What It’s Like to Observe Ramadan in Gaza

It’s nearly sunset, and the pre-iftar frenzy is in full force in my suburban Maryland home. I rush to set the dinner table, heat up all the food, and refill the date container before my famished family of six descends upon the kitchen to break their 13-hour fast. The sambousek sizzles and splatters, dozens of plates clatter, and the familiar smells of apricot nectar amarideen, maqlouba, and shorabit adas fill the air, along with the heavenly scent of cheese-stuffed atayef. I’m feeling fatigued and desperate for a nap, but there is no time to waste.

Halfway across the world, my family in Gaza City prepares to have their predawn meal of suhoor in total darkness.

Ramadan is the ninth and holiest month of the Muslim calendar. For millions around the world, it is a time of unity and reflection during which believers abstain from all food and drink from dawn until sunset, increase their acts of charity, and deepen their worship, marking the days with prayers, family gatherings, and shared meals.

But for my family in Gaza, the experience of Ramadan is not simply defined by these rituals of faith and devotion. Their observance is a constant reminder of their endurance in the face of overwhelming hardship. They continue to suffer from Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. On March 18, Israel resumed large-scale attacks — the first of this magnitude since January’s ceasefire — killing more than 700 people in the last week. Since October 2023, Israel has killed over 64,000 Palestinians, or 3 percent of Gaza’s prewar population — including dozens of my own family members — while hundreds of thousands more have been maimed or rendered missing. Some have returned to fragments of their former homes in the north of Gaza; they’re missing doors, kitchens, and even entire walls, but they still have a home, they say. Many others have returned to living in tents on the rubble where their homes once stood. All have experienced unspeakable horrors and cruelty. This, and more, runs through my mind as I observe the blessed month with my own family in Maryland.

With Ramadan underway, almost the entire population of Gaza is facing what the World Food Program calls “crisis levels of hunger,” a direct result of Israel’s continued weaponization of food against the population. In coordination with the Trump administration, Israel also blocked all humanitarian aid from entering the enclave earlier this month, a move Oxfam has called “a reckless act of collective punishment.” In response, the price of goods inside Gaza soared.

It is in this context that observant Muslims in Gaza continue their fast. The irony is inescapable. After all, what is Ramadan if not a hectic mix of feasting, frailty, and faith that lies somewhere at the intersection of struggle and surrender? The deprivation fasting induces is thought to foster a greater appreciation for the human condition and our dependence on our Creator, offering a powerful reminder of our ability to endure in the face of great adversity. But while fasting is obligatory, hunger, for my family and other Palestinians like them in Gaza, is not a conscious religious choice, but an imposition, a cynically engineered reality of everyday life, dating as far back as 2006 (the year that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s advisor described the policy behind the punishing and illegal siege of Gaza as putting Palestinians on a “diet”).

Still, my family in Gaza City endures, and they manage as best they can.

With most mosques destroyed, Palestinians in Gaza have instead built prayer spaces out of greenhouses in which to gather for the evening taraweeh prayer. It’s nearly impossible to hear without loudspeakers, so they rely on traditional night drummers, musaharatis. With no fuel to power their ovens and homes, they have baked traditional holiday kaak date rings in homemade clay ovens. And with much of the population still displaced and living in tents, they gather and eat together on long, public iftar tables decorated with lights to break their fast together.

“Last Ramadan was not a Ramadan at all,” my relative Nermeen in Gaza City shared with me in an exchange over WhatsApp at the start of Ramadan this year, before the bombing resumed. “We reached a point where there was no flour, no cheese, no vegetables at all, not even onions or potatoes. The most basic things were unavailable. We could not even gather with our relatives — my sisters were scattered all over the place — so we ate alone, in the dark.”

Ever the optimist, she tells me that this year, Ramadan feels more like it should. Though they still struggle to find food, before Israel’s latest assault her family could safely venture out into the neighborhood without the fear of being killed by Israeli quadcopters. Her community even managed to build a temporary prayer space down the street.

These days, Palestinians in Gaza celebrate the small victories — being able to gather with loved ones, having a few moments of safety, and even hanging up a string of lights — which are triumphs at a time when the everyday is defined by survival. They supplement what little they can cook with aid rations. The menu the night we caught up was a special treat: cabbage rolls called malfouf, stuffed with rice supplemented from the neighborhood soup kitchen. Ordinarily malfouf is made with ground beef, but meat is a luxury few can afford, let alone find, in Gaza these days. Their iftars are very simple, she admits, some variation of boiled pasta and canned food or legumes. Greens and meats are nowhere to be found. Despite the grainy, dimly lit photo Nermeen sent me at iftar time, her daughters’ smiles are unmistakably bright.

