Agency. UNRWA started work with Palestinian refugees the year Israel was created, 1948, and so it has fed
Fathiya, who is 40, and Jamal, 50, all their lives. They were both born in the Gaza camps to parents who had fled the
1948 war from villages around Ashkelon in Israel. The town is hardly 12 miles away but there's a 16-foot wall now
between Gaza and Israel; neither of them has ever visited their family's' villages.
Every three months UNRWA delivers the ration. Because Jamal cannot work, the family gets an enhanced level of
supplies. The basis of the hand-out is flour - a 75kg sack per person. There's also 50kg of rice and 6 litres of cooking oil,
and some pulses like chickpeas, and sugar. Fathiya shows me one of the flour sacks - it's marked 'Wheat flour from
Japan, for free distribution to refugees' - and we do the maths. This morning she baked 160 pitta breads - half a flour
sack's worth. Of the nine sacks she gets every 13 weeks there's usually three left over - these she sells in Gaza's
markets, where a 75kg sack will fetch 70 Israel shekels, about £10.
This oversupply is intentional. As is often the case in organised camps the basic agency food basket only provides a
proportion of a family's nutritional needs - in Gaza the target is set at 55 per cent. UNRWA's Chris Gunness says: 'We
rely on there being a working economy in Gaza and that people have income to supplement the food packages, and buy
things like eggs, dairy, protein, fresh fruit and vegetables. But that's getting more difficult: there's a cash crisis in Gaza,
since the shutdown began last June. Ninety per cent of businesses have shut, according to the World Bank, and
100,000 jobs have gone in the private sector.'
Fathiya al-Absi's £30 must be stretched to buy everything else for the kitchen. Lunch today needed yeast and salt for
the bread, the garlic, chilli and herbs for the bean stew. There's also all the ordinary household expenses, and the cost
of clean drinking water and gas cylinders. With the blockade these are now 55 shekels (£8) each, and the family gets
through three a month. Electricity is unreliable, too, since the power and fuel supply is also limited by the Israelis. The
large fridge in Fathiya's tiny kitchen serves only as a storage cupboard. So Fathiya and her oldest son, Tamer, built the
clay oven. They fire it with scrap cardboard and plastic bags. Happily the stink from those doesn't much affect the bread.
The money doesn't stretch a lot further - to meat or fish, for example. The price of raw meat in Gaza has just about
doubled since last June, and there's shortages of milk, too. I asked Fathiya's children what their favourite meal was:
turkey shawarma, they all said. Ten-year-old Hanan had shared one with his father a few weeks ago - his face still
glowed at the memory. But the family hasn't had any meat to sit down and eat together since last Eid, four months
earlier, when some lamb was donated by the mosque.
Though Fathiya's children seem healthy enough, it's no surprise that malnutrition rates in Gaza are five times those of
neighbouring Egypt. Even before the blockade 17.5 per cent of children under five suffered from chronic malnutrition,
while 53 per cent of women of reproductive age and 44 per cent of children were anaemic. When the meal is finished,
the two little girls say they still feel hungry. 'They always feel hungry,' says Fathiya.
Her only other income is from her work for an Oxfam-funded sewing cooperative, where people from the Beach camp
are paid 12 shekels a day (£1.70) to make clothes that can be sold to residents. Fathiya also makes food for the workers
there, for which Oxfam pays her. Much of that money goes to pay for 18-year-old Tamer's course in secretarial skills at
Gaza's Al-Azhar University.
3. Her father, Jamal, is too sick, he tells me, to work, even if there were any jobs. He lifts his shirt to show
me the twisted purple scars he says are entry and exit wounds from an Israeli bullet. Privately, I'm told
that Jamal has other problems. Like a disturbing number of men in the Beach camp, many of whom used
to make a living from fishing before the Israelis restricted the boats' movements on security grounds, he
has a drug and alcohol habit. Crack cocaine is one commodity that can enter Gaza from Israel quite
easily: social breakdown and rising levels of violence within families are another side-effect that has to
be attributed in part to the political impasse.
The striking thing that unites all the women we interviewed in refugee camps is how much of their time is
spent on the essential work of providing and caring for their families. For almost all of them the job
occupied every waking hour. Fathiya's day begins at 6am, when she feeds Urud and cleans the two
rooms where all the family live and sleep. The children she sees off to school without food - they will get
a sandwich and milk when they arrive. Then, if, like today, it's a baking day, she starts making the bread.
I tried to help her with this - but my kneading and pulling of the elastic pitta dough makes everyone giggle
(still, when mine came misshapen out of the oven it tasted pretty good).
Fathiya's family have what many refugees don't have, which is a form of stability. They lack much else,
though, that we would think essential: a decent house, to begin with. Their current two-room shack is
temporary. UNRWA knocked down their original house, not much bigger, because it was infested with
lice. But, since Israel has not allowed any cement into Gaza for nine months, plans to rebuild the house
have been put on hold by the agency. So the family have lived through the cold of winter with gaping
holes in their walls and no heating. And during all those months the conflict between Israel and Hamas
has been worsening. As we left Gaza that evening we watched Qassam rockets rising into the evening
sky, aimed at Israel. One of them killed an Israeli civilian in the nearby town of Sderot: by the next
morning, 33 Palestinians had been killed in the Israeli reprisals. Four of them were children who had
been playing football not far from where we ate. It was, said Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, 'a
proportionate response'.
The Gazans also lack hope - perhaps the most debilitating problem a refugee knows. There seems to be
no prospect of a political solution to their long exile - more than one Gazan I asked said that the
refugees' only strategy was to have as many babies as possible. But no one I spoke to had any genuine
expectation that this half-life might change. None of them, or indeed most of the four million Palestinians
spread around Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, have known any life but that of a refugee.
Some of the older ones remember, though. And they all speak with harrowing sadness of 'our village', of
the homes they have lost in al-Nakba - the'catastrophe' of 1948. In Bethlehem the walls that enclose
Aida refugee camp, another relic of that year, are painted with murals. Each one pictures a different lost
village, its olive trees, green hills and chalk-white farmhouses. In Aida I met Ayesha al-Jarma, who was
only six years old when her family fled Ajjur, near Hebron in the West Bank. She has been back, only
once, when she was 25, to the ruins of her father's farm there. She has brought up nine children in the
camp. Now she is a great-grandmother.
'We had a lovely life in the village,' she told me. 'We used to make maftool (couscous) with lamb,
because we had sheep and goats. Or with chicken, or doves, we kept them, too. There would be pine
nuts and za'atar for the rice. We grew wheat and vines, figs, apples and olives. We had watermelon and
tomatoes and cucumbers.' Did her children grow up differently, eating the UNRWA diet? 'Of course,' said
Ayesha. 'I always said to my children, you're like biscuits. You break so easily. In the village we'd fall
from the roof and not break anything. We were healthy, but you go to hospital every week.' She sighs.
'Oh, how healthy were the children. And how happy.'
