On 20 May 2026, the World Central Kitchen management announced layoffs of about 480 of 1,870 workers in the kitchens. I was among them. They told us the reason was a lack of funding, with no further information. We signed termination of employment papers, but we still haven’t received the money that was promised to us as part of the severance arrangements.

What hurts most is that my kids are queuing for food instead of going to school. It hurts that their academic future is lost and their entire world revolves around getting food and water. Also, the food from the aid kitchens is very low grade, barely fit for human consumption. About three months ago, the activity of the kitchen in al-Musaddar was scaled back, and now we hardly get any food from there. Sometimes the children come back with completely empty pots.

About a month ago, the WFP scaled down the number of kitchens in the northern Gaza Strip, and now there’s only one left, in the al-Karamah area. The lines in that kitchen are now long and crowded, and there’s not enough food for everyone. [...] I had to look for another community kitchen in western Gaza City. I finally found one run by Chef Faten al-Madhun, and I’ve been going to it every day since. That kitchen also has long lines of IDPs and it’s very crowded, but thank God, every day, I manage to get a plate of food.

The soldiers also tied me in the “shabah” position for many hours, completely naked. They tied me up in a very painful way, with my hands behind my back, hoisted up with chains, and left me like that for hours without mercy. Then they lowered me down onto a pole that was fixed to a table, so it went all the way into my anus. The pain was so bad, I started screaming hysterically, begging them to take me off the pole.

I nodded off and was woken by my daughter’s hysterical crying. When I picked her up, I discovered rats had gnawed at her foot while she slept. I was so afraid, I felt my soul leave my body. I started screaming and crying, grabbed her and ran together with my husband between medical service points to find medicine or disinfectants against infection and poisoning. But the military doesn’t even allow medicine and disinfectants into Gaza.

Nothing stops the rats from entering our tent. Sometimes I find them gnawing on bread or other food we have, and I immediately throw it away so we don’t catch a disease. Honestly, I don’t know how to get rid of them. I tried scattering poison, but it didn’t help. I feel they are only multiplying, because of the piles of garbage around us, the sewage water, and the scraps of food that people throw right by the tents. We’re living in a massive environmental disaster, and we have no idea how to deal with it.

The problem is worse in summer, when the rats and mice spread in large numbers throughout the camp. Most of the displaced families can’t afford ordinary solutions such as poison or traps. For example, a glue trap for rats currently costs 20 shekels [≈ USD 5], and rat poison costs around 50 shekels [≈ USD 13]. As an unemployed father, I cannot afford it. If I have 20 shekels, my priority is to buy food, medicine or other necessities for my children.

Life in the camps is very hard. There is no privacy; women are constantly exposed to the gaze of strange men, which requires wearing overgarments and a hijab; long lines for water; the spread of skin diseases; dependence on soup kitchens; bullying and exploitation. Another pattern I see is women having to take on all the responsibility for the family. Some men lost their jobs and completely rely on their wives, and sometimes also make sexual demands without taking into account their wives’ wishes, mental state or the conditions in the shelters.

[...] my daughters and I cut our hair, because there were no cleaning products or shampoo, and our hair was crawling with lice because of the filthy conditions we were living in. The few cleaning products and hygiene items that were available on the market were insanely expensive, and there was no way we could buy them. Sometimes my husband went to bombed houses to scavenge for food, hygiene items and cleaning products, and when he came back with some leftover piece of soap and we could shower properly, not wash ourselves a little with just water, we all felt as if we were born again.

My son Hamzah would go to get aid, although I forbade him to go there for fear for his life. But he insisted, telling me: “I’m dead anyway! We are hungry. We want to eat.” He would go at night to Netzarim, risking his life to bring us some flour and canned food, and I would sit in my prayer clothes and pray, imagining them coming to tell me that he had been killed. When he came back safely, I would smother him with hugs and kisses.

I suffer the most from the fire, which I spend so much time in front of, sometimes whole days. When my children want to bathe, I light a fire and heat water for them. When someone asks to eat something, I stay by the fire and cook for them, whether it’s morning, noon or night, all day long. During the day, my husband and sons go out to look for pieces of plastic or wood in the garbage dump, so I can light a fire. The skin on my face has grown darker because of the fire, and my hands have become wrinkled and the soot does not come off them.

This war has taken everything from me: my daughter, her children and her husband, my self-respect and my sense of self-worth, and my home. I’m homeless now, living on the street. I hate the word tent. I’m not used to this life, and I don’t know how we’ll be able to adapt to life in tents. I hope God helps us and life goes back to how it was before the war, that I return to my home and this tragedy finally ends.

I gave birth to my son Samir in the eighth month of pregnancy, and I named him after his half-brother who was killed. During the pregnancy, I didn’t have enough food and there were no vitamins. I suffered from malnutrition and was almost a skeleton. I also suffered from a kidney problem. Samir was born weighing 800 grams, and they put him in an incubator. After the birth, I suffered from anemia. When I came back to the tent, we still had no food at all, and I ate only a few lettuce leaves. Fruit, milk and eggs were something I could only dream about. It was out of the question.

