Baking hope in Gaza: Making Christmas cookies in a displacement tent
Al Jazeera
A baker tries to bring a little joy into a displacement camp as everyone prays for an end to Israel’s brutal war.
Khan Younis, Gaza – From a makeshift kitchen with a sand floor and a nylon roof, and lacking the most basic equipment, Mayess Hamid prepared Christmas cookies this year.
Hamid, 31, has been making cakes and cookies for about 10 years, working at one of Gaza’s largest cake shops before it was destroyed in Israel’s continuing war on the besieged enclave.
Like many in Gaza, she lost her job when the bakery she worked at was bombed.
“I wanted to start the year with optimism and make Christmas cookies to distribute to the children around me in the camp,” she says as she kneads.
“The war turned our lives upside down. I lost my income, and my home was destroyed,” says Hamid, who has been displaced nine times since her family left Zeitoun, east of Gaza City, and has now settled in al-Mawasi in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip.
