Seven mouths, one meal: Feeding a family through Gaza’s food crisis

Gaza City — Whenever Mervat Radwan hears the community kitchen in her displacement camp will serve lunch that day, she breathes a sigh of relief.

She takes a cooking pot and walks to the community kitchen with her nephew, six-year-old Ubay.

The meal is rarely enough for the seven people in her household, so she has to supplement it with whatever else she can find. A can of tuna, beans or peas from an aid parcel can help make the meal stretch further.

“Sometimes they give us a cooked meal, but it isn’t enough for seven people, so I try to find something besides it,” she told Al Jazeera.

Community kitchens are a vital source of food for families with little or no income in Gaza, but their operations have fluctuated sharply in recent months.

The kitchen near Radwan’s displacement site was closed for almost two months before resuming services for just two days a week.

Daily production in Gaza fell from about 1.5 million meals via 165 kitchens in mid-March to 698,000 served by 102 kitchens by July, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

This substantial reduction in the number of community kitchens operating in the Gaza Strip and the meals they serve has been attributed to severe funding shortages and rising operational costs, with charities facing difficulties securing sufficient food or cooking supplies.