Everything is hard for us, and I’m young and can’t cope with all these difficulties alone. I’ve become irritable. I have no patience even for my children. Sometimes I wish I could have a big tent, with a private corner for my husband and me. I need privacy. I can’t even cry in front of my children, because then I’d fall apart. I try as hard as I can to appear strong for them and for my husband. I so much want to be alone, even for one day, to be just with myself in a distant place where I can scream at the top of my lungs and cry over this terrible life that has been forced on me.

My husband stood and tried to fix the tent with his bare hands, holding down the corners in an attempt to stop the water from coming in, but he was powerless against the force of the wind and rain. I saw his helplessness. I saw my little daughter shivering with cold, and I burst into tears, crying like I’d never cried in my life. All the pain and humiliation of the war, the displacement, the poverty, the fear, the exposure to the elements with no protection, all of it came together for me in that moment, when we were standing in the water, trying to protect ourselves from drowning inside a shelter made of cardboard and burlap that we called a “home.”

The winds were so strong that they tore down the tarps we put up. Suddenly, I heard Rawan screaming. We rushed over and saw her holding Tayyem. His body and face were blue. He wasn’t breathing and looked lifeless. I immediately took him to a-Shifaa Hospital. When I got there, the doctors checked him and said he was suffering from low blood sugar due to extreme cold […]

I ran to pick up Hadil while my wife started lifting the other children and taking them out of the flooded tent. Her body was very cold and blue, and her lips had gone blue. Our other children were shivering from the cold and couldn’t walk. Their bodies were as cold as ice. [...] I held Hadil and tried to warm her and wake her up, but nothing helped. I hugged her and was terrified she would die from the cold. [...] the neighbors called an ambulance, but it was delayed. When it arrived about half an hour later, Hadil was already gone.

While I was at the market, I heard people saying that a building in a-Sheikh Radwan had collapsed on its inhabitants. My heart sank, because I immediately felt it was our home. I went home and saw the roof had collapsed. Lina and Ghazi were trapped under the rubble. My wife and the other kids had escaped through another entrance. They were screaming and crying. [...] They had been trapped and apparently suffocated. When they were pulled out and I saw they were dead, I went into shock.

That night, it rained very heavily. We woke up at 3:30 A.M. and found the tent flooded. We checked on our children. Rahaf was completely wet. When my wife changed her clothes, she noticed that her body was very cold and her face looked different. Her lips had gone blue. I called an ambulance, but because of the heavy rain, it arrived only about an hour and a half later. My wife and I went with Rahaf to Nasser Hospital. She was already dying. The doctors tried to resuscitate her, but it didn’t help.

They soldiers dragged me along the ground and put me in a narrow cell, like a coffin. One of them said to me: “We’re going to leave you in this coffin until you die, son of a bitch.” I was terrified and thought they were going to kill me. I stayed locked in that coffin for several days, completely isolated, without food and with almost no water. Every time I shouted and begged for water or food, the soldiers opened the door, beat me hard and shut it again. When I needed the bathroom, I called out to the soldiers, but they ignored me. I tried to hold it in, but in the end I was forced to wet myself. The soldiers opened the coffin from time to time just to see if I was still alive.

There were five interrogators, and they tightened my handcuffs so much that I lost feeling in my hands. They tied my legs to a chair in a “banana” position. All the soldiers in the room attacked me and beat me on my back, chest, legs and even my testicles. I thought my bladder would explode. I screamed and told them I had to pee. They ordered two guards to take me to the bathroom. When I got there, I was too shocked to pee. When I finally managed to, there was a lot of blood in my urine.

I woke up and found myself lying in a large pool of blood. I was shocked. I looked at my feet and saw that they were bleeding. It was a horrific sight, and I started screaming and crying hysterically, hoping someone would come to help me. I was taken to the prison hospital. […] A doctor in uniform told me: “Listen, your life is in danger. You have to choose between having both your legs amputated and dying.” I started crying and screaming, hoping someone would hear my pain, my torment, my grief. They handed me a document and forced me to sign that I agree to have both legs amputated.

The soldiers grabbed me, lifted me up by my arms and hung me in the “shabah” position, with chains, in the middle of the interrogation room. They brought a dildo and put it under my buttocks, and then began lowering the chain while holding me, until part of the dildo entered my anus. It was the worst pain I’d ever experienced. I started screaming and sobbing. That was the cruelest, harshest torture I went through during my entire detention in Israel.

The Metzada Unit attacked me and I was injured by a rubber bullet. I was sent to hospital for 15 days, and on the way there they beat me. They questioned me again about Hamas, about the hostages, and about booby-trapped houses. They threatened that if I didn’t give them information, they would arrest and rape my wife and my mother. I was badly beaten and humiliated almost every day. Sometimes they showed us a black body bag and said: “This is the only way you’ll leave this place,” and again demanded that we’d given them the locations of Hamas and of tunnels – things we had nothing to do with.