Hunger in Palestine, beyond the numbers

Published at: 29/08/2025 04:17 PM

The hunger caused by Israel against the Palestinian people is a horror story. The weapon of Israeli control over the entry of food is causing an even greater death toll than bombs.

In an interview with the Executive Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF ), Catherine Russell, she stated that “hunger is an unbearable reality for children in Gaza”, and read the reflection of a member of the Palestinian Organization's Cry for Freedom , at the celebration of World Breastfeeding Week in the second week of August and we present it in this research:

“As a mother, I don't understand how World Breastfeeding Week was celebrated, while babies are dying of hunger in Palestine. There are babies who cannot be breastfed because their mothers are malnourished or have been killed. Babies who do not have access to milk formulas, because Israel blocks the entry of food and humanitarian aid. Babies who die in the arms of women who gave them life and now watch them die.

And in the meantime, the content on the parenting and motherhood side remains the same: breastfeeding advice, quotes about attachment, memes and advice about your Montessori routines, discipline tips, and more.

But not a word about Palestinian mothers who are burying their children on an empty stomach, not a single word about hunger as a weapon of war, not a word about genocide.

Prioritizing breastfeeding: creating sustainable support systems is the theme of the year. But what support system is there for a mother who has lost access to water, food, health, safety and life itself? What sustainability can there be in the midst of genocide? Who are these campaigns aimed at if they don't name the mothers who need the most support and who are being raped the most?

If breastfeeding, motherhood, or childhood only matter in comfortable and privileged settings, then it's not a true defense of breastfeeding. The opposite is marketing, consumerist capitalism and parenting hypocrisy; it's using motherhood as a business niche, while ignoring the real pain of other mothers.

Not using platforms to make this visible is not neutrality, it's indifference. And if Palestinian children don't hurt them, then we must question their true interest in childhood.

Motherhood cannot be apolitical, the defense of children cannot be selective, and silence in the face of genocide is also violence.”

After this intervention, the room was silent. Nothing happened, there were no actions in this regard.

Calculated Starvation Policy

For Jonathan Whittall, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in the Palestinian territories, “what Gaza is witnessing is not just hunger, but a calculated policy of starvation.”

According to reports from international organizations such as OCHA, UNRWA, OXFAM and Save the Children, the population of Gaza is facing a tough struggle to survive, and the same reports warn that thousands of children are at risk of dying due to lack of food and medicine in a “man-made” humanitarian situation.

Also, researcher Alex de Waal explained in his book Mass Famine: Its History and Future, that contemporary famines are often the result of deliberate political and military decisions, and not of natural food shortages. What is worrying is that everyone reports famine, but it continues to increase.

Also about the famine, and from a different perspective than the figures and reports regarding the genocide, doctor Shehab Ezzidem wrote on his social networks about the horror:

“I swear to you, before God, before this wretched century, before any glimmer of humanity that may still remain in me, what I saw today was not life.

I have seen the collapse of everything that once pretended to be sacred. In the past, Fridays in Gaza were sacred; not by tradition, but because they were tender.

A father would come home with fish or chicken and for an hour we would eat like people, we were poor, but not degraded.

We smiled around the table, thanked God for the food and we felt alive, we felt worthy of encouragement.

Even the poorest people knew this dignity, they saved all week, they endured hunger not out of habit, but out of hope, for that day, that food, that illusion of a normal life.

But now... today is Friday. I have walked the streets of Gaza, not to celebrate, not even to feed myself, but to look for rice, rotten rice, gray grains that stick to my fingers and taste like nothing.

Anything, in order to trick the stomach into keeping quiet. My brother searched one market, I searched another, we came back with crumbs. We paid with the last coins we had.

They ask for gold in exchange for ashes, and we pay for it, because children must eat and because we no longer dare to say what is right. But I didn't come to talk about rice or justice, I came to confess what I saw:

A truck passed by, it was empty. Its floor was covered with a thin layer of flour dust. Just dust, not bags, not bread, just the trace of something that could once have saved a child.

And then I saw it. They weren't rebels, they weren't criminals, they were children who ran like hunted things to that truck. They climbed it with their hands that have never held a toy. They fell to their knees as if before an altar and began to scrape. One had a broken lid, the other a piece of cardboard; but the others used their hands, their tongues, licked it .

They licked the flour dust off the rusted steel from the dirt, from the back of the truck that was already leaving. A child laughed, not because he was happy, but because the body goes crazy when it dies of hunger. Another wept in silence, like someone who no longer believes that anyone would listen to him.

And I stayed there, with all my embarrassment, with my hands in my pockets, like someone waiting for a bus. As if I wasn't seeing the end of the world.

I wanted to scream, but what scream can reach the sky, when the sky itself is deaf? What words can I offer? What words can explain the sound of a child's tongue licking rust off the floor of a truck to search for flour?

There are no metaphors left, there is no beauty in this, only sin, only crime. And we are all guilty. You, me, those who sent the truck, those who sent the bombs.

This is the 21st century, but history has not advanced, it has swallowed its own children and called it progress.

I don't want to write this, I don't want to see it, I want to forget the boy who licked the floor of the truck. But I can't, because I saw it. Because it's real, and if I forget it, then I'm no longer human.”

It is a global outcry, we must put an end to this absurdity, that border crossings are opened so that humanitarian aid can enter without problems, it cannot be that the Zionist regime is responsible for managing the famine created by themselves. The world must shout louder.

AMELYREN BASABE/Mazo News Team