So this is hunger. A new war raging within the war of missiles and bombs, a war no less brutal or mighty than the one searing us with its fires and sending us running to escape its crushing force. Hunger came for us in our home, as it did for others. We eat one meal a day now, halfway through the day; in the morning, a few biscuits are shared out between the children and then the adults, and in the evenings, we make do with tea.
Shortly after flour disappeared from the market, it began to circulate again in the form of sacks intended for distribution by UNRWA. This sudden appearance was the result of looting of the UNRWA warehouses, which we only heard about afterwards: crowds of hungry people had stormed the warehouse, some breaking down the doors while others scaled the walls, and emptied it of its supplies—not only flour, but also tinned sardines, corn oil, milk powder, and dried lentils and chickpeas—in a matter of minutes. Apparently they’d even taken wooden desks and shelves and the agency’s archives. I bought a sack of looted UNRWA flour for over four times the usual price, and made my way home as if bearing some priceless treasure. Ula and her sisters were jubilant, and we were all seized by a dark joy amid the wasteland of fear and grief that grows vaster and more desolate by the day as the war continues to escalate. We felt momentarily comfortable and safe; we could bake our own bread now, instead of waiting under the hot sun for hours in the uncertain hope of finding some at the bakery. But another problem stood in our path: to turn the thin rounds of dough into bread, we needed an oven, and all we had in the flat was a gas canister that barely sufficed to cook our regular meals. We would have to find some other way.
Mud ovens, which is what rural Gazan families have always used for cooking and baking, are dotted all over the green patches that lie between the apartment blocks in Hamad City. The women they belong to are generous and gladly volunteer their help when other families turn up needing to bake something or other, only asking them to bring enough paper and cardboard for fuel. But we didn’t have any paper or cardboard in the house—just my books. Ula looked at me timidly. «Let’s use one or two for now, and when the war’s over you can replace them,» she said as gently as she could. «The kids need food more than they need to be read to.» The ugliness of it was devastating. In all the years I’d spent amassing my modest library, it had never occurred to me that I might one day have to weigh a book against a piece of bread for my children. I was stunned by the cruelty of the choice, paralysed by the question it raised: how had things got this bad, this fast?
I’d collected my books over many years, and I had around two hundred now, including works on philosophy, society and religion, novels, and poetry collections gifted to me by friends at their book signings, with dedications hand-written in the front pages. The books felt to me like part of a shared memory belonging to all those people, some of whom were still in Gaza, some of whom had gone abroad, and some of whom had died while searching for life. The more I thought about it, the clearer the feeling burned: my library was a pulsing bundle of flesh and blood and memories and lives and errands run in Gaza’s streets and alleys and evenings spent in cafes and on the seafront in summer and in winter.
Which is why I replied, «I’m not going to burn a single page of a book. There must be some other solution.» Ula realised her gentle pressure hadn’t worked. «Never mind then,» she said. «We just have to get hold of some paper somehow, so we can bake the bread before it goes bad.»
I went downstairs and headed out, thinking I’d find a stack of empty boxes lying next to the garbage containers or outside a grocery stores. But as I walked down the street, there wasn’t a scrap of paper or cardboard to be seen. People had used up everything they could find in the garbage containers, and as I searched, I realised others were searching with me. Young and old alike were raking the ground with their eyes, all looking for paper to give to the village women so as to bake their bread. I wondered for a second if there might be none to be found anywhere in Hamad City, and I was overcome by a crushing sense of despair as I looked left and right, running now, chasing the paper mirage. I nearly went back to the flat and took two books from the shelves, and would have burned them to bake bread for the hungry children had not the owner of the store beneath our building intervened. He seemed to have been watching me on my search, and had finally decided to help me when he saw I was losing hope.
«You’re looking for cardboard boxes, aren’t you?» he asked. «Do you have any?» I replied eagerly. «Here,» he said, handing me three large pieces of cardboard, «Nothing’s too precious for you.» I thanked him several times before racing back upstairs, happy and proud, and grateful to the man for rescuing me from the sea of regret I’d soon have been drowning in had I begun to burn my library.
They were only a small and humble collection of books, but to me they were the souls of the people who’d written them—and this was no metaphor or poetic image, but a truth I had felt for many years.