The dead are starving. The living cannot swallow.

Some mornings, I forget to eat. Not in protest or in solidarity, but because I cannot. Because a spoonful of rice feels like a betrayal when I’ve just read about a baby who died in Gaza, her breath slowing in the final hours not from injury, but from hunger. The blood had dried on her scalp days earlier. The doctors tried to keep her warm. But no amount of blankets could undo the fact that she had not eaten in days. Her name was Razan Abu Zaher. She was 4 years old.

Eighty-five percent of Gaza is entering the fifth stage of starvation. That’s the final stage. There is no sixth. No cliff to tumble from, no miracle drug. Only the body beginning to consume itself. The tongue dries. The stomach walls shrink. Children lose their hearing, their eyesight, their ability to cry. They die quietly, or loudly, or in the arms of a mother who knows what death smells like because it lives on every street now.

Starvation kills children first. Their smaller bodies succumb faster to dehydration, their organs shut down sooner, their cries grow silent before anyone else’s. At least 18,000 children have already been killed by bombs, but thousands are at risk of wasting away, dying hungry. To withhold food from children is not just to kill them, it is to end the future they represent. It is to deny Palestine its continuity. No society can rebuild when its youngest are buried before they learn to walk.

But here I am, thousands of miles away. I walk through grocery aisles that hum with fluorescence. I see toddlers playing with grapes in their mother’s carts. And I think of Gaza, where parents carry their children to morgues in plastic bags. Where every meal is a negotiation with fate. Where you must choose between starvation or being gunned down at a so-called aid distribution site. Israel has killed more Palestinians waiting for aid than were killed on October 7, 2023.

On July 20, Israeli forces opened fire on yet another aid convoy in Gaza, killing at least 100 Palestinians as they waited for food. They had been standing in line for hours under a punishing sun. Some were carrying infants. Others had brought plastic bags, hoping to fill them with flour. Instead, the asphalt was covered in blood. Days earlier, a convoy organized with international coordination was similarly attacked. The UN has reported that 798 Palestinians have now been killed while receiving aid. That is not negligence. That is deliberate. That is hunger weaponized.

This grotesque inversion of aid in Gaza reveals a truth far more violent than absence. In 2024, Israel fired on starving civilians near the Kuwait roundabout as they rushed toward flour trucks. That massacre was filmed. The screams echoed across the internet. But flour still does not pass easily through the blockade. Rice still waits in trucks at the border. Medical equipment still sits in warehouses while babies die in incubators that have lost power. There are more than 30 recorded cases of infants left to die without oxygen because hospitals were denied fuel.

And yet, the UN still will not declare famine. But there is no ambiguity in a toddler whose skin is breaking from dehydration. There is no lack of clarity in an old man dying for bread, as we all watch. The hesitation to name this genocide is not about evidence. It is about permission. If they name it, they will have to act. And they have no intention of acting.

But let us not get distracted by our feelings. We don’t deserve to be forgiven. Not while we sit in comfort watching our people shrink. Not while Gaza rots and the world is consumed by its own grief or inaction. The only thing that matters is liberation. The only thing that matters is that Palestinians eat a meal in peace, beneath a sky that does not deliver death.

Anything other than that is theater. They want us to numb our minds, to confuse grief with surrender. But the sumud of the Palestinian people is not fragile. It is not a poem. It is the will to remain human under conditions that seek to turn us to dust. It is a father digging through the rubble with his hands. It is a mother not eating so her children can. It is a boy dying in his superman t-shirt, holding to hope that someone would save him, because hollywood told him that he would not be buried in blood soaked clothes.

In Gaza, starvation is not a byproduct. It is administered with precision. The Israeli government has long admitted to calculating the caloric threshold needed to keep Palestinians “on the brink” without triggering international intervention. This is a system designed by bureaucrats and engineers, not just soldiers, and upheld by a society that protests aid at the gates. And it is implemented with the support of Western democracies who claim to uphold human rights.

There is no dignity in begging your occupier to feed you. And yet that is what the world demands of Palestinians. That they perform gratitude while choking on powdered milk. That they smile for aerial photos of aid trucks while burying another child in a mass grave. That they bow our heads and say thank you, while the hand that feeds us is the same hand that starves us.

But Palestinians will not bow. They will not smile through genocide. They will not confuse survival with justice. The only acceptable future is one where Palestinians control their own borders, their own food, their own lives. Where the next generation does not learn to count their ribs before they learn to read.

Sumud is not just the ability to endure. It is the knowledge that even under siege, a people can remain whole. Not because of pity, or charity. But because they know who they are.

And who we are, above all, is a people who still believe that liberation is possible. Even as the world forgets us. Even as the UN stalls. Even as our children cry from hunger and no one listens. We hear them. We cry for them. And we will not forgive the world for making us starve in silence. But who cares what we think…

On the Day of Judgment, every drop of blood will be weighed, and every hunger pang will rise as testimony. The martyrs of Gaza are not gone. They are alive, provided for and at peace. It is the living who must answer. It is we who will be asked what we did when Gaza starved, and the gates of heaven will not be opened to those who turned away.

So we continue. We protest. We boycott. We call for economic sanctions. We demand a world where those who were complicit this genocide are haunted by its memory forever. Let their lives be filled with the hollowness of hunger they inflicted. Let them live out their days with the same emptiness they created in the bellies of children.

Gaza cannot wait. Let the record show that the aid was at the border. Let the record show that the sea was closed. Let the record show that the world stood idle while an entire people was denied food, light, and breath. And let the record show that we are all guilty.

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