For over a year now, my family and I have been displaced from northern Gaza to Deir el-Balah, in the middle of the Gaza Strip. Throughout this period, we and the rest of the population of Gaza experienced every form of torture imaginable and unimaginable. One of them is hunger.
Gaza is now entirely dependent on food aid. From a place that could produce its own food and feed its population with fresh vegetables, fruits, eggs, meat and fish, today it has become a place of famine.
Since last year, the Israeli army has made sure to destroy food stores, markets, warehouses storing food, farms and fishing boats. He eliminated the police forces responsible for ensuring the delivery and distribution of aid, ensuring that aid was looted before it reached those who needed it. For some time now we have been buying “aid” food, and we are not getting it for free.
We had barely gotten through it when the situation deteriorated sharply in October. What began in the northern “disaster zone” has spread to the rest of the Gaza Strip. Israel’s nutritional terrorism has hit all of Gaza.
The Israeli army reduced the number of trucks it allowed in to just 30 to 40 per day and food – already expensive and unaffordable for most – began to disappear. Today, even if we can buy food, we cannot find it. International agencies and various charities are of no use; they can’t provide anything.
It is difficult for me to explain and understand the feeling of hunger in someone who does not understand the depth of their pain, and it is even more difficult to explain this experience when we are constantly under bombardment and bombing of Israel for over 400 days now. .
But I’ll try.
Every day I wake up in the morning to a house full of family members trying to survive this madness. I drink a little barely drinkable water; it has an unpleasant salty taste that does not quench thirst. Israel has polluted groundwater and prevented the entry of fuel, so the last water desalination plant no longer works.
If I’m lucky, I have some coffee, of course without sugar, and maybe a small piece of bread. Then I try to forget my hunger by focusing on my studies.
I was supposed to graduate last year, but I couldn’t finish my last semester because the genocide started. After the Israeli army destroyed all the universities, Gaza’s education authorities came together and came up with a plan to allow students to continue their studies online.
Gaza’s destroyed infrastructure has made this endeavor extremely difficult. Internet connection is weak and in most places non-existent. There is also no electricity, so charging a phone or laptop is a challenge.
But that’s not even half the battle. Studying yourself, being able to concentrate amidst the noise of screams, bombings and drones, and the constant feeling of hunger and weakness is almost impossible.
I study literature, which requires dissecting a text, analyzing the language, the characters, their motivations and their feelings, but I can’t concentrate. My brain does not comply; I can’t understand what I’m reading. The brain fog doesn’t go away even if I try to concentrate. The headache is followed by nausea and a rumbling stomach.
What makes it even harder to concentrate when you’re starving are children. I have eight nieces and nephews who all live with me here in the same house and all are under the age of six.
Every time they cry for food, their mothers try to change the subject or offer them the expired food they have. Yet how can you convince when food is too difficult to look at, even for adults?
My sister and sister-in-law have babies. It’s almost impossible to find formula, so they try to breastfeed them even though they themselves are malnourished. Imagine how you breastfeed a newborn in a vacuum.
Gaza health authorities reported that 28 children died of malnutrition in the spring. There have been no updates to this number since. We can only imagine how many babies we have lost to hunger.
Hunger has affected everyone I see. People are visibly thinner, they walk around with a blank stare, dark circles underneath. The streets are full of children and elderly people begging for food. I see misery and hunger everywhere I turn.
The worst thing is that the food we have, when we eat it, does not help us feel better. We mostly had expired canned goods and worm-infested wheat. When I eat it, my stomach problems are even worse. I always have pain after a meal.
Starvation destroys our body and mind, making us unable to live. And that’s the goal.
This is of course not the first time that Israel has starved Gaza to ensure that its population is weak and vulnerable.
When he imposed his illegal siege on the Gaza Strip in 2007, he allowed the entry of an average of 2,400 trucks per month over the next three years. This is a sharp decrease from the average of 10,000 trucks, which met the bare minimum of needs before the siege.
This number began to increase after 2010, when an international coalition of activists and human rights groups organized the Gaza Freedom Flotilla – a fleet of six civilian ships loaded with humanitarian aid that sailed to Gaza in an attempt to break the Israeli siege. Israeli soldiers attacked the ships and killed nine people, sparking international outrage and significant political pressure to lift the blockade.
The number of aid trucks increased further after Israel’s brutal attack on Gaza in 2014, which killed more than 2,200 people and destroyed parts of the strip. International pressure has mounted again to force Israel to authorize more aid.
It is for this reason that I cannot easily be convinced that the international community simply cannot influence or pressure Israel. They can, they have done it and they must.
In October, only 37 trucks entered Gaza per day, less than 1,150 for the entire month. Two weeks ago, Israel allowed three trucks carrying food, water and medicine to enter the north, only to attack and burn the shelter where they were unloaded.
If 10,000 trucks per month were not enough to meet the needs of Gaza before the genocide, then imagine what 1,000 trucks do for a population that has been starving for over a year, has no water drinking water, medical supplies or fuel and suffers. from various infectious diseases and injuries.
Forgive my gloomy overview of our reality, but there is no more room for niceties because I am hungry. All I can think about is my empty stomach. All I got while writing this article was a piece of old wheat bread and some expired canned goods. And although Israel hopes that we will starve in silence, we will not. The world can and must end the famine in Gaza.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
