I woke up one morning in July with a burst of messages enlightening my phone. Each information chain, each publication on social networks, each conversation burst out cautious optimism. “Negotiations progressing well,” said titles. “Imminent truce”, “Massive help convoy preparing to enter”.
At that moment, we were deeply in the pangs of famine; Some days we haven’t eaten anything at all. You can imagine the prudent joy that flashes in our hearts, the way Hope has traveled through our messages. Friends have written to me, their words trembling with provisional relief. “Could it really be the end?” One asked. “We will remember what security will look like?” Will there be bread? ”
We dared to dream. We imagined the silence of the ceasefire, the taste of hot bread, the comfort of a full meal. Some stores have temporarily reopened. Prices have dropped slightly. For the first time in months, the bread seemed almost at hand. For an ephemeral moment, life seemed to return to the street.
In Gaza, even the most battered communities breathe differently when hope appears – even if it is for a few hours.
My neighbor – a widow of war raising seven children alone, including a baby who is constantly crying out of hunger – told me how her children cry with empty stomach while she cries out of helplessness. When rumors of the truce spread, she dreamed of nourishing them properly, of putting an end to their suffering. Like all of us, she looked at this hope to disintegrate.
The next morning, everything had collapsed. A new title, cold and final, sealed our fate: “Negotiations fail. No truce. “
The stores that had barely reopened were closed. The flour has disappeared again. Prices have climbed out of reach. Apart from Gaza, the media always spoke of the convoys of help “on their way”, but on the ground, there was nothing. Empty words. Empty trucks. Empty hands.
You can imagine how hearts broke that day. How the spirit of a people simply dreaming of bread was crushed. How mothers who are desperately looking for food for their children have felt.
The fragile hope that had lit our eyes has disappeared, leaving only hunger, fear and silence.
It was not the first time that has happened. This had happened several times before. And it happened after.
Last week, we found ourselves to wait, this time for a single word of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Hamas would have accepted a cease-fire proposal. Uncertainty was unbearable. After several days of silence, the Israeli government made impossible requests, effectively killing the last attempt at negotiations. The news pushed us back into another cycle of despair while hunger, displacement, loss and sorrow are wreaking havoc.
I believe that these repeated titles of ceasefire are not involuntary-they are another form of punishment for the inhabitants of Gaza. Another form of torture. We are bombed, hungry, moved, then the news finishes us.
Hope is suspended in front of us, only to be torn apart, leaving us lower each time.
It is a deliberate and systematic policy intended to get rid of a defenseless population. It is designed to break our mind, to make us live a constant uncertainty, to strip us of the fundamental human law to hope for tomorrow. This cycle – Hope raised and then broken – leaves scars deeper than famine.
While we are waiting for the news, hunger tightens its grip. Enter outside and you see it engraved on the faces: men wipe tears, women collapse in the streets of exhaustion, children too weak to play. Hunger is not only a physical state – it is an unbearable weight that crushes the soul.
Mothers stop planning meals because they cannot promise that they can put something on the table. Children learn early that good news is often cers in the morning. Families sell their last possessions when the aid is announced, to stay nothing with anything when it arrives.
This repeated devastation generates more than distrust of governments and the media; He erodes the very concept of hope. Many here no longer ask: “When will it end?” But “how can it get worse?”
According to the World Food Program, 100% of the inhabitants of Gaza are now suffering from acute levels of food insecurity, all children under the age of five faced with acute malnutrition. Famine has been officially announced.
Israel continues to claim that its blockade measures prevent supplies from reaching Hamas, even if the US government – its greatest ally – and Israeli officials themselves say that there is no proof of resistance fighters that plunder aid.
Amnesty International calls the Israeli seat of “collective punishment” of Gaza and “a war crime”. Geneva conventions explicitly prohibit collective punishment and forced famine.
And so, I can’t help but ask: where is the world in all of this? How can an entire planet watch two million people are hungry, bombed and stripped of dignity, and do nothing?
This silence is heavy; He crushes the mind as much as hunger. He tells us that our suffering is acceptable, that our lives can disappear without consequences.
History will condemn those who have committed these crimes, but also those who have held and allowed them to occur.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
