In Gaza, where life once began with the morning call to prayer and the soft trill of birdsong, survival now comes feathered, fragile, and barely enough. The sky no longer symbolises freedom, it offers, if anything, the faint chance of a meal.

With food supplies cut off, farmland bombed, and humanitarian aid strangled by blockade, families across Gaza have turned to what little remains: the birds that still dare to fly. Once cherished as symbols of peace and childhood joy, they are now hunted with nets fashioned from curtain threads and wire, plucked from the air to fill empty stomachs.

Abu Mahmoud, a father from Al-Zaytoun, roasts sparrows over olive pit embers. “My children haven’t eaten in days,” he says, his voice cracked with hunger. “I never thought I’d have to chase birds to feed them.” Um Wasim, a mother of five, cradles a lifeless bird before placing it in a pot. “We used to listen to them sing,” she says. “Now I cook them while I cry.”

This is not survival. It is the daily erosion of dignity, of culture, of memory. The people of Gaza are not just starving, they are being stripped of the very fabric of normal life.

Environmental experts warn that the desperate consumption of birds risks further collapse of Gaza’s fragile ecosystem. But as one said plainly: “This is not about harming nature. This is about staying alive.”

Birdsong, once a soundtrack to Palestinian resilience, now carries a different tone, one of silence, mourning, and a question that echoes through each hunted wing: how long can the world look away?