RAFAH — With aid routes cut, famine looming, and trash pilling up to new heights, hungry and desperate residents of Gaza have flocked to makeshift grills to consume the unthinkable: trash burgers.
After nine months of war, isolation, and lack of basic services, Gazans have a new worry of disease and pestilence due the heaping mounds of rotting trash that dot the landscape in the battle-scarred enclave.
But Mohammad Arish, a former resident of Rafah who has moved his family three times since the beginning of the war, came up with an idea of putting that trash to use.
“If you cook the trash long enough on a grill, it will become charred and unrecognizable, and depending on what the trash is, it might actually not make you sick,” said Mohammad while grilling in front a dozens of starving onlookers.
“Ideally, the trash burgers are better with some sort of condiment,” he said. “My cousin Ahmed used his own blood on the burger. He said it wasn’t half bad.”
The horrifying development highlights the embarrassment of the US military’s much-touted pier that was supposed to have alleviated the suffering of Gazans ,but instead became a karaoke bar that later fell into the sea.
Health officials expressed extreme worry about the development, as dozens of people have developed dysentery, hepatitis A, food poisoning after eating the burgers. A few have already died.
But the dangers don’t seem to worry some starving Palestinians.
“You tell me what other option we have,” said Bassam, a former resident of northern Gaza who lost his entire family, while eating a trash burger.
“Either I eat this, risk sickness or death, but maybe I’ll be okay, or I die from hunger,” he added, while pulling out what looked to be used tampon from his mouth.
Abu Hamza has been covering the Middle East and the Islamic World for over a decade. He likes smoking sheesha.
