‘Eid does not enter tents’: Gaza residents mark grim holiday amid loss and hunger
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – For years, the Baroud family would rise before dawn on Eid al-Adha, piling into a car to visit relatives across the Shati refugee camp, sharing meat from a sacrificed animal, and posing for an annual photo to send to loved ones abroad. That photo, printed and folded, is now all Walaa Baroud has left.
Of the 22 people in the frame, 13 have been killed in Israeli airstrikes that hit the extended family, claiming more than 80 members in total. This Eid, instead of gathering for a picture, the survivors are gathering for a funeral. Days before the holiday, Walaa’s brother Baha was killed in another strike. “The war has not stopped devouring our loved ones,” Walaa told Al Jazeera, “and we never expected to open a mourning tent during a truce.”
The ceasefire that halted major fighting in January has not brought relief. Israel’s military campaign has killed nearly 73,000 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, and displaced most of the population. For those still alive, the holiday has become a cruel reminder of what is gone.
Hajja Shama al-Zorbatli, a widow in her 70s, lives in a small tent pitched on a pavement, shielded from passersby only by a cloth hanging at the entrance. When asked about the Eid atmosphere, she looked as though she had never heard the question. “Eid does not enter tents,” she said. There is no electricity, no phone, no television – she does not even know what day it is. When she saw a video of pilgrims performing Hajj in Mecca on a stranger’s phone, she broke into tears. “I have never entered the House of God. My wish is to perform Hajj. But what kind of Hajj is this when I can’t even find food to eat?”
She remembers Eids in her former home in the Shujayea neighborhood of Gaza City: buying clothes for her grandchildren, bringing sweets, baking Eid cakes. Now she calls this “the Eid of the martyrs, passing without joy and with an excess of loss and sorrow.” She points to her worn-out shoes and threadbare dress. “I wash this one, then wear the other.”
Next to her tent, Mohammed Obeid, also elderly and once a homeowner in Shujayea, sits in a wheelchair. The war cost him his wife, his legs, and his four-story house. Now he spends his days reciting the Quran. “I was dignified. I owned a four-storey house … I moved among people with the confidence of a man accustomed to abundance,” he said. “Eid today is like any other day; nothing is different. The war has crushed us. I used to slaughter sacrificial animals and distribute the meat to neighbors. Today, people are the ones distributing charity to me.”
The collapse of the sacrificial tradition mirrors a broader economic catastrophe. Before the war, the Ru’ya charitable foundation would slaughter 300 to 400 calves and sheep each season. This year, coordinator Karam Khaled says the number dropped to zero. “Carrying out sacrifice in the traditional way has become financially impossible for institutions and ordinary people alike.” The price of a single sheep has jumped from about $350 to between $4,500 and $6,000, driven by the closure of crossings and the near-total ban on importing live animals. The foundation has resorted to distributing 10 tonnes of frozen meat instead – much of it imported from Israel, Argentina or Uruguay.
Mohammed al-Najjar, a meat trader, says 80 percent of frozen meat in Gaza’s markets comes from Israel, and the rest from Egypt. Live animals have all but disappeared. A kilogram of lamb now costs about 300 shekels ($105), forcing most families to forgo meat altogether.
On Gaza’s main commercial streets, shop displays are full of clothes, toys and sweets – but buyers are nowhere to be seen. Unemployment is rampant, cash is scarce, and priorities have shifted to basic food and water. Amjad Akram, a children’s clothing shop owner in the Remal neighborhood, says shipping costs for a single box of clothes have risen from 250 shekels ($88) to 2,000 shekels ($705). “This Eid season is nothing like previous ones. Customers come in just to ask about prices, then leave in shock without buying.”
Except for the sounds of takbirs – calls to prayer echoing from refugee camps and cars with loudspeakers – the first Eid al-Adha since the ceasefire passes with almost no scenes of celebration. People are immersed in extreme poverty and unrelenting loss, struggling to piece together shattered lives after two years of war that Israel has waged in Gaza.