Life without refrigerators: Gaza residents fight heat and food spoilage

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Gaza City — Inside the tent Malak al-Zaanin has lived in since being displaced from her home in Gaza, the mother of four holds a tray of rice her family received that afternoon from a nearby community kitchen.

She has already shared the meal with her husband and children, but her next worry is how to keep the valued leftovers from spoiling in the sweltering heat.

Before the war, her refrigerator kept food fresh for days, but due to a lack of electricity caused by Israel’s siege on Gaza, it now sits unused inside the tent.

She placed the remaining rice on metal shelves inside the tent, knowing what will inevitably happen amid Gaza’s endemic food crisis.

“The children will be hungry again soon and ask for food,” she says.

“By then, it will probably have spoiled because we don’t have a refrigerator, and the tent feels like an oven.”

Malak has turned her unused refrigerator into a table with shelves to store aid boxes and household items.[Abdelhakim Abu Riash/ Al Jazeera]

Gaza electricity crisis

UN agencies have previously warned that extreme heat, prolonged power cuts and the lack of refrigeration in Gaza are increasing risks of food spoilage and food-borne illnesses, especially among displaced families.

Fuel supplies remain critically low, and 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, falling far short of the amount required to keep life-saving operations running.

Continued shortages are likely to further disrupt electricity, water systems and other essential services, but many families in Gaza are already feeling the impact of the energy crisis.

Malak’s struggle is the same as countless mothers across Gaza, who now face the dual challenge of not only finding food, but in the absence of electricity and refrigeration, also preserving it.

“We barely manage to secure food for our children,” she says. “Imagine watching it spoil in front of you while being unable to save it.”

Besides the heat, stored food is also vulnerable to flies, insects and rodents that have become increasingly common in the crowded displacement camps with little sanitation.

“I’ve turned [the fridge] into a table and storage shelves,” she says, lifting a cloth covering the appliance, showing it filled with aid boxes and supplies for the family’s small kiosk.

The only other options, refrigeration services, are costly or simply unavailable.

She remembers one time receiving trays of rice and meat, only to find no space to store the leftovers after her children had eaten.

“We ate the meat and threw away the rice. What else could we do? That’s our life now.”

When a cool bag of water is available, Malak sometimes buys one 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

A short walk away, 43-year-old Manal Hamad shares the same modest dream: a glass of cold water.

“I need to keep my medicine in a refrigerator,” she said.

“Cold water is a dream for me. When I drink the hot water from the tank, it feels like my heart is boiling, and my blood pressure immediately drops.”

Manal Hamed says fresh vegetables spoil by the next day because of the extreme heat and lack of refrigeration.[Abdelhakim Abu Riash/ Al Jazeera]

Manal, a mother of three who lives with diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, needs life-saving medicine that requires constant refrigeration.

She sometimes has to pay 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 has to move 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.

A cupboard

In Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighbourhood, 40-year-old Nidal Rafeeh has found another use for the refrigerator that has sat idle during Israel’s genocidal 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 says. “I pay for water, phone charging, and now cooling food or drinking water.”

Nidal Rafeea, 40, uses his broken refrigerator as a cupboard to store canned food and kitchen supplies.[Abdelhakim Abu Riash/ Al Jazeera]

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.

Near a makeshift camp in central Gaza, 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 – services that 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.