Story by Heba Almaqadma

GAZA CITY—In Gaza, there’s a popular saying that has been passed down by generations of families, reflecting our resilience in the face of difficult conditions: “No one dies of hunger.” For the longest time, that was true. In the Gaza that we knew, people struggled because of poverty, unemployment, and the other consequences of the occupation, but no one died because they had nothing to eat.

Today, we are witnessing the unthinkable. Hundreds are dying. And the cause? Hunger. Behind the headlines and beyond the numbers, flesh and blood people are cut off from basic necessities, including food, clean water, and medical care. They are facing a slow, quiet, forcibly imposed death.

Starvation is not a looming threat; it is a brutal, daily reality. Children cry themselves to sleep on an empty stomach. Parents break under the weight of helplessness, watching their sons and daughters grow thinner, weaker. Bread, once a basic staple, has become a luxury. Vegetables, milk, eggs have become unimaginable for most families. Hunger has overtaken war as the cruelest weapon.

In recent weeks, thousands of Palestinians have been killed or injured risking their lives to try to find food. My cousin, Yousef Ala’atal, just 14 years old, was among them. Hunger pushed him to seek food from an aid distribution site managed by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). He came back not only empty-handed, but with a bullet in his head, blood soaking his body, and lasting damage from the injury. Yousef asked his mother with a pain that a child’s heart cannot endure: “Am I going to stay like this?” After that question, silence overtook their family.

Children are the primary victims in this deliberate campaign of starvation; young ones can’t understand what it means that there is no food. Breaking their parents’ hearts with their hunger, older ones try to go to the GHF, which we refer to in Gaza as “death traps.” Many are killed, while others return injured, heartbroken, or sometimes find themselves detained.

Mohammed Dababsh, a 35 year old and father of two young children—Yazan and Masa—was killed on July 11 while trying to get food from an aid site run by the GHF. “He never wanted to go. He was completely against their humiliating and chaotic aid system,” recounted his wife, Ghandoura Abu Ziada. “But, one day, after they ordered us to evacuate from Khan Younis, he told me to take the kids and stay with my family until he could find us a safer place. He stayed behind in Khan Younis.”

As the family separated, the crushing burden of being unable to provide for his young children continued to weigh on Mohammed. This ultimately led him to try and risk getting food from a GHF site. “Masa has been asking for Indomie [instant] noodles for months. We kept explaining that bread and lentils are all we have, but her little mind couldn’t grasp it. While he was still in Khan Younis, his friends tried to convince him to go to the GHF, saying he might be able to get Indomie and biscuits for the kids.”

While Ghandoura was waiting for a regular call from Mohammed, she received one from his brother instead. He had been injured at a GHF site, he said, and was being taken to Nasser Hospital for treatment. Ghandoura rushed to the hospital searching and hoping to find him among the wounded. Half an hour after her arrival an ambulance arrived carrying his body.

“Our children still can’t understand. 'What do you mean he’s never coming back?' they ask. A few nights ago, Masa was going to the bathroom when she heard her grandfather’s voice and thought it was her father. She told me, 'Dad is here, let me go see him.' I told her he’s in heaven now, while my heart aches and cries,” she said. “They still wait for him. And so do I. I can’t believe it. I keep waiting for him to return. Mohammed was the one who provided for us. Now that he’s gone, everything has become even harder."

“We Don’t Want Them”

Sohaib Madi, a 24-year-old, was shot in the head while he was trying to get aid from the GHF for his family earlier this month. As a result, the right side of his body was paralyzed, and he lost his vision. He came to the GHF site desperate for food, and was transported to hospital still on an empty stomach. His mother cried for him for days. She feared losing him after she lost her daughter in January 2024, after being shot in the neck by a sniper while hanging laundry on a balcony in Khan Younis.

Palestinian women continue to bear a disproportionate share of the suffering in the Gaza Strip, enduring the same violence, displacement, starvation, and maltreatment as the rest of the population, but with the added burden of having to care for their families alone once male providers for their households are killed.

Last week, the GHF announced that they would dedicate a day exclusively for women to receive aid. The implied assumption was that women are not seen as a threat and, therefore, wouldn’t be targeted or killed while gathering aid. Yet this supposed extension of goodwill resulted in even more tragedy for Palestinian women.

Maria, a mother of seven who had lost her husband 10 months earlier, needed to secure her kids with food, and she had no choice but to go to one of the sites. Her daughter, Malak Sheikh El Eid, later recounted that her mother went twice and came back with nothing, having stared death in the face.

They pleaded with her not to go for aid again, but if she insisted, they asked to at least take them all with her. Their mother promised she wouldn’t go, but when they woke up, they found she had already left. Mariam recounted bitterly how, when she called her mother on the phone to check on her, a stranger answered and told her that her mother had sustained moderate injuries.

Later, Malak learned that her mother had been martyred with a bullet in her head, leaving behind seven orphaned children, who now have no father, no mother, and no food. Malak cried while recounting what happened in a video later posted on Instagram. Barely able to catch her breath through her tears, she said: “Close the GHF aid. We don’t want them.”

Survivors’ Guilt

Each day in Gaza we see dozens of people killed or wounded in the most humiliating way, while merely trying to obtain food for themselves and their families. Many Palestinian children now must live with the knowledge that their mother or father died while trying to secure them food, leaving them with a survivors’ guilt that will last a lifetime.

The deprivation from starvation and siege is visible upon people’s faces. People are looking hollow-eyed and tired. We are suffering not just from hunger, but from abandonment. Palestinians have been turned into symbols of suffering and defiance, whereas what we want is not only to survive, but also to truly live and feel alive once more. Instead, as the whole world watches, for nearly two years we have been brutally murdered and tormented in the most horrific and innovative ways that a human mind can devise.

The world is silent, but inside Gaza, there is no silence. There are the sounds of children collapsing from malnutrition, parents crying in frustration, communities trying to survive without food, fuel, or medicine. The suffering isn’t sudden: it is slow, deliberate, and devastating. As the expert on famine Alex de Waal said in a recent television interview, this starvation is the product of a “minutely engineered” Israeli policy aimed at breaking our ability to live.

We are not starving because of drought. We are not starving because of natural disasters. We are starving because of Israel’s decision to use starvation as a weapon against Gaza’s civilian population, and the world’s decision to permit it. Closing borders, shooting people waiting for aid, and turning away aid trucks has become acceptable, as long as it’s Gaza.

No political justification for this policy can erase the hollow look in a child’s eyes, the desperate hope in a mother’s voice, or the slow and cruel death of a people who are being starved in full view of the world. We do not need pity. We need pressure on those who are blocking food, those who remain silent, and those who still have the power to stop this but choose not to.

Because tomorrow, someone else will write another article. Another photo will circulate. Another child will die. And we will ask again: how many more lives must be extinguished before the world decides that Gaza deserves to live?

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