Gaza graduate and her family forced to seek food in trash

‘THIS IS OUR LIFE DAY TO DAY. IF WE DON’T GATHER ANYTHING, WE DON'T EAT’

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With flies buzzing all around them, the woman and her daughter picked through the pile of garbage bags for scraps of food at the foot of a destroyed building in Gaza City.

She found a small pile of cooked rice, a few scraps of bread, a box with some smears of white cheese still inside.

Islam Abu Taeima picked soggy bits from a piece of bread and put the dry part in her sack. She will take what she found back to the school where she and hundreds of other families live, boil it and serve it to her five children, she said.

“We're dying of hunger,” she said. “If we don’t eat, we'll die.”

Depths of desperation