"Utensils in exchange for a bottle of olive oil and a kilo of za’atar so my children can take some to school.”
The post, shared by a Palestinian woman in Bethlehem in a private Facebook group for mothers, is no longer unusual.
Since the war on Gaza began - and Israeli restrictions across the occupied West Bank intensified - women have increasingly offered furniture, toys, kitchenware and even their children’s clothes in return for basic food.
Long the barest staples of Palestinian life, olive oil and za’atar (a herb blend) have become shorthand for poverty itself, captured in the saying: “He lives on oil and za’atar.”
But with time, they have turned into urgent pleas for milk, cooking oil, medicine and other essentials.
Today, they map the depth of a cost-of-living crisis tightening its grip across the West Bank.
The territory is sliding into a hunger crisis, says economy researcher Dr Haitham Oweida.
Before the war, these Facebook groups dealt in surplus. They offered goodwill exchanges of outgrown clothes and spare toys.
International Glance
An extraordinarily violent crackdown by Iranian security forces appears to have succeeded for now in driving protesters from the streets, according to activists and analysts who mahttps://abcnews.go.com/International/bloody-crackdown-appears-quelled-iran-protests-now/story?id=129287014naged to speak with people inside the country despite the information blackout.
Preparing for meetings at the World Economic Forum, Ukrainian envoys in Florida made “substantive” progress on documents they hope to sign with US President Donald Trump in Davos, Switzerland this week.
One day during his first term, Donald Trump summoned a top aide to discuss a new idea. “Trump called me down to the Oval Office,” John Bolton, national security adviser in 2018, told the Guardian. “He said a prominent businessman had just suggested the US buy Greenland.”
Discussions are reportedly under way within Donald Trump’s administration about the US possibly granting asylum to Jewish people from the UK, according to the Telegraph, citing the US president’s personal lawyer.





























