For more than a year, Renad Attallah’s Instagram cooking tutorials offered an unusual window into life in the Gaza Strip.
On @renadfromgaza, the giggly 11-year-old explained to her 1.6 million followers how to cook hamburgers with canned meat from an aid parcel. In another video, she quipped at the drones buzzing overhead as she explained how to make a banana roll “the Gazan way.”
“It looks like the drone above us likes cream – that’s why it’s out!” she joked. As basic ingredients became increasingly scarce in Gaza, Renad improvised, mashing cooked pasta to make bread.
Why We Wrote This
Their Instagram accounts became globally popular for showing the creative ways Palestinians in Gaza cooked and ate in a time of war. But as hunger spread, the story they were sharing began to change.
But Renad’s popularity isn’t due only to her made-for-social-media cuteness. With foreign media excluded from Gaza, and local journalists regularly killed in the line of duty, social media has become one of the few windows still cracked open onto life in the besieged territory. Through the eyes of Renad and other content creators, the conflict’s devastating effects on civilians play out in real time.
“It’s not about views. It’s not about comments,” Renad says. “It’s about the truth of our lives.”
“The Gazan way”
And the truth now is that Palestinians in Gaza are starving. In late August, United Nations agencies warned that close to 100% of people in Gaza are facing a hunger crisis, and 1 in 3 will experience famine – meaning “catastrophic conditions characterized by starvation, destitution and death” – by the end of September.
“This famine is entirely man-made,” the U.N.-backed report said.
On Instagram, Renad’s followers watched Gaza’s hunger crisis unfold on a human level. Her round cheeks thinned as she dropped more than 10 pounds. Dark circles bloomed around her eyes.
“Famine bread, the Gazan way,” she announced at the beginning of a recipe tutorial in early June, her face uncharacteristically serious.
The video was a far cry from the spunky early posts on @renadfromgaza. Renad and her older sister, pharmacist Nourhan Attallah, started the page together in March 2024, after a video showing Ms. Attallah’s personal account of Renad opening a box of donated food from the United Arab Emirates got more than 9 million views.
With Ms. Attallah behind the camera, the sisters made videos of Renad cooking and “unboxing” aid parcels, a riff on influencers elsewhere in the world who film themselves opening their online purchases.
“I can’t talk because of excitement,” Renad exclaimed in one early video as she sliced open the tape on a box from the charity Human Concern International. As she lifted a bag of meat slices from the parcel, an explosion sounded in the distance. Renad flinched, and then continued to gleefully pull items from the box.
A global language
Hamada Shaqura also knew how to catch the eye of faraway viewers. Before the war, he owned a marketing agency and used his Instagram account @hamadashoo to promote Gaza City’s thriving food scene. As he sampled local taco joints and filmed families tucking into pizzas and burgers, Mr. Shaqura’s page offered a glimpse of a city vibrant despite years of Israeli blockade.
Food is “a universal language of expression,” he says.
Courtesy of Hamada Shaqura/@hamadashoo
In early 2024, he began posting his own wartime cooking tutorials using ingredients sourced from aid parcels. The clips were wordless, but like Renad’s, they spoke a global language.
Mr. Shaqura’s videos featured quick cuts of him preparing a dish, the amplified sounds of his chopping, pouring, and sizzling creating a popular effect known as ASMR. He, too, soon went viral, becoming known for his unbroken, somber gaze and creative takes on international dishes such as tacos, pizza, and crepes.
At first, he shared his culinary creations with children at a makeshift camp in Rafah, near where his own family was living after fleeing their home in Gaza City.
But as his Instagram following grew, Mr. Shaqura connected with local and international charities providing food to displaced people. Soon, his videos showed him preparing meals by the thousands for those in need.
“What made it meaningful was feeding people,” he says. “Seeing that others could eat because of my cooking, it gave value to everything.”
Documenting hunger
As the war ground on, however, posting about food slowly began to lose its joy for both Renad and Mr. Shaqura. They themselves rarely had enough to eat, and when they did, it felt crass to flaunt what they had while others around them starved. “It wouldn’t be right,” Renad says simply.
After she posted her “Famine Bread” video in early June, she did not make ann more recipe tutorials. Instead, she began sharing posts with titles like “Foods I haven’t tasted in 5 months” and “We are being starved.”
Mr. Shaqura, too, has largely stopped updating his account. “It is impossible now,” he explains. “I cannot cook for others when I struggle to find food for my wife and child.” Even when he has donations, he says, he is afraid to distort the already exorbitant prices in local markets by buying up large quantities. That “would harm the whole community,” he says.
But not being able to cook for children weighs heavily on him. “Cooking a meal for a child who has nothing is about more than food,” Mr. Shaqura wrote recently in Time Magazine. “It is about telling them that they matter and that they are not forgotten.”
Meanwhile, Renad’s life was changing quickly. Her elder sister won a scholarship to study at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, and at the end of August, she, Renad, and Renad’s twin brother Adam were evacuated from Gaza.
On Renad’s Instagram page, the sisters made a new post.
It was a solid black background with a single word: “Goodbye.”
