A vendor serves dates to a customer in Gaza City on 1 March 2025. Photo: Omar al-Qattaa/AFP.
By Maha Hussaini – Aug 8, 2025
Israel has tried to strip us of life, hope and energy. But the sweetness of a single date highlights why we must keep resisting
After more than five months of a near-total closure of Gaza’s borders, leading to the deaths of dozens of Palestinians from starvation or malnutrition, Israel has finally allowed a small number of merchants to bring limited goods into Gaza.
This week, we awoke to find food items on market shelves that had been absent for five months.
The scenes were surreal. People stood before crates of sugar, pressed dates and feta cheese as if seeing them for the first time in their lives. Some reached out cautiously to touch them and inquire about prices, while others simply stared, uncertain whether this was real or some cruel illusion.
These were not luxuries. They were the most basic of staples, but after months of crushing starvation and relentless deprivation, they might as well have been treasures.
In the first phase of starvation, when vegetables, beans and rice disappeared, many families relied on “tea fattah” – pieces of bread soaked in tea and eaten as the main meal of the day.
It became a mother’s go-to solution when her children cried from hunger. The meal provides carbohydrates and sugar, offering just enough energy to carry out daily tasks.
But when flour also ran out, people were left with nothing but tea. Some drank three or four cups a day, and that was all that entered their stomachs. But sugar soon vanished too, and with it everything sweet.
Memory faded
This was the harshest phase, as people literally collapsed in the streets from sheer exhaustion and depleted energy.
At some point, hunger stopped being just physical, and started to erode the mind. You would see people wandering aimlessly, not even asking for food anymore. Children stopped playing. Conversations became quieter, slower. People forgot certain tastes. The memory of sweetness faded.
Cravings for anything sweet became so intense that mothers began sharing stories, and sometimes recordings, of their children begging for larger doses of liquid medicine, simply because it tasted slightly sweet. After months of deprivation, they just wanted to experience the taste of sugar again.
Some residents, thinking outside the box, started selling ice cream made from children’s liquid antibiotics, since it contained sugar and a bit of flavour. Everyone knew what it was made of, and that it could be harmful. But people still bought it – including me – because it was the only sweet thing left in a landscape of tasteless survival food. No one was eating for pleasure anymore; we were eating to stay alive.
When people talk about starvation, they often think only of empty stomachs. But starvation is not just a bodily affliction. It eats away at the human spirit. It robs people of memory, emotion and clarity.
Days pass in a fog, filled with survival tasks: fetching water, searching for something to eat, waiting in endless lines, watching others faint beside you.
Some children became unrecognisable; their limbs thin and movements weak, their faces pale and expressionless. Parents, especially mothers, carry unbearable guilt – not just for failing to feed their children, but for the mere act of bringing them into this world, and for beginning to lose themselves, forgetting how to provide comfort.
But as we awoke this week to find crates of sugar, dates and cheese in our local markets, Gaza sounded different. The laughter of taxi drivers – known for their grumpy complaining in times of crisis – rang through the streets. A shift in the city’s mood was almost visible. People described it as a feast after prolonged fasting.
“It feels like Eid,” one Palestinian journalist wrote on social media. “We had tea with sugar and cheese manakeesh.”
Others shared photos and stories of drinking tea with sugar for the first time in months.
The prices remain painfully high, because the amount of goods allowed in is still a fraction of what people need. Regardless, the mere sight of food and the scent of sugar in the markets – the possibility of choice, however limited – was enough to stir something long buried.
It was not normality. But it was enough to remind us that we are still human, after nearly two years of genocide and a siege that Israel said it was imposing on “human animals”.
The taste of joy
On my way to work on Thursday morning, street vendors were selling pressed dates by the piece. I bought one and held it in my hand until I reached my office building.
As I climbed the stairs, internally grumbling about having to ascend two more flights after my long walk in the scorching sun, I popped the date into my mouth – and immediately, the sugar hit.
I stopped in the middle of the stairs, closed my eyes, and sighed in relief for the first time in months: “Where have you been all these months, sweet taste? Oh, I’m willing to forget everything that has happened. I’m willing to climb the two floors. I think I can handle the current situation a bit longer now.”
Apparently, dopamine does its job faster when it has been absent for too long. I finished the date, and a few moments later, came back to my senses after being briefly “sugar drunk”.
Now I understand. This is what they are fighting us with: dopamine.
This is the energy they are rapidly draining from the bodies of an entire population. You cannot push a people determined to resist your attempts at forced expulsion unless you first strip them of life, hope and energy.
Israel’s strategy is not simply to dismantle an armed or political faction. It is to manufacture a completely different population, one too exhausted to even consider the idea of resisting – a population convinced they will never truly be themselves again unless they leave this place.
It is not just a war against our bodies. It is also a war on memory. The longer this starvation lasts, the more we forget: what we used to eat, how our children used to laugh, what normal feels like. The joy I felt from that single date – the fragile, fleeting joy – was a reminder that I had forgotten what joy tasted like.
When you withhold food and carefully restrict selected essentials like sugar, wheat flour and dairy from a people, you do more than just starve and kill. You aim to slowly unmake who they are.
You want them to stop being citizens of a homeland and start being bodies trying to stay alive. And eventually, you hope they will decide that living anywhere else, even in exile, is better than dying like this.
But that date told me otherwise. It told me that I am still here; that my body still remembers what they want me to forget.
It told me that a single bite of sweetness, even if long delayed, can remind us who we are, and why we are still fighting to remain.
