There are no words to better capture reality in Gaza today than it is: we are dying. Every day, in every imaginable way, we die. Death comes by missiles, by shooting, by collapsed construction, due to lack of medicine and for fear. And now, once again, It will be hungry as Israel has closed humanitarian supplies – With him agreement of the Trump administration, but also of the tacit support of the people of the United States and Europe who chose governments not committed to the rule of law and the arrest of atrocities.
Many are responsible for the small wasted bodies that will soon be seen on Western television screens.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump met again this month – From positions of power and comfort, decide the fate of the people who will never know. In their decisions, Gaza's children are reduced to guarantee. Mothers, parents and whole families are figures on a chess board, disposable.
Our kitchens used to smell at home: warm spices, olive oil, baking bread early in the afternoon. Now they smell at all. Only metal cans and any dry product that we can collect. Stocks that could enter scale during the fire “They have practically exhausted“, According to John Whyte of the United Nations Aid Agency for Palestinians. For six weeks, no help has entered Gaza due to the current Israeli block. The United Nations World Food Program said Friday that it had run out of food in Gaza. More than 2.1 million people are trapped, bombarded and dead.
When we can eat, it's just to survive, not be full. Do not feel joy. Children align for charity foods that maintain plastic containers. Mothers break down while trying to calm the hungry screams of their babies. The parents look at the ground, ashamed of not being able to keep their families. We try to turn almost anything into something, but even the imagination is tired.
Fruit, vegetables, meat: now they are memories. In the past, even under siege, we share how little we had. But this time is different. Our shelves are naked.
How did he get to this? How did the world reach a place where the collective punishment of starvation is used as leverage to shape the terms of a high fire?
This is not a consequence of war. It is a strategy. A deliberate and systematic Israeli effort, with western acceptance, to make hunger a form of control. One way to turn a town too weakened to resist oppression. This is not rationing. It is elimination.
And yet, we remember who we are. We remember 1948, when our grandparents were forced from their homes. We remember 1967, when we uproot again. In each chapter, we cling to the earth, planted on its ground. But this time, Israel has also taken the fields. Israel has taken the water, seeds and hands that once sank them. According to the Al-Haq human rights group, more than 70% of Gaza is now inaccessible to its residents, with information indicating that Israel has seized more than 37% of the earth.
And yet, how would you know? They tell me that CNN rarely covers us more. The people of Gaza do not appear on the last minute news alerts. We are invisible for the editorial decisions of the people who find our lives too political, too inconvenient, whose audience has accepted our suffering as noticeable.
You've seen a mother divider A single bread among five children? Have you heard of The boy who died From boiling after being beaten in a pot of food while a crowd was rushing to a meal? The stories sound unreal, but they are not.
Even my cat is starving, and I don't know how to help her. But some people can see the entire communities of hunger and feel nothing.
The same nations that speak of human rights at news conferences remain silent when those rights are filmed in Gaza. Even when South Africa brought a case of genocide to the International Court of Justice, the court carefully responded, not a sentence, but a request: stop bombing civilians, letting in. Even that was ignored. The bombs fell anyway. The aid was blocked. The request was drowned by the allies of Israel, France, Germany, United States, urging the Court not to say the word “genocide.” As if language could hide the bodies.
This is not just about Gaza. This is the collapse of the idea of justice. If the law leans to power, what is left for those without it?
People should choose what type of legacy they want to leave behind. Is it a silence in front of Israeli abuses? Or one of courage, where justice is more than rhetoric?
We do not need pity. We do not need sympathy. We need rights. We need food. We need security. A high fire is just the beginning. The siege, apartheid, multiple displacements: these are not footnotes. They are the story.
And one day, when this ends, when horror is felt in light, the world will be asked: how did you let this happen?
Nour Khalil Abushammala is a lawyer for Palestinian apprentices and defender of human rights based in the city of Gaza.
