Hunger in Gaza: 'We queue for hours for a piece of bread'

Mariam al-Scheikh hears her youngest of three children crying from hunger at night - but the 34-year-old from Gaza City can do nothing about it.

Getting food for her children is a daily struggle, she tells dpa. She often spends hours searching for bread or canned food.

"Some days, I can only find a small loaf of bread and a tomato to share between three children," she says. "We used to cook meals together. Now we eat whatever we can find – and sometimes there's nothing at all."

Um Khaled, 58, who found refuge in a school after fleeing her home, describes her difficulties of finding the bare necessities of life.

"We queue for hours for a piece of bread," says the grandmother of several grandchildren. "Sometimes there is no bread, only rice and lentils, and even that is not enough for all the children." Her grandchildren would like to eat fruit. "I tell them maybe there will be something tomorrow. But there is no tomorrow here."

Ahmed Nasser, a 22-year-old student, says his life has become a continuous cycle of queues. Sometimes he waits half a day just to fill a single bottle with drinking water. "People survive on tea, bread and sometimes rice," he reports. "I see mothers begging for milk for their babies. This is no life."

The people of Gaza City fear that everything will get worse if Israel implements its plan to take over the city. "When the soldiers come, where can we hide?" asks Um Khaled. "There are no safe places left."

"How much more can the city take?" wonders Ahmed Nasser, for whom the sight of ruins and the smell of smoke over the rubble have become part of everyday life. "It already looks as if it has been swallowed up by the ground."

Mariam Al-Sheikh's children also keep asking if soldiers are coming to their street. "My children know the sound of every weapon – drones, planes and tanks," she says of the war that has become everyday life for her children.

"No child should have to experience this."