The event will take place on Thursday, 24 September, at the Centro Bibliotecario Insular
The ‘Voces desde la frontera’ (Voices from the Border) series, organised by the Centro Bibliotecario Insular, will host the presentation of Menú de Gaza (Gaza Menu) next Thursday, 24 September — a book documenting the meals of a family from Gaza living under Israeli siege.
The book is a collaboration between the Hammad family, now evacuated to Spain, journalist Mikel Ayestaran and the magazine 5W. The presentation in Fuerteventura will feature Gazan photojournalist Kayed Hammad, now a refugee in Spain, and 5W photojournalist Anna Surinyach. The event will take place at 8.00pm in the Sala Josefina Plá at the Centro Bibliotecario Insular.
No water, no gas, no electricity. Cooking under the bombs, with no access to meat, fish or fresh fruit. This is how the Hammad family fed themselves in Gaza throughout long months of Israeli siege. And this is how they told the world about it, dish by dish, through journalist Mikel Ayestaran’s Instagram account — a project that gained tens of thousands of followers and won the 2025 Ortega y Gasset Journalism Award.
Menú de Gaza became a book thanks to a collaboration between the Hammad family, Mikel Ayestaran and the magazine 5W.
The Hammad family was evacuated to Spain, where they could begin a new life far from the bombing. The photographs of the dishes they shared with the world for more than 500 days, exposing hunger as a weapon of war, were published in a book featuring recipes — many of them staples of Palestinian cuisine — alongside hundreds of images of the meals they cooked under fire.
The book grew out of the personal relationship between reporter Mikel Ayestaran and Kayed Hammad, his interpreter in Gaza, and his determination to expose the use of hunger as a weapon of war.
The voice messages, photos and memories the family sent to the world through Mikel while they were in Gaza form the heart of the book. Through them, it tells the story of daily life shaped by war, but also by dignity, humour and shared food.
The ‘Voces desde la frontera’ series, organised by the Centro Bibliotecario Insular, which falls under the Consejería de Cultura (Department of Culture), and coordinated by journalist Eloy Vera, is a project that seeks to raise awareness of the fight for human rights and the plight of migrants at borders.
