Gaza City — Malak al-Zaanin, a mother of four, lives in a tent after being displaced from her home in Gaza; she received a tray of rice from a nearby community kitchen but now worries about keeping the leftovers from spoiling due to the sweltering heat.

Electricity Crisis in Gaza

Before the war, Malak’s refrigerator kept food fresh for days, but due to a lack of electricity from Israel’s siege, it now sits unused inside the tent. UN agencies have warned that extreme heat, prolonged power cuts, and lack of refrigeration are increasing the risk of food spoilage and food-borne illnesses, especially among displaced families.

Fuel supplies remain critically low. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that just 1 million litres (265,000 gallons) of diesel entered Gaza in early June 2026, far short of what is needed to keep life-saving operations running. Continued shortages are likely to further disrupt electricity, water systems, and other essential services.

Struggles of Mothers in Gaza

Malak’s struggle is shared by countless mothers across Gaza, who now face the dual challenge of not only finding food but also preserving it due to the absence of electricity and refrigeration. “We barely manage to secure food for our children,” she said. “Imagine watching it spoil in front of you while being unable to save it.”

Stored food is also vulnerable to flies, insects, and rodents in the crowded displacement camps with little sanitation. Malak has turned her fridge into a table and storage shelves, filled with aid boxes and supplies for the family’s small kiosk. The only other options, refrigeration services, are costly or unavailable.

Malak sometimes buys a cool bag of water for two shekels ($0.35-$0.70), but often the family has nothing available but water from a storage tank heated by the summer sun. “Cold water is a dream for me,” said 43-year-old Manal Hamad, a mother of three with diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. She needs life-saving medicine that requires constant refrigeration.

Life Without Refrigerators in Gaza

Manal sometimes pays people with a refrigerator to keep her medicine cool or preserve leftover food, but even those temporary solutions frequently fall short. One time she had to pay 10 shekels ($3) to refrigerate meat, only to discover later that it had spoiled. She constantly moves vegetables from one shaded corner of her scorching tent to another, trying to delay their spoilage.

What hurts her most is watching her children endure the heat without being able to offer them cold fruit, juice, or chilled water. Instead, she fills a bucket with water so they can cool themselves. “There’s nothing else I can do,” she said.

40-year-old Nidal Rafeeh in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood has found another use for the refrigerator that has sat idle during Israel’s war on Gaza. It has become a cupboard for canned food and personal belongings. “Things that were once necessities have become things we pay extra for,” he said. “I pay for water, phone charging, and now cooling food or drinking water.”

As Israel’s siege on Gaza leads to massive inflation due to a shortage of goods and energy, small expenses accumulate, forcing Nidal and his wife to cook only single meals to avoid leftovers spoiling. “We do everything we can to avoid wasting food, like thousands of families across Gaza trying to survive,” he said.

34-year-old Mohammed al-Zaanin, displaced from Beit Hanoon, turned a small freezer into his only source of income after losing his job as a driver. He now runs a wartime survival business, charging phones and selling chilled drinks and water. These services emerged as prolonged power cuts due to the Israeli embargo created new daily needs.

Mohammed relies on a diesel generator to operate the freezer and charging station, but the costs are high. Running the freezer alone costs about 1,500 shekels a month ($488), while electricity bills reach 1,300–1,400 ($423-$456) shekels every 10 days, with power costing about 35 shekels ($11.39) per kilowatt. Despite the huge costs, which inevitably must fall on the customer, he has no shortage of people using his services.

“People come every day, asking me to chill a bottle of water, cool their food … but I simply can’t meet everyone’s needs,” he said. He remembers one time a deaf man arrived carrying a single mango, using sign language, pleading with Mohammed to keep it cool in his refrigerator. “It broke my heart. We’ve reached the point where people bring just one mango to cool,” he said.