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GAZA — Eida Abu Amra holds papers torn from her children's university books and receives meals for the fire inside a clay oven on which she prepares bread and food to overcome the severe cooking gas crisis in the Gaza Strip.

In order to survive, Aida and most Gazans had to set fire to pieces of household furniture, clothing, stationery, textbooks, and even postgraduate theses, as finding firewood became an almost impossible task.

The prices of firewood have multiplied several times, and it has become scarce in the markets, after about two months of relying on it, as an alternative to cooking gas, and the occupation state prevents its supply to the Gaza Strip, within the framework of an applied siege imposed in conjunction with the fierce and escalating war since October 7.

Eida says to Al Jazeera Net "books and clothes are not more expensive than life, and God knows if we will return to our lives, schools and universities after this war or not."

Eida Abu Amra lights fire with school and university books to provide bread for her children (Al Jazeera)

Persistence

For the first time, Israel allowed the supply of limited quantities of cooking gas under the temporary truce agreement with the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) on November 23.

Local authorities in Gaza estimate that 2.3 million Palestinians in the Strip need cooking gas at about 200 tons per day, while Israel currently does not allow more than two trucks carrying only about 40 tons.

Eida took refuge in the mud oven after her home in the southern Gaza city of Rafah ran out of cooking gas, and says she had to set fire to clothes, books and shoes in order to provide for her family.

As she threw papers of books for her university children into the fire to keep them burning under loaves of bread, Eida held together in front of the blazes of the oven fires, and said in a tone of defiance and determination to live, "We must live in spite of the occupation and everyone, we will live and we will not complain about our concern except to God."

PhD under loaves of bread

A family famous for their keenness to obtain higher degrees in various disciplines collected doctoral theses in order to light a fire and prepare bread, and Istanbul-based journalist Esraa Al-Mudallal wrote on her official Facebook page, "The doctoral thesis of my mother, Mrs. Naima, my brother Dr. Abdullah and my brother Dr. Muhammad collected it this morning to burn it for a loaf of bread instead of firewood and wood that ran out, for a hot cup of tea and a bite."

"After my mother served her life with the United Nations as the first woman director of the educational zone in Rafah for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), after she opened houses of science, raised generations, and established an educational approach that is the first in the Middle East, all her master's and doctoral theses are burned, as well as my brothers, after the policy of starvation that the world applies to us, everyone is responsible, negligent and involved in crime," Israa said.

The family's home was damaged and partially destroyed as a result of an air strike carried out by Israeli warplanes on a nearby house in the "Al-Zohour neighborhood" area, north of Rafah.

Cutting down cemetery trees

The ferocity of the Israeli war created a great state of chaos in which official oversight was absent, and caused people to rush to use every available means to manage their daily lives.

A young man in his thirties, who preferred not to be named, said while cutting down a lush tree with an axe in the "Martyrs' Cemetery" in the neighborhood of El Geneina, east of Rafah, that he cuts it in order to sell it as firewood, and provides a small amount of precision for his family.

The young man worked as a taxi driver on a car, whose wheels stopped spinning since the first week of the war, after the stations ran out of fuel and its price increased several times on the black market.

As in this cemetery, where the trees no longer have a trace other than the remains of trunks slightly above the ground, other axes have been removed from shady trees planted in schools and public streets, and school seats have not been spared from fires lit by displaced people to keep warm and cook.

Source : Al Jazeera