Danielle Paquette

They used to swap TikTok recipes and photos of mouthwatering spreads: crispy falafel, baked chicken, grilled beef kebabs. Now her aunt in Gaza appeared on a WhatsApp video call with sunken eyes. The proud foodie was down to three cups of lentils and her last sack of flour.

“We can make that stretch,” Aunt Fairouz was saying, “for two more days.”

Perched at the marble island in her fully stocked Maryland kitchen, Ghada Tafesh listened and silently did the culinary math. No configuration of those ingredients would nourish a household of six. The youngest, 12-year-old twin boys, had each shed 22 pounds in the last year, a quarter of their body weight. The doctor’s diagnosis was all too familiar. Acute malnutrition. The family hadn’t eaten meat since early March.

“I pray for you every day,” Ghada replied.

Over almost 22 months of war, she had watched from afar as they all shrank: Her 47-year-old aunt with a pent-up flair for hosting; her 21-year-old cousin, Yasmeen, who’d fainted during her volunteer-nurse shifts at the hospital; the twins, Kareem and Ayman, both Cristiano Ronaldo fans who’d lost the energy to play soccer. The Washington Post is identifying them by only their first names because they fear retaliation.

No one in their family group chat was surprised when the leading global authority on food crises said last week that the “worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip” and predicted “widespread death.” The emaciated children in images circulating worldwide resembled ones Yasmeen said she saw daily in the emergency room. They all rejected the Israeli prime minister’s insistence that there was “no starvation” in Gaza. They weren’t sure what to make of President Donald Trump publicly contradicting him. “That’s real starvation stuff,” Trump had remarked. “I see it, and you can’t fake that.”

Ghada, a 30-year-old biologist and newish U.S. citizen, wires cash every other month to her family in the battered enclave, her hometown, despite the transfer fee that fluctuates as high as 60 percent. But the bigger challenge is finding anything edible for sale, and Aunt Fairouz is willing at this point to pluck out the maggots.

Thieves loot the aid trucks that manage to roll through Israel’s strict blockades, she told Ghada. Otherwise, where were street hawkers getting tomatoes to sell for $20 apiece? She urged her children to avoid supply convoys, fearing stampedes and bullets. Their survival strategy: Stay indoors – though not literally, because strikes had blown out their doors – and wait for those shameful merchants with their bags of questionable produce. Three cups of lentils, for instance, used to cost $2. Now the price tag is closer to $25.

They have no choice but to venture out to the water truck, which rumbles down their unpaved road on a frustratingly irregular basis. The twins know to run outside with buckets, shouldering a chore their father used to handle. Sami, who’d worked as a Palestinian Authority police officer, died in January 2024 from a heart attack. There had been no doctors around with the right training to treat him. As far as the family knows, he hadn’t been included in the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll, which last month passed 60,000. But the Israel-Hamas conflict has crushed access to even basic medical care, so Aunt Fairouz views her government’s tally as incomplete.

“I pray that things get better,” Ghada said for what felt like the millionth time. What she was thinking: I am so afraid to lose you. All my fears are about losing you.

She blew a kiss to the screen.

The last time they’d embraced was in 2021, when Ghada visited Gaza after nine years away. Visa complications, she said, had trapped her in what stung like exile.

She’d first visited the United States as a high school exchange student and returned on a college scholarship, eventually earning a doctorate degree in biological sciences from George Washington University. In June 2024, she became a citizen.

All the while, Ghada missed her family’s cooking. Food was how they kept in touch. Food was how they showed love – “our pride and joy,” she explained.

During that last trip, Aunt Fairouz and her daughters whipped up all the special dishes. There was chicken with caramelized onions, pine nuts and warm pita. There were ducks stuffed with rice, carrots, peas and potatoes. There was strawberry shortcake and pastries laced with sweet cream. The family’s doors were still on their hinges. The second floor was still intact. They still had electricity and running water. Ghada’s parents and brother still lived nearby; their house hadn’t yet collapsed, and they hadn’t yet fled to Cairo.

The boys still kicked their soccer ball.

Kareem wanted to go pro like Ronaldo. Ayman was more into his mother’s laptop and styling himself a “good hacker.” In an extended family of dozens, they are the only twins. “Mini-celebrities,” Ghada called them, with bright futures.

Now?

“I just want things to be normal,” Kareem muttered on WhatsApp behind his mother’s shoulder.

When it’s calm enough to venture out, the twins attend a relief agency-run school in a tent but can barely pay attention. Both are too hungry. Ghada couldn’t help but remember them as chunky babies. Before leaving for college, she’d accompanied her aunt to pediatrician appointments. The family was that close. Always giggling.

“Can you find us a sugar daddy?” Yasmeen was joking now. “To get us out of Gaza?”

The volunteer nurse has lost 28 pounds.

It was 10 p.m. in Gaza – eight hours since their last and only meal of the day, which, they explained, could have been worse. They could have endured another helping of “anything soup.” That recipe: Boil a $20 tomato (or $20 onion) in a pot over black-market wood or bits of broken furniture. Cooking outside is too dangerous, so Aunt Fairouz deals with smoke blowing into her face and all through the kitchen. Each night, she scrubs soot off the walls. She can’t get the black off the ceiling, though.

“I love you all,” Ghada said, trying to keep her eyes soft and happy.

Her own kitchen is what real estate agents would call a chef’s paradise. Gleaming white with an 11-foot island, it’s why she’d bought this townhouse. But she can’t enjoy it. She can’t wash her hands without imagining the twins scrambling to the water truck.

Ghada said she has developed anxiety around food waste, too. She plans meals each week on an Excel spreadsheet so she doesn’t overindulge at the grocery store. She can’t tolerate throwing away a scrap when her family abroad are starving.

“The guilt is constant,” she said after they all hung up.

She hadn’t told them what she was about to cook for dinner: Cod with creamy dill sauce and pearled couscous, a recipe she’d saved on TikTok. The ingredients – fresh fish, lemons, heavy cream, organic baby spinach – probably cost less than three cups of lentils in Gaza.

She still aches to swap photos, but that bonding ritual seems cruel now. Scrolling through her phone, Ghada realized the last time she’d sent a food shot to Aunt Fairouz was Oct. 1, 2023 – six days before their lives were upended.

It was a Jordanian dish with lamb and tangy yogurt sauce. The twins’ favorite.

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