Faten Hajaji selling chocolate to raise money for Gaza aid

WHEN she went to sell homemade chocolates at a demonstration outside the Town Hall in December, Faten Hajaji wasn’t expecting to make a speech.

A few days earlier, she had got talking to a member of Islington’s Palestine Solidarity Campaign outside Archway’s Cafe Metro, which Ms Hajaji runs with her husband, Mahmoud.

They spoke about her family living in Gaza, and the campaigner suggested she set up a stall in Upper Street at a protest urging Islington Council to divest from companies with links to Israel.

The plan was just for Ms Hajaji to raise money to send to her family – but then she was unexpectedly asked to address the crowd.

She told the Tribune: “I just started talking in general about what’s happened there. Suddenly I saw that most of the people started crying. It’s not easy. It had been about one year and nothing had changed. There is still no ceasefire.

“I have lost 40, 50 people, now maybe more. I can’t calculate how many relatives I have lost.”

Ms Hajaji, who worked in financial administration in Gaza before moving to the UK, was a hard act to follow.

But Jeremy Corbyn took up the microphone, and urged the demonstrators to get up to Cafe Metro and buy her chocolates.

“Now every day maybe 20, 30 people they come and ask for chocolate – and I don’t have enough!”, she said. Sometimes Mr Hajaji has to do two or three trips back home from the cafe to pick up fresh batches.

She grew up in Beit Hanoon, a city near the border of northern Gaza close to the Erez crossing into Israel.

“This is the first town they destroyed – there is nothing left. There are no Palestinian people, there are only Israeli tanks. There are no houses left, not even trees.”

Since Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza began following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 2023, her family has had to move again, and again, and again.

The oldest is her 76-year-old father, retired builder Yousef, who is recovering from a heart attack. She has seven sisters and three brothers, each with five or six children each, the youngest of whom is two. They are living in tents, scattered across the country.

“There is no food, no clean water, no hospitals, no universities,” she said. “My family in Gaza have had to walk long distances, under danger and even the threat of death, just to find food. Most of the aid is distributed in areas under American supervision, but these places are surrounded by Israeli tanks. Hungry people who go there are often shot at while simply trying to survive.

“There is no electricity and in the summer it is very hot. The temperature there now is 35 degrees or more.

“The only time I can talk to them is if my sister goes to the hospital to charge her phone. That’s once or twice a month. When I spoke to her last month, I asked my seven-year-old niece, Salma, what type of food have you eaten today? She said for seven days we have had no food.

“You just need to be human to support Palestine. It doesn’t need to be any more – just humanity. This is a genocide.”

For now, she said she would continue making chocolate in her kitchen and selling it at Cafe Metro, at Islington PSC events and the marches in central London.

Ms Hajaji said: “I can’t ask people to give me a donation. I have my dignity. If you give me money, you take something.”