The Heart of Gaza's Hearth
An interview, mini essay, and recipe from Nisreen Shehada
Cake Zine Community,
Today we’re sharing The Heart of Gaza’s Hearth, a powerful interview originally published in Daily Bread by Jun Chou with Nisreen Shehada—a Palestinian baker and dentist who was displaced from her home in Gaza City in October, 2023, and, like hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians, forced to survive in a tent. Before then, Nisreen baked for pleasure: selling Basque cheesecakes, teaching herself sourdough from cookbooks, and sharing loaves with family and friends. Amidst the genocide, she turned to baking again—as necessity. Using charcoal and bottled water, she made bread to keep herself and her family alive. The story was first written in November of 2024, but we have done our best to update the data.
Gaza is now experiencing its longest and deadliest blockade since Israel’s genocide began. It has been over 75 days since Israel has allowed any supplies to enter. Famine is widespread. Bakeries have shuttered for lack of flour, fuel, and electricity, and civilians have been shot dead while waiting for bags of flour.
We’re also including some thoughts from Nisreen alongside her recipe for za’atar and olive oil focaccia—a representation of her Palestinian heritage, love for fermented bread, and commitment to keeping Palestinian food alive and joyful.
The Heart of Gaza’s Hearth
Interview with Nisreen Shehada by Jun Chou
In a tent surrounded by the staccato explosions of a city under siege, Nisreen Shehada baked bread. Mixing flour with precious bottled water, she shaped the sticky dough into rounds before rolling it out on top of her makeshift oven, bootstrapped to run on coals in the absence of gas and electricity. As she fanned the coals, the khubiz swelled, its warm aroma temporarily masking the acrid stench of war. Then, she uploaded a video montage of the process to social media. “Bakeries have been closed,” she said over soft music, “so we had to make our own bread.”
Before October 7, 2023, baking was a source of comfort and joy for Nisreen. The twenty-seven-year-old dentist from Gaza City documented and sold creations like burnt Basque cheesecake and Nutella-topped brownies on social media. She obsessed over the craft of sourdough—uncommon in traditional Gazan bakeries—and taught herself from cookbooks. Baking two loaves took two days, and she delighted in distributing them to her loved ones, many of whom had never tasted sourdough before. “The joy of sharing it was its own reward,” she says, her voice soft yet sturdy, like the first crack into a fresh loaf.
When Nisreen had no choice but to flee northern Gaza amid Israeli attacks in October 2023, she left behind her home, many loved ones, her cat Mesho, and her beloved sourdough starter—which she had tended for over three years and nicknamed Daisy.
“It was literally my baby,” Nisreen mourns. “I was so sad that it was gone.”
This is how she wound up baking bread in a tent in Rafah, forced to rely on fire and charcoal. Cramped in an apartment with twenty-five other relatives, she slept on the floor, dreaming of returning home within weeks. In the end, she lived there for six months.
In times of tumult, routine persists. So, Nisreen did what was familiar: she crocheted, she documented, she uploaded, she baked. Only this time, baking was a lifeline.
“We had to make bread just to survive,” she says. “Sometimes bread would be the only thing people would eat all day.”
Bread, the oldest of staple foods, has long symbolized both pleasure and necessity. In Egypt, where Nisreen and her husband eventually escaped after leaving Rafah, the word for bread—aish—is also the word for life. But bread’s dearth also begets death.
Israeli forces regularly restrict humanitarian aid from entering Rafah, forcing Gazan refugees to remedy their hunger with expired canned food and animal feed. “It’s getting worse, not better,” Nisreen says. Gaza is currently undergoing its longest suspension of aid and goods since the genocide began; May 2025 marks three months of the blockade that humanitarian bodies such as the United Nations and the World Health Organization deem “acts of war that show an utter disregard for human life.”
The BBC reports a staggering 1,400% surge in food prices, with charity kitchens rendered obsolete as supplies vanish in the face of crippling scarcity. Bread is nearing extinction. As of April 2025, all bakeries have been forced to shutter from a lack of cooking gas and ingredients. Beyond starvation, Israel’s deliberate deprivation has led to increasing malnutrition, disease, and violence.
“People would sometimes be killed just to get a bag of flour,” Nisreen says. In what has since been dubbed the Flour Massacre, soldiers shot into a crowd of refugees waiting for flour, killing 112 people and injuring 760 others, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office.
Amid these severe resource shortages, Nisreen relied on whatever flour and yeast she could find. Once, using her experience cultivating a sourdough starter, she managed to grow a scarce amount of yeast until there was enough to bake bread. “Everyone was so impressed,” she laughs, a rare moment of levity in a conversation shackled by grief.
