This gentle creature has been troubling me since March 2025.
People in Gaza have a sacred weekly ritual: the Friday meal, which must be adorned with chicken. Red meat is usually out of reach for most people, but the chicken had always shown us mercy, allowing us to buy one every Friday to quiet our longing for meat.
Since March 2025, meat of all kinds has disappeared from Gaza—most importantly chicken. And when it began returning to the markets three weeks ago, the price of one kilogram reached 22 USD, and sometimes the frenzy of exploitation pushed the price to 30 USD at the hands of thieves and war profiteers.
At the beginning of the war, the Israeli occupation bombed poultry farms and prevented the entry of feed, forcing traders to sell chickens at very low prices. A single chicken weighing 1500 grams cost 3–4 dollars. At that time, people thought it was a blessing due to the low prices, but the curse arrived days later when the bombardment on every living creature intensified and famine worsened. Meat—especially chicken—became a rare guest that visited us only during a ceasefire or when international and humanitarian organizations managed to bring in food.
Gaza has been facing a genocide since October 7, 2023. According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, the death toll from the war of extermination and starvation has risen today to 68,865 Palestinians, in addition to 170,670 injured. These numbers continue to rise every day after the ceasefire agreement on October 10, when hundreds of victims—most of them unidentified—were recovered from beneath the rubble of destroyed buildings or from mass graves, many showing signs of torture or execution.
Even today, obtaining a chicken is extremely difficult, and we as parents undergo this forced weekly test to silence our children’s hunger—but we fail every time.
Every Thursday and Friday morning, movement begins on social media. Friday is the official weekly day off in Gaza, and people have long been accustomed to eating chicken on that day. After scrolling through social media, a chain of calls begins with friends, relatives, and workers in butcher shops and markets. Once the first news of chicken reaching the market appears, the chase begins—yet it fails for most people. Most purchases are made through electronic wallets due to the cash shortage, as banks—despite reopening at the end of last October—still refuse to open new accounts or allow withdrawals and deposits by order of the Israeli occupation.
Last Thursday, I resumed the search for a chicken. I visited two commercial centers that had reopened, and three shops in the Nuseirat market in central Gaza, an area that now hosts around 300,000 residents during the war, although its original population was only 100,000. It is a refugee camp, but people fled to it because it suffered less damage; only 10% of its buildings were destroyed, compared to 80–90% in other regions.
The small quantity that arrived on Thursday sold out within minutes. Only a few types of frozen meat were available, bearing Egyptian and Brazilian labels. Some people found themselves compelled to buy them as substitutes for the “queen” of the Gazan table: the chicken.
The lack of protein found in chicken and many other foods negatively affects the body, as protein is essential for building tissues, muscles, enzymes, and hormones.
The shortage of protein—most of which Gazans once obtained from poultry—leads to weakened immunity, reduced muscle mass, and delayed wound healing.
According to the Paris Protocol, the economic agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Israel signed in 1994, Israel controls most of the goods entering and leaving Gaza. After Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007, Israel banned the entry of many items under the pretext that some of them could be used for terrorism, while continuing to control food security in general. It determines the quantity of each item entering Gaza in very limited amounts. But the suffering intensified after October 7, 2023, with the collapse of local agriculture and industry, and markets devoid of essential goods such as fuel, meat, construction materials, and thousands of other items—while the private sector completely collapsed and only fragments of the public sector remained.
I tried to follow in the footsteps of friends, attempting to bargain with two people whom I heard had obtained two boxes of frozen Egyptian chicken, each chicken weighing 1100 grams—ten chickens per box. But someone else reached them first and paid a higher price: 20 USD per chicken. And thus, the search failed once more.
My youngest son Adam (6) and my daughter Sarah (9) were anxiously waiting, and when I returned home empty-handed, they were very upset. My daughter Maryam (13) was more compassionate; she comforted me with words beyond her age, having gained much social maturity during the war and now sharing my worries.
At five in the evening, I received a call from my brother informing me that a limited quantity of chicken had reached the market. Because I suffer from a torn knee cartilage and my health had deteriorated due to the lack of MRI diagnosis and the starvation that caused me to lose 34 kilograms, I asked for help from my oldest son Malik (15), who moves faster than I do. After difficult persuasion—since he already knew the expected outcome—he agreed to search for a chicken. Minutes later he called, delivering the predictable result. And so, we failed once again.
On my way home, I stopped at the pharmacy to buy colchicine, which a doctor had prescribed 18 years ago to treat vascular and joint inflammation. The pharmacist laughed loudly when I asked for the medication, explaining that this medicine is usually taken by gout patients who suffer joint inflammation caused by eating meat—exactly the opposite of our reality, where people search desperately for meat and cannot find any.
Every week, my children bring me news of neighbors who succeeded in finding a chicken, while I stand helpless. So for the fourth time in two days, I resumed the search for any kind of meat. I finally succeeded—but without the approval of my three daughters, my two sons, or their mother—when I bought 1800 grams of frozen Brazilian beef. After burning seven kilograms of wood to light the fire, they ate some of the meat, still speaking longingly of the missing honored guest: the chicken.
The cat in our house was the only one who stayed beside me until the end of the meal, eating some fat and leftovers. This cat had become sick, lost much weight, shed fur severely, and developed a skin disease. He received a vaccination weeks ago so he wouldn’t die.
When the famine began last March and continued until the ceasefire in October 2025, we watched our bodies weaken day by day. We ate only one meal a day—lentil soup—and we were unable to eat bread for ten full days. During the remaining weeks of the famine, my family of seven received only one kilogram of flour per day at the price of 23 USD, forcing me daily to negotiate with traders and thieves, as flour had become extremely scarce.
Before October 7, 2023, the financially fortunate—though they were few—ate lamb and beef. This is how we grew up during the 18 years of Gaza’s ongoing siege, which dramatically increased poverty and unemployment. Before the Palestinian Authority arrived in 1994, Palestinians working inside Israel earned enough money to live comfortably.
According to WHO statistics from November 2025, 16,500 patients are awaiting evacuation from Gaza for treatment. They include war-wounded individuals and people with serious illnesses.
A few days ago, I met a doctor working at the European Hospital in southern Gaza while we were waiting for our turn at the barbershop. He told me that wounds no longer heal after surgery due to malnutrition. And when doctors advise patients to eat protein, laughter breaks out at the mention of chicken—which has been absent for months—along with all other meats.
According to Palestinian medical sources, by the first week of September 2025, the total number of famine and malnutrition deaths in Gaza had reached 387, including 138 children. The famine after the ceasefire has also caused irreversible health problems for newborns.
Nine hundred thousand children in Gaza suffer from malnutrition and famine. Seventy thousand of them entered acute malnutrition between March and October 2025—a crisis that has not ended yet, though its intensity has slightly lessened after the implementation of the first phase of the ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Israel on October 10, 2025.
Chicken arrived in small quantities last week, but most people cannot afford it amid an unprecedented poverty and unemployment crisis in Gaza. According to Gaza’s labor force survey for the fourth quarter of 2024, unemployment reached 68%, compared to 45% in the third quarter of 2023, and rose to 80% two months ago.
When I was young, my mother raised a different type of chicken for eggs, and sometimes she raised chicks for meat when they grew heavier. Today, as I try to convince my children that the crisis is nearing an end, I tell them stories about the chicken coop in our old home. I find myself forced to eat bread with the leftover meat soup from yesterday’s meal, trying to convince them to eat with me—but in vain, after the disappearance of what they truly want.