Hunger is Hunting Me

Gaza City, 8 Aug 2025

I thought of all possibilities of being killed: by a bullet, a missile, or a bomb. I thought of the countless types of military machines they would be launched through: drones, fighter jets, bombers, naval vessels. I thought about where my last moment will be, my last breath, my last smile, my last fear. I thought of how my flesh might be lost, so I collected my body through poetry. But I never thought my body might shrink one kilo after the other. I never thought my flesh might cease to exist.

Although I have experienced hunger about five times since the beginning of the genocide, I never thought I would die hungry. This possibility was never real to me. I met a friend a week after the ceasefire collapsed. We were having dark chocolate ice cream that cost about five times its regular price. I told her jokingly that I was reading some research on the theme of hunger in literature. She was wondering why I would read such a thing. I told her, ‘I am preparing myself for the coming famine.’ She said, while still licking her ice cream, ‘You will never be ready to die of hunger.’ I recall this conversation as I put on my trousers that are now too large and have started slipping down, as I explore my newly sharp-cheekboned face, as I notice my upper arm circumference getting smaller and my hair falling out more than it ever did.

In famine’s rumour stage, the news creates a hollow in my stomach, the casual daily portion doesn't satisfy. In famine’s first stage, my brain stops thinking about anything but food. I eat breakfast wondering when lunch will come. I eat lunch wondering how much is left for tomorrow’s breakfast. In the second stage, my stomach misses all luxuries. I start growing insane, dreaming of having my morning coffee and a chocolate oat bowl. In the third stage, my dreams change to having a green salad. My taste shifts and a desire for the food I used to hate awakens — a desire I never expected I could feel. I start counting the food we restocked and wonder when we will enter the one meal per day stage. Now we are in the one meal per day stage. I try helplessly to convince myself that we won’t reach the point of not finding food at all. 

I am a liar and my stomach has no choice but to cling to the hope that this might be my last lie. Each time the Israeli forces close the borders, trust threads between me and my stomach are torn and replaced with barbed wires of horror. I suffer to rebuild trust again. The first time was the hardest. It took me months to fill the hollow that hunger caused, to free my stomach from the chain of fear. Stage after stage, I learned how to pull the trust threads from my stomach gradually before they’re cut. I reduce the portions and store large amounts of food the moment I hear any fleeting rumour. This doesn't change the physiological effects of hunger. It doesn't stop me from thinking about food all the time, or wanting to eat 20 pieces of bread and swallow a cup of raw sugar at once. It doesn’t change the fact that my mouth is watering as I write this essay remembering what food used to taste like. But this will help me later to restore the trust between me and my stomach.

I learned how to escape from all thoughts that point towards my hunger. I changed the Instagram content settings which never showed me cooking reels before until we were being starved. I unfollowed some people who kept posting food on Instagram, and deleted the photos I took before 7 October. I did keep some to remind myself that such dishes exist. I asked my friends living abroad to eat all the food I wished to eat. I called them when they were buying groceries so that they would buy me some. They promised to keep them for me. In my dreams, some came and gave me the food, while for others, I went to their houses where we prepared traditional Palestinian dishes. Even in those dreams I did not eat, I got the food and woke up, or I prepared the meals and left. All these attempts at adjusting to my new situation failed. I was dying of hunger. 

Hunger taught me how to be patient, how small, ordinary things like a piece of bread can become a dream, how there is always something worse. It showed me that we are not weak. You won't die because you didn't have your morning coffee, you will still be alive, but with a big hollow in your stomach and a bigger one in your soul that will tell you before telling the whole world:‘You are alive, you are dying.’

Paris, 8 Feb 2026

I am rereading this essay from my room in Paris, where hunger is still chasing me. I realised that ever since I arrived in Paris, I have been fascinated by it as a place full of food rather than anything else. I see hunger in the shelves of the supermarket, in the food I buy knowing that I won’t eat it, in the meals I cook for myself everyday calling it an act of love while I know it’s only a calming whisper to a scared body. I see it in the homeless who I pass by everyday. I see it in my fear of gaining weight. In my fear of losing weight. Sometimes hunger hates the fact that I could survive it, so it resists in my stomach, filling it up to my throat, making sure that I won’t eat for days. Other times it turns it into an ocean in which everything disappears. Not even the fact that I am no longer living the famine could make me and my stomach regain trust – trust in the humanity of this world which gave me food in exchange for my home, my family, my friends, and my memories. As if people like me can never have a full life, only fragments they keep collecting through the years, and as soon as they find a fragment, another one falls along the path. You look around, not knowing whether to keep going and get a sliver of life you never experienced or to go back and recover the one you lost. And here I am, walking, collecting new fragments while turning my head towards home. 

I cannot see the new fragments, and I cannot retrieve the ones I left behind. The louder I hear hunger’s thunderous roar, the louder the fragments in my pocket get, calling for me to keep looking, ‘you never know; you might, you might feel for the first time: Alive’.