Nisreen is now in London, pursuing her Masters in Public Health, but her husband remains in Egypt, as her student visa did not support spouses. “For us Gazans, you don’t have the luxury of choice,” she says. “You just have to deal with whatever is in front of you.” The rest of her family remains in Gaza, and anxiety attacks punctuate the blacked out days between their conversations. The only time her voice ever lilts with reverie is when she talks about Gaza.
“There’s something about Gaza that only Gazans will understand. It’s a tiny place that has gone into severe destruction over years and years. But it is always beautiful in a way that can charm you.” She says with a sigh: “And I think I’m still under that charm, to be honest.”
Olive, orange, fig, and pomegranate trees surrounded the family home her grandfather built in Gaza City. Nisreen would sit on the balcony, the warm air saturated with the smell of citrus, eating fresh oranges picked by her mother. Every Friday, her large family gathered to share a home-cooked meal, the table piled high with maqluba, fatteh, and kafta—a bounty studded with vegetables and meat. “Everything was special in that house,” Nisreen says. “It taught me how to love life.”
Though the memories persist, the home itself no longer stands. It is one of more than 370,000 homes that have been completely destroyed by Israeli bombs, as reported by the UN. Within each of those lost homes lie the many chambers of memory: Each wall, once steeped with the scent of za’atar and yeasty manakeesh, is now shattered—the echoes of gossip and laughter roaring through the rubble.
For more than two years, the possibility of returning home has been erased for millions of Gazans like Nisreen. The result is a life severed from its roots—dresses saved for special occasions too tattered to be worn, overdue books at libraries that no longer exist, the doomed courtships of love letters in flames. It is a life marked by a familiar yearning, another loop in the recurring spiral of history, mirroring the displacement endured by older generations during the Nakba in 1948. Because Israeli occupation limited travel for Gazans, Nisreen, who was born in Gaza, never left before the genocide began. Now, Gaza is her phantom limb, still tingling with sensation after forcible amputation. Yet, Nisreen retains her romantic worldview, the dreamer in her holding steady.
“Hope is the only thing we have right now,” she says.
Still, it’s hard to shake the lingering smell of smoke after fleeing a burning kitchen. Though her hands are now busier with homework than dough, Nisreen dreams of one day resurrecting Daisy and reviving her relationship with bread. Because bread, which mirrors the continuity of life and death, fills and fulfills us all.
“I know deep in my heart that one day we are going to return and rebuild everything that was gone,” Nisreen says. “We are going to be happy again.”
Jun Chou is a writer and designer who overspends at every Chinese bakery she enters. She is convinced that King’s Hawaiian Sweet Rolls were sculpted by the heavens.
Nisreen Shehada is a Palestinian baker from Gaza who once read an entire book to learn bread fermentation.
On days like this, when the trees glisten wet around us, all I can think of is heading into my kitchen to bake. I’ve always seen baking as a form of solitude, a warm, grounding experience that could carry me and my entire home into a journey of sweet aromas and love. And love was the essence of Gaza, of our families, of my tiny kitchen nestled in the heart of the city.
That day, I baked focaccia with fresh za’atar my father had prepared for me, gifted alongside a bottle of olive oil from the trees in our family’s garden. I left it on the counter that night, kissed by the sound of the waves, and woke up the next morning eager to dip my fingers into it, to sprinkle my father’s precious za’atar across the warm bread.
Back then, life felt simple. Hard, but made easier by love. Made easier by baking. A year later, the same fingers that once baked with love now tremble. The waves and birdsongs have been replaced by the sounds of bombs. The olive trees are gone. And my father, who once brought me olives and za’atar, now brings only the weight of our shared fear: fear of losing our home, fear of what the future might hold.
The mouths that were once filled with the precious produce of our land, with what our hands and love had created, are now empty. That food once carried our memories, warmed our souls, and shaped our history.
Now, the land is gone. The people who once loved now grieve. The kitchen is no longer there. And food is no longer a dreamy thing. It has become a luxury, an out-of-reach treasure that, instead of comforting us. Now it has become a symbol of our survival, and sometimes, a quiet torture of our existence and resistance.
The people of Gaza deserve life.
They deserve food made with love, shared around family tables. They deserve to bake again in warm kitchens, gather again in safe homes. They deserve to live, not just survive.
—Nisreen Shehada
This is a beautiful piece, and I hope many eyes get to see it! Free Palestine <3
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!