Bombs, snipers and a weapon reserved for the most fragile: starvation

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Um Fadi writes to me from Gaza at night. All winter long, even in the hardest moments, her tone remained calm, never desperate. There were no diapers; without clean water she couldn’t wash Lana, who got sores and nasty infections on her newborn skin. In just a few months, she and her daughters were displaced ten times; Monday night was the eleventh.

I met her son and husband in hospital. The son, Fadi, suffers from an unidentified neurological disease, thought to stem from a genetic mutation after phosphorus bombs were dropped on Gaza while his mother was pregnant. He has never met his baby sister; he and his father were in Egypt on October 7 and have been unable to return to Gaza. Um Fadi and her little ones have wandered around Gaza for months. Once she sent me a video of Lana from when she had just been born, from her old home. The infant lay on the double bed, with the wardrobe mirror behind her and a 1930s-style door with a brass handle, soft light drifting in from the hallway: a real home, tidy and clean, the sort of peaceful place where one could raise children. Of all the images, that one brought the most pain.

The first time we spoke, this winter, she was living in a makeshift tent of blankets and plastic. When it rained, mud flowed everywhere, digging up canals where debris gathered. Later they fled again, sheltering in the ruins of a shattered house. She sent clips of the girls sitting amid piles of rubble under a sky that seemed itself covered in gray dust, with distant fires and explosions day and night, relentless. In every video from Gaza, the background sound is the same: drones buzzing overhead, spying on the population and often firing at them.

Then came an abrupt turn. A few weeks ago Um Fadi wrote me in despair: “I’m exhausted, I can’t go on, we’re hungry, we’re afraid, please come and get me!” That plea, with no real hope of being granted, felt more like a prayer to God than to me. Nothing any of us is doing – an army of desperate people trying to save Gaza from our own governments as well as from Israel – is bringing any good outcome.

The situation is desperate. I hear it in Um Fadi’s messages; it is clear in the messages coming in from everyone writing from the Strip. While the old UN-led network once ran about 400 distribution points, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, guarded by armed private contractors, has opened only four mega-sites – three in the south, one in central Gaza—and none in the north, where the needs are the greatest. People are being forced into new, managed migrations to allow Israel to clear and occupy the land left behind.

People have to walk for many miles, crossing live front lines and biometric checkpoints where snipers shoot without hesitation. The return trip is the same road, the same dangers, but now weighed down with supplies for loved ones – plus the weight of the massacre narrowly avoided, the blood on the ground, the bodies of those who did not make it. It feels like the Netflix series Squid Game, popular with South Korean kids, but being played out in real life with life-and-death stakes.

Desperate crowds run to grab the few rations on offer – never enough for everyone – while gunfire rattles from the other side. In one month about eight hundred people have died near distribution centers.

All for a box holding four kilos of flour, a couple of bags of pasta, two tins of fava beans, a packet of tea bags and some biscuits. The alternative is the black markets, where prices are ruinous and which are being targeted by drones. Sugar is $120 a kilo, powdered milk $60, flour $30, salt $15, tomatoes $25, potatoes and onions $35. Eggplants and lentils cost $30, lemons $70, coffee an astonishing $450. Ten thousand liters of desalinated water run $100, up from $15 last year. A pack of diapers is $250.

The few goods on offer in a market in Deir el Balah (photo by Khaleel Naji, who also informed the author on current food prices in Gaza)

The fact that the United States has approved $30 million for this controversial aid scheme makes it fully complicit in grave war crimes, including the use of starvation as a weapon of extermination.

Nine years ago, Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, wrote in the New York Times that the world might finally have escaped the danger of mass famine. Now, in the same newspaper, he writes: “I was wrong.” Since 2016, he explains, decades-long gains in global nutrition have stalled, while the number of people needing emergency aid has risen by 180%. Hunger, which had almost been banished worldwide, is back.

The problem is a political one. Hunger is once again a weapon; humanitarian crises are man-made, not natural. Some regimes are willing to intentionally seal off every route that could carry aid into emergency areas, choosing to set off crises rather than contain them. That is what is happening in Gaza.

Hunger being wielded as a weapon of war across the world isn’t just a stain on our conscience; it should frighten us. Beyond being a colossal failure of human principles, it is a threat to global security.

Famines shatter societies, drive millions to migrate, fuel despair and violence. If we think the problem is somewhere far away, we are wrong: every unresolved regional emergency metastasizes into the wider body that is our world – interconnected and destined either to live together or to die together.

Um Fadi sent me photos of her girls. I have watched them grow these months; one could say I’ve watched them grow older. They look thinner by the day, with two dark lines in the hollow between nostrils and cheeks, eyes weary. On Monday night, as they were fleeing a sky full of missiles, she wrote: “I hope we die, this is terrifying.” As of the time of writing, it had been four hours since the last contact. “May God protect us” were her last words, at dawn. Then, silence.

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Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/undici-volte-sfollate-e-poi-la-fame-unarma-puntata-sui-piu-fragili on 2025-07-22