Across town, my cousin Nael breaks his fast with his family on lentils and rice, or mujadara. With no power to light their homes, they all eat in darkness, they tell me, and use tarps to cover up bombed out walls and roofs. Yet, they are grateful. “It is a month of goodness and giving. I have faith — and am convinced that this Ramadan, through our patience and prayer, God will grant us relief, ease our burdens and expand our provisions, and bless us — even if the absence of loved ones at the iftar meal is palpable,” Nael says. Nael’s mother, sisters, and brother were killed in an Israeli airstrike in November of 2023.

Further south in the town of Garara (also known as Al Qarara), my relative Mariam has a much harder time observing like she used to. Her husband is outside of Gaza getting treated for cancer, and she struggles to feed her five children and find much-needed medicines and clean water. The day we spoke, she said she managed to buy some tomato burghul soup from the local soup kitchen for iftar. With her entire neighborhood destroyed, there’s no gathering with anyone but her own family. She had barely settled into the Ramadan routine in a tent on the ruins of her previous home when she received Israeli orders to leave once again, sending her on yet another long walk in search of safety by the beach in an area known as Mawasi.

Stability and security are a fleeting, elusive hope in Gaza, as made painfully clear even before the large-scale attacks resumed on March 18. That Israel can, with almost a flip of a switch, shut off Gaza’s water and food supply underscores its longstanding control over Palestinian foodways, borders, and sovereignty.

When Israel’s blockade of food and aid was at its peak last February, Palestinians in the hardest-hit towns of northern Gaza survived on Gaza City’s iconic Ramadan stew of sumagiyya. Instead of chard, they prepared it with foraged mallow and sometimes purslane, the same greens our ancestors consumed during the 1948 event Palestinians call the Nakba, in which hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes by Zionist militias and the newly formed Israeli army during Israel’s establishment. When all the pomegranate trees of the towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun were razed to the ground, they substituted sumac for tart pomegranate juice in rumaniyya, a beloved vegan dish of eggplants, lentils, and rich roasted sesame tahini.

Earlier this year, Nermeen proudly sent me a picture of ma’roota date bars she made. Ordinarily made during religious holidays such as Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, they call for pitted date paste, an assortment of warm spices, yeast, two types of flour, and olive oil — all rare commodities in Gaza these days. I was flabbergasted. How on earth did she decide to make these laborious spiced date bars?

“This is the war version,” she mused, showing off her handiwork. By that, she meant no yeast or spices and baked in a makeshift wood-fired clay oven with uneven heating. Still, a familiar taste nonetheless.

Such scenes of Palestinian resourcefulness while cooking traditional dishes have been broadcast all over social media feeds over these past 17 months. Family cooks flipped large pots of maqlouba amidst rubble and ruin to the celebratory applause of onlookers, genocidal war be damned; people prepared Gaza’s richly spiced shrimp stew, zibdiyit gambari, with canned tuna; they swapped breadcrumbs for pastry dough in kunafa, and so on.

None of this should surprise me. After all, I spent many years documenting Palestinian women and men cooking in their homes for , preparing feasts worthy of a royal banquet with nothing more than a small propane burner and no surface area to speak of. Palestinians have learned to adapt to years of blockade and siege imposed illegally by Israel, many with knowledge passed down from generation to generation. Our cuisine has evolved in this context. Preparing a traditional meal during what human rights organizations and legal experts have called the fastest-paced destruction of a society in post-World War history can feel like the ultimate act of resistance against looming erasure. Genocide, after all, is disorienting and dehumanizing: the pace, the propaganda, and the ferocity of it all.

Palestinians in Gaza are frequently described as resilient — capable of enduring almost anything. But this language, and its implications, are deeply problematic. It obfuscates our reality, normalizes our suffering, and absolves those responsible from any accountability. What Gazans can and have learned to do is to cope and endure by forging ordinary moments that bring them meaning and joy and a sense of normalcy, defying the brutal reality imposed upon them by Israel and its biggest backer, the United States. Palestinians have a word for this: sumood. Steadfast perseverance.

It may explain why over the course of the past year and a half, in between bouts of utter despondency and advocacy, I wanted to do nothing more than cook the dishes of my childhood and the other dishes that I had compiled over the years that I felt were in danger of disappearing: my aunt’s sumagiyya, my mother’s shorabit adas, a beloved elder’s kishik stew (both my aunt and the elder were killed in Israeli airstrikes). Clinging to the familiar, to faith and food, to the sacred and the mundane, is both grounding and empowering.

For my cousins and the others in Gaza, the familiar tastes, prayers, and customs are not mere rituals, they are lifelines that preserve dignity in the darkest of times. They are both a celebration of our heritage and a space that helps us cultivate and maintain an agency and humanity that Israel actively attempts to strip us of. The appearance of sumac rumaniyya, purslane sumagiyya, and war-version ma’roota on Gazan tables this Ramadan also plays a bigger role: These adaptations are part of an assertion of our connection and rootedness to the land that bore us and from which we are constantly pushed away. And amidst unimaginable tragedy, our faith remains a steadfast anchor.