Gazans describe their day-to-day effort to find food and stay alive

Many of the roughly two million Palestinians in Gaza face a grim routine over their daily struggle for food.

- Abeer Ayyoub & Omar Abdel-Baqui

They scour the markets for supplies. They risk getting shot by Israeli troops as they move through combat zones to reach one of the handful of aid-distribution sites. They scavenge for wood in the rubble to create cooking fires.

The food shortages are particularly acute in the north, where aid-distribution sites are scant. On Friday, a global body tasked with assessing famine conditions, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, said the area in and around Gaza City met the official criteria, the first such determination in the Middle East.

"Our situation would make a stone cry," said Hala Al-Kamouni, 49 years old, who lives with her three daughters and two sons in a tent in Gaza City. Three of her other children died in an airstrike, she said.

There are days when Al-Kamouni finds nothing to eat. Her days are consumed with lining up with hundreds of others waiting for water dispensed from a truck. When she finds food supplies, she then scavenges for discarded clothing and cardboard to make a cooking fire.

She forbids her children from going to aid-distribution points for fear they will be killed. Instead she looks for food she can afford on the marketplace, relying on the cash her relatives send from abroad through smartphone apps.