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 time, we, along with the rest of Gaza’s population, have lived every type of torture imaginable and unimaginable. One of them is hunger.
Gaza is now fully dependent on food aid. From a place that could produce its own food and feed its population with fresh vegetables, fruit, eggs, meat and fish, it has now become a place of starvation.
Since last year, the Israeli army has made sure to destroy food stores, markets, warehouses storing foodstuffs, farms and fishing boats. It has eliminated police forces securing aid delivery and distribution, thus ensuring that aid is looted before it reaches those who need it. For a while now, we have been buying “aid” food, not receiving it for free.
We were barely scraping by when the situation took a sharp turn for the worse in October. What began in the so-called “disaster zone” of the north has expanded to the rest of the Strip. Israel’s nutritional terrorism has struck the whole of Gaza.
The Israeli army decreased the number of trucks it was allowing to enter to just 30-40 per day and food – which was already expensive and unaffordable for most – started to disappear. Now, even if we are able to buy food, we cannot find any. The international agencies and various charities are of no use; they cannot provide anything.
It is difficult for me to explain and capture the feeling of hunger for someone who does not understand the depths of its pain, and it is even more challenging to explain this experience while being under constant bombardment and shelling from Israel for more than 400 days now.
But I will try.
Every day, I wake up in the morning in a home full of family members trying to survive this madness. I drink a bit of barely drinkable water; it has an unpleasant salty taste that does not satisfy thirst. Israel has polluted underground water and prevented fuel from entering, so the last remaining water desalination plant is no longer working.
If I am lucky, I have a bit of coffee, of course without any sugar, and maybe a tiny piece of bread. Then I try to forget about my hunger by focusing on my studies.
I was supposed to graduate last year, but I couldn’t complete my last semester because the genocide started. After the Israeli army destroyed all universities, Gaza’s education authorities came together and devised a plan to have students continue their education online.
Gaza’s destroyed infrastructure has made this endeavour extremely difficult. The internet connection is weak and in most places, non-existent. There is also no electricity, so charging a phone or a laptop is a challenge.
But this is not even half of the struggle. Studying itself, being able to focus amid the sound of screaming, bombardment and drones, and the constant feeling of hunger and weakness is nearly impossible.
I study literature, which requires one to dissect a text, to analyse the language, the characters, their motives and feelings, but I cannot focus. My brain does not comply; I cannot comprehend what I am reading. The brain fog does not go away, no matter how hard I try to focus. The headache is followed by nausea and my stomach rumbling.
What makes it even more difficult to focus while starving are the children. I have eight nephews and nieces all living 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 what expired food they have. Yet, how convincing can you be when the food is too difficult to look at even for adults?
My sister and sister-in-law have babies. Formula is almost impossible to find, so they try to breastfeed them even though they themselves are malnourished. Imagine how you breastfeed a newborn on emptiness.
The Gaza health authorities reported 28 children died from malnutrition in the spring. There has been no update of this number since then. We can only imagine how many babies we have lost to starvation.
Hunger has affected everyone I see. People are visibly thinner, they walk around with an empty look in their eyes, dark circles underneath. The streets are filled with children and elderly people begging for food. I see misery and hunger everywhere I turn.
The worst is that the food that we have, when we do have it, does not make us feel better. We have been having mostly expired canned food and wheat infested with worms. When I eat it, it makes my stomach problems so much worse. I am always in pain after a meal.
Starvation is destroying our bodies and our minds, incapacitating us. And this is the goal.
It is, of course, not the first time Israel has starved Gaza to ensure its population is weak and vulnerable.
When it imposed its illegal siege on the Strip in 2007, it allowed on average of 2,400 trucks per month to enter in the following three years. This was a sharp decrease from the average of 10,000 trucks, which was meeting the bare minimum of needs before the siege.
The number began to rise after 2010 when an international coalition of human rights activists and groups organised the Gaza Freedom Flotilla – a fleet of six civilian ships loaded with humanitarian aid that sailed for Gaza in an attempt to break the Israeli siege. Israeli soldiers raided the ships and killed nine people, causing international outrage and significant political pressure to lift the blockade.
The number of aid trucks increased again after Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza in 2014, which killed more than 2,200 people and destroyed parts of the Strip. International pressure again bore down to force Israel into allowing more aid in.
It is for this reason that I cannot be easily convinced that the international community simply cannot influence or pressure Israel. They can, they have, and they must.
In October, just 37 trucks entered Gaza per day, or fewer than 1,150 for the whole month. Two weeks ago, Israel allowed three trucks carrying food, water and medicine to enter the north, only to attack and burn down the shelter where they were unloaded.
If 10,000 trucks per month were inadequate to meet the needs of Gaza before the genocide, then imagine what 1,000 trucks are doing for a population that has been starved for more than a year, has no clean water, medical supplies or fuel, and is suffering from various infectious diseases and injuries.
Forgive my grim outline of our reality, but there is no space left for niceties as I am hungry. All I can think about is my empty stomach. All I have had while writing this article is a piece of bread from old wheat and some expired canned food. And while Israel may hope that we starve in silence, we will not. The world can and must stop the starvation of Gaza.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
