Hunger

“Watchers,” from the portfolio Painting Past Photographs by Bradford Johnson, which appeared in the Winter 2003 issue of The Paris Review.

So this is hunger. A new war raging inside the war of missiles and bombs, a war no less brutal or mighty than the one searing us with its fires and sending us running to escape its crushing force. Hunger came for us in our home, as it did for others. We eat one meal a day now, halfway through the day; in the morning, a few biscuits are first shared between the children and then the adults, and in the evenings, we make do with tea.

Shortly after flour disappeared from the market in November 2023, it began to circulate again in the sacks originally intended for distribution by UNRWA. This sudden appearance was the result of an act of mass looting by crowds of hungry people, which we only heard about afterward: they had stormed the UNRWA warehouses, some breaking down the doors while others scaled the walls, and emptied them of their supplies—not only flour, but also tinned sardines, corn oil, milk powder, and dried lentils and chickpeas—in a matter of minutes. Apparently, they’d even taken wooden desks, shelves, and the agency’s archives—all of which could be used as firewood. I bought a sack of looted UNRWA flour for more than four times the usual price and made my way home as if bearing priceless treasure. My wife Ula and her sisters were jubilant, and we were all seized by a dark joy amid the wasteland of fear and grief that grows vaster and more desolate by the day as the war continues to escalate. We felt momentarily comfortable and safe; we could bake our own bread now, instead of waiting under the hot sun for hours in the uncertain hope of finding some at the bakery. But another problem stood in our path: to turn the thin rounds of dough into bread we needed an oven, and all we had in the apartment was a gas canister that barely sufficed to cook our regular meals. We would have to find some other way.

Mud ovens, which are what rural Gazan families have always used for cooking and baking, are dotted across the green patches that lie between the apartment blocks in Hamad City. The women they belong to are generous and volunteer their help when other families turn up needing to bake something, only asking them to bring enough paper and cardboard for fuel. But we didn’t have any paper or cardboard in the house—only my books.

Ula looked at me timidly. “Let’s use one or two for now, and when the war’s over you can replace them,” she said, as gently as she could. “The kids need food more than they need to be read to.” The ugliness of it was devastating. In all the years I’d spent amassing my modest library, it had never occurred to me that I might one day have to weigh a book against a piece of bread for my children. I was stunned by the cruelty of the choice, paralyzed by the question it raised: How had things gotten this bad, this fast?

I’d collected my books over many years, and I had around 200 now, including works on philosophy, society, and religion, novels, and poetry collections gifted to me by friends at their book signings, with dedications handwritten in the front pages. The books felt to me as if they were a part of a shared memory belonging to all those people, some of whom were still in Gaza, some of whom had gone abroad, and some of whom had died while searching for life. The more I thought about it, the more clearly I felt it: my library was a pulsing bundle of flesh and blood and memories and lives and errands run in Gaza’s streets and alleys and evenings spent in cafés and on the seafront in summer and in winter.

Which is why I replied, “I’m not going to burn a single page of a book. There must be some other solution.”

 “Never mind then,” Ula said. “We just have to get hold of some paper somehow, so we can bake the bread before the dough goes bad.”

I went downstairs and headed out, thinking I’d find a stack of empty boxes lying next to the garbage containers or outside a grocery store. But as I walked down the street, there wasn’t a scrap of paper or cardboard to be found. People had used up everything they could find in the garbage containers, and as I searched, I realized that others were searching with me.

Young and old alike were raking the ground with their eyes, all looking for paper to give to the village women so as to bake their bread. I wondered for a second if there might be none to be found anywhere in Hamad City, and I was overcome by a crushing sense of despair as I looked left and right, running now. Thinking how hungry the children were, I nearly went back to the flat and took two books from the shelves to burn, had not the owner of the store beneath our building intervened. He seemed to have been watching me on my search and had decided to help me when he saw I was losing hope.

“You’re looking for cardboard boxes, aren’t you?” he asked.

“Do you have any?”

“Here,” he said, handing me three large pieces of cardboard. “Nothing’s too precious for you.”

I thanked him several times before racing back upstairs, happy and proud, and grateful to the man for rescuing me from a sea of regret I’d soon have been drowning in had I begun to burn my library.

They were only a small, humble collection of books, but to me they were the souls of the people who’d written them—and this was no metaphor or poetic image, but something I had always known.

 

This is an edited excerpt drawn from Muhammad al-Zaqzouq’s memoir in the forthcoming anthology Palestine is everywhere , edited by Skye Arundhati Thomas, which will be copublished by TBA21, Silver Press, and the87press later this month.

Muhammad al-Zaqzouq is a writer, editor, and researcher from Khan Younis, Gaza. His poetry collection Betrayed by the Soothsayers was awarded the 2018 Al Khalili Prize for Poetry. He is the coeditor of the anthology Letters from Gaza, and his journal of the war is forthcoming from al-Mutawassit.

Katharine Halls is a prizewinning Arabic-to-English translator. Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, the NYR Online, Frieze, and elsewhere. Her translation of Sara Abou Ghazal’s The Dreams of Ayn Ara is forthcoming from Feminist Press in summer 2026.