I have always been told when I was a child that breakfast is the most important meal. This gives you energy to continue all day. And so, in my family, we would regularly eat a delicious breakfast.
It was in the past, of course. For weeks now, we have practically nothing to eat. I myself dreamed of having a slice of cheese and a miche of hot bread soaked in thyme and oil.
Instead, I start another day of genocide with a cup of tea and a “Fortified WFP cookie without insipid sale, which I bought for $ 1.50.
I followed the news recently and I started to think that my wish for something other than a global food program (WFP) could soon be achieved.
Apparently, the United States has tired of hearing Palestinians in Gaza say they are hungry. So now he has decided to end hunger, or at least boring complaints about it.
And so, with unshakable confidence and pride of its own ingenuity, the US government has announced a new mechanism to deliver food to Gaza. The “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”, an extraordinary name now added to our genocide vocabulary of NGOs and charities, should restart the distribution of food by the end of May and distribute “300 million meals”. Israel, for its part, volunteered to ensure the “humanitarian” process, while maintaining its killing activities.
Although this new food “mechanism” is put in place, the Israeli government, “under American pressure”, announced that it would leave “a fundamental quantity of food” in order to prevent “the development of a hunger crisis”, reported the international media. The recovery will only last a week.
Here in Gaza, where the hunger crisis is already “well developed”, we are barely surprised by these announcements. We are well used to Israel – with foreign support – lighting and turning off the “food button” as he wants.
For years, we are kept in a prison of 365 square kilometers, where our Israeli jailers control our food, rationing so that we can never go too far beyond the level of survival. Long before this genocide, they openly declared to the world that they were holding us to a diet, our calories were carefully counted to ensure that we are not dead but that we suffered. It was not an ephemeral penalty; It was an official government policy.
Anyone motivated by basic humanity who dared to challenge the blockade from the outside was attacked, even killed.
Some say that we should have been grateful that the trucks are allowed to enter at all. Certainly, they were. But just as often, they were not, especially when we prisoners were considered badly.
Countless times, I would find that my neighborhood bakery closed the bakery because there was no kitchen gas, or I would not find my favorite cheese because our jailers had decided that it was a double -use article and could not enter Gaza.
We were gifted to cultivate our own food, but we could not do much either because a large part of our fertile soil was near the fence of the prison, and therefore out of reach. We loved fishing, but it was also closely watched and limited. Advent yourself beyond the shore and you would be shot.
All this humiliating and calculated blockade took place long before October 7, 2023.
After that day, the amount of food authorized in Gaza was considerably reduced. In the days that followed, I felt the obstacles of the Israeli blockade on Gaza more tangible than ever, even if I had lived below since my birth. For the first time, I found myself struggling to secure something as basic as bread. I remember thinking: the world will surely not allow it to last.
And yet we are there, 19 months later, 590 days, the fight only worsened.
On March 2, Israel prohibited all food and other aids at the entrance to Gaza. Since then, the situation has gone from bad to worse, leaving us nostalgic of the previous phases of the crisis, when the suffering was slightly more bearable.
A few weeks ago, for example, we could still have tomatoes alongside our canned beans that rotten our stomach. But now vegetable sellers are not found.
The bakeries have also closed, and the flour has practically disappeared, leaving me by wishing to repaint the slight disgust at the sight of the worms being wiggling through the infested flour because it would mean that my mother could redo bread. Now, finding unpired FAVA beans is all I could want to realistically.
I recognize that others still have much worse than me. For parents of young children, the fight to find food is an agony.
Take my hairdresser, for example. The last time I went to him for a haircut two weeks ago, he looked exhausted.
“Can you imagine? I haven’t eaten bread for weeks. Whatever the flour I manage to buy every few days, I save for my children. I eat just enough to survive, so as not to feel satisfied. I just don’t understand why the world treats them like that. If we are not worthy of life in their eyes, but not at least pity for my hungry children.
This may seem a cruel sacrifice, but this is what parenting has become here after 19 months of Israeli murder constantly. Parents are consumed by fear, not only for the safety of their children, but for the possibility that their children are bombed while hungry. It is the nightmare of each household and each tent in Gaza.
In the few barely functional hospitals, the famine landscape is even more painful. Babies and children resembling skeletons are on hospital beds; Mothers of malnutrition are seated near them.
It has become normal to see daily images of emaciated Palestinian children. We can find it difficult to find food, but see them leave our hearts broken. We want to help. We may think that a box of peas could make a difference. But what can peas do for a baby suffering from slump, for a child who looks like a fragile shell of skin and bone?
Meanwhile, the world is sitting in silence, watching Israel block help and deliver bombs and ask questions in disbelief.
On May 7, the Israeli army bombed rue Al-Wehda, one of the busiest in Gaza City. A missile struck an intersection full of street sellers, another – a functional restaurant. At least 33 Palestinians were killed.
Images of a table with slices of pizza dipped in the blood of one of the victims appeared online. The Pizza scene in Gaza has captured the attention of the world; The bloodbath did not do it. The world has demanded answers: How can you be in famine when you can order pizza?
Yes, there are sellers and restaurants in the middle of the genocidal famine. Sellers who sell a kilogram of flour for $ 25 and a box of beans for $ 3. A restaurant where the smallest and most expensive pizza slice in the world is served – a piece of poor quality dough, cheese and blood of those who wanted it.
In this world, we are required to explain the presence of pizza to convince that we are worthy of food. For this world, the outline of an abstract American plan to feed us seems reasonable, while being tons of help saving lives, wait for border passages to be authorized and distributed by aid agencies already fully functional.
We, in Gaza, saw masked public relations exercises as a “humanitarian action” before. We remember the air props that killed more people than they fed. We remember the $ 230 million pier which barely obtained 500 aid trucks from Gaza from the sea: a feat that could have been accomplished in half a day via an open crossing.
We, in Gaza, are hungry, but we are not fools. We know that Israel can only die of hunger and genocide because the United States allows. We know that the cessation of genocide is not among the concerns of Washington. We know that we are hostages not only from Israel, but also from the United States.
What haunts us is not only famine; It is also the fear of foreigners who arrive under the guise of help, only to start laying the foundations of colonization. Even if the American plan is applied and even if we are allowed to eat before the next bombing of Israel, I know that my people will not be broken by the armament of food.
Israel, the United States and the world should understand that we will not exchange land against calories. We will free our homeland, even on an empty stomach.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.