I Never Wanted to Write About Hunger
It wasn’t shame that kept me from writing about hunger. After all, I and everyone I know are hungry. This is the reality for all the people of Gaza.
It’s not about the lack of food anymore; it’s about the complete absence of food. Our bodies are losing their strength, our minds are losing their clarity, and children’s mouths never stop moaning in pain. As for the youth, they now understand that this is beyond their parents’ ability to fix, so they endure hunger in silence, so as not to burden the already powerless shoulders of those who raised them.
I didn’t want to write, because writing feels pointless. Words fail to truly capture what we’re living through, and they certainly fail to stir enough conscience to move those who still possess a shred of decency, to act, to do anything, or at least to try.
For months now, I’ve been convinced that normalizing the genocide has become the norm. Even those who pretend to care about our suffering do so only to offer themselves a moral alibi. They might hide a part of their daily routine just so they don’t feel complicit in our pain. But life goes on, and the world sleeps, pressing down with its full weight on the chests of hundreds of thousands of starved people in Gaza.
We now face a range of options for how we might die:
A swift death by missile strike; a risky death at the gates of the US aid centers, which seem more like death traps, and grotesque replicas of sadistic games we once believed only existed in films; or the slow death of emaciated bodies losing their strength, their immunity, becoming easy prey for diseases and epidemics we no longer have the medicine to treat.
This scene… these words… of course, they will change nothing, in such a vile world.
That’s all. Enough.
Gaza, July 19, 2025
