I step out of my tent every morning, burdened with exhaustion, drenched in sorrow, searching for anything I might be able to buy for my family, a family worn down by hunger. Their bodies are too weak to move. Their faces have turned pale, drained of all signs of life. For two months, not a single grain of flour has entered our tent. My children still go to sleep every night with empty stomachs and unbearable pain.

Everything available in the market is scarce and sold at outrageous prices. A kilo of rice today costs a week’s wage, that is, if work is available at all. Clean water has become a distant luxury. This is not a temporary crisis, but a deliberate long-term policy designed to humiliate and kill slowly.

An unprecedented famine, in full view of the world

Amid this hell, I tried to recall historical examples that might help me comprehend what’s happening to us, anything to draw a comparison that might ease the burden of reality. I thought of the siege of Leningrad, the Bengal famine, the siege of Sarajevo. But I found no famine that resembles what we are experiencing in Gaza today.

The difference lies not only in the death toll but in the world’s reaction. When Eastern Europe starved, the world moved. When hundreds of thousands died in Ethiopia, the media and humanitarian aid rushed in. But in Gaza, hunger is being documented in full colour and sound, and still, the world watches in silence, as if we are a people beyond the boundaries of humanity.

I can’t recall a time in modern history when the world treated a famine with such coldness and indifference. Even the harshest humanitarian catastrophes have elicited some degree of empathy, except for Gaza.

Is this a spontaneous famine, or a military strategy?

This hunger is not a natural consequence of war. It is a calculated tool within a military framework. Food is deliberately blocked. Water is cut off. Electricity is denied. Aid trucks are bombed. Bakeries are targeted. Those approaching aid convoys are shot at.

This famine is not a side effect. It is a direct objective, the quietest and deadliest of weapons.

Has Israel succeeded in engineering famine methodically? Has it succeeded in silencing the world’s conscience or muting it into a passive observer? Sadly, the answer is yes.

“Human animals”: the occupation’s moral doctrine

Early in the genocide, former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant described Gaza’s population as “human animals.” This was not a slip of the tongue, it was a declaration of policy. A doctrine carried out with chilling precision for more than 21 months.

The Israeli military establishment has treated Gaza’s civilians as if they fall outside the category of human beings. This dehumanisation made it possible, politically and in the media, to justify the unjustifiable: mass killing, bombing hospitals, burning tents, and starving children.

Israel has succeeded in selling its narrative globally: the people of Gaza are terrorists, unworthy of life, and everything happening to them is a matter of “security necessity.”

The hostages: a false moral pretext

Every time Israel is criticised for its brutality, it hides behind the issue of hostages held in Gaza, as if Gaza’s children, women, and patients were collectively responsible.

But the truth is that Israel is not genuinely seeking to rescue hostages. Rather, it uses them as a smokescreen for executing a genocidal agenda.

The military campaigns have yielded no progress in freeing hostages, only the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.

To invoke the hostage issue to justify the starvation of an entire population is not just an ethical failure on Israel’s part, it is a global scandal implicating those who enable, justify, or remain silent.

Starvation as policy: siege, bombardment, and deprivation

The famine in Gaza is layered and systematic.

First: A full blockade on the strip since October 2023, cutting off food, medicine, and fuel.

Second: Direct targeting of agricultural infrastructure, such as poultry farms, water wells, and bakeries.

Third: Bombing of aid convoys and repeated strikes on distribution centres.

Fourth: The spread of social chaos, by allowing limited aid to trickle in, only for it to fall into the hands of war profiteers who sell it at astronomical prices.

There is no “Hamas” in Gaza as Israel claims, there is a population being annihilated. Using “Hamas” as a pretext to starve an entire society is a calculated deception aimed at manipulating international perception.

The aid trap: the US-Israeli death centre

In a surreal twist, the United States and Israel established a so-called humanitarian aid centre in northern Gaza, allegedly to provide relief.

But that centre, which should have been a lifeline, became a mass death trap.

Between May and July, over a thousand Palestinians were killed while trying to reach food. Thousands more were injured. And the famine? It persists.

That centre did not distribute food. It distributed death.

The collapse of the global moral order

The international response has been feeble, feeble to the point of betrayal.

All Gaza has received so far are hollow statements of condemnation, a few online campaigns, and the muffled voices of silenced humanitarian organisations. There have been no sanctions, no international tribunals, no suspension of military support to Israel.

Israel has successfully normalised both famine and genocide.

Massacres are now just another news headline, no longer sparking outrage. The longer the genocide continues, the more the world becomes desensitised. Morality fades.

Who is responsible?

Responsibility does not lie with Israel alone. It lies with a world that knows, and says nothing. With Western governments that fund and arm the assault. With media institutions that justify or ignore the horror. With international organisations that no longer lift a finger in the face of atrocity.

A famine that cannot be justified

There is no justification, security or political, for starving more than two million people. Hunger cannot be used as a bargaining tool. Silence in the face of this horror is nothing less than complicity in the crime.

The famine in Gaza is not a complicated issue. It is a crime. Clear. Blatant. Ongoing.

The only hope: people, not politicians

The only remaining hope lies in the awareness of ordinary people, in public outrage, and in grassroots mobilisation beyond the calculations of power.

Only the voice of the people, their boycotts, their pressure, can change the course of this catastrophe.

But even this hope fades with every passing day, with every day that passes without flour, without water, without real intervention.

Final word: time is blood

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and using hunger as a weapon.

Until the world realises that what’s happening is not a passing humanitarian crisis, but a deliberate, structured crime, countless children, already starving, will have died.

Time is blood. Every minute of delay means more corpses.

Famine is not just hunger, it is a slow, deliberate form of death. And it must end now.

 

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.