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January 5th, 2022 
Awake Goy Every evening after sunset, Noura Atta, 45, and her daughter Maryam, 15, gather in the family’s modest kitchen in the Shuja’iyya neighborhood of Gaza City and start preparing dinner. Noura’s husband, Ibrahim 47, sits on a mattress on the floor of their living room, and calls his sons Majd 18, and Tareq 14, from their bedrooms.
Maryam carefully fills a large tray with an array of small dishes, filled with a variety of foods she pulled out of the family’s refrigerator. Ibrahim gets up to help his daughter move the tray onto a short plastic table in the middle of the living room, and makes one last call for his sons to come sit at the table .
As her family waits around the table, Noura puts her finishing touches on what is perhaps the most important part of dinner: her freshly brewed black tea. Without it, it doesn’t really feel like dinner, the family says.
Once Noura brings the tea kettle and cups on a small tray and sets it down on the table, the spread is complete: local spice blends of Za’atar and Dukkah, sliced tomatoes, chicken mortadella, soft white cheese, fresh olives from this season’s harvest, and some olive oil from the family’s supply – a gallon that they must make last for the entire year.
Everything that was available in the fridge, is now on the table for dinner.
Ibrahim breaks a piece off of the warm homemade bread, passes the bread on to the person next to him, and the family starts their dinner.
The spread on the Atta family’s dinner table can be commonly found on dinner tables throughout the Gaza Strip, where many families live below the poverty line. In 2021, the unemployment rate in Gaza exceeded 50 percent .
Ibrahim Atta is one of the millions of Gazan’s facing unemployment. After he was injured during the Second Intifada in 2000, Ibrahim was rendered unable to work. Atta’s family of five lives off of his monthly pension from the Palestinian Authority of 900 shekels (~$290).
“Dinner meals are mostly simple, as we have to make a balance between affordable meals and the more costly ones,” Noura tolda Mondoweiss, as she sipped on her tea. “Tomorrow is Friday and traditionally families eat meat or chicken, but I can’t offer it. It is so expensive that I can only afford it once or twice in the month, maximum” she said.
After dinner, the family sits around the table finishing their tea, laughing, and chatting about their days. Noura, who does all the shopping for the family, expresses her discontent with the economic situation in Gaza, and how “everything was much more affordable and easily accessible before the siege.”
“Hearty meals consisting of fresh vegetables and meat are now too expensive for us to make regularly during the week. Things are much more difficult these days,” she said, adding that the family often relies on leftovers from lunch to eat for dinner.
“Fifteen years ago we used to get a larger amount of food at a lower cost. Now the amount of food is less, and the cost is higher,” she continued, adding that her growing teenage boys don’t often feel full after their dinners, but the family “makes do” with whatever they can find in the fridge.
According to Noura, before the Israeli siege was imposed on Gaza in 2007, she used to be able to purchase food for 100 shekels ($32) that would last her family the whole week.
“Now for 100 shekels, I can only get simple things to last for a few days,” she said.
The Atta family’s budget for dinner doesn’t exceed more than 15 shekels ($4.87) per day, sometimes even less when the dinner consists of leftovers from lunch, plus one or two new side dishes. This week, the family had leftovers two nights of the week.
Day 1: Dinner today is Za’atar, a mix of dried thyme and sesame seeds, a local spice blend called Dukkah, olive oil for dipping, slices of chicken mortadella, tomatoes, hot red peppers, yogurt and some white cheese to cool down the hot spices in these dishes, and of course, fresh seasonal olives.
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Za’atar, a mix of dried thyme and sesame seeds, a local spice blend called Dukkah, olive oil for dipping, slice tomatoes, ‘Shatta’, a hot red pepper sauce, yogurt, soft white cheese and fresh seasonal olives. -
Day 2: Dinner today is leftovers from lunch. Noura made baked pastries stuffed with spinach. On the side of the pastries was cheese, tomatoes, and olives.
Day 3: Dinner today was a traditional dish called Ful (pronounced fūl), a stew of cooked fava beans served with olive oil, cumin, garlic, and other herbs and spices. On the side were boiled eggs, mortadella, tomato and olives.
Day 4: Dinner today is lentil soup served with its special side of lemon and garlic, along with yogurt, some olives and homemade bread.
Day 5: Dinner is lunch leftovers of cooked spinach, some poached potato , olives, tomatoes, and red pepper.
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Cooked spinach, homemade bread, boiled potatoes, olives, and red pepper sauce. -
Day 6: Dinner today is pasta cooked in tomato sauce, olives and yogurt.
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Pasta cooked in tomato sauce, yogurt, olives, and some bread on the side. -
Day 7: The final dinner of the week is made up of cheese, beans, tomatoes, chicken mortadella, and red peppers.
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Cheese, beans, tomatoes, chicken mortadella, red pepper sauce, and homemade bread. -
At the end of the week, Noura begins planning her shopping list for the week to come. She’ll assess what she has at home already, and go out to buy only the things she needs. If she has enough money left in her budget, she’ll try to purchase some meat or chicken to give her family a special treat.
“I wish I could go to the market and buy the best food for my family every day, but if I did that, our monthly income would be gone within two days,” Noura said. “I have a family to feed for the whole month, so we choose to have these simple meals instead.”
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