By Nour ElAssy
A starving person has no choice but to run after food. Families, especially parents, will take great risks to try to get aid, despite knowing they might not return. There is no other way to feed their kids. People know they will die from either malnutrition or gunfire. I don’t think that should be considered as having options. But that is where we are today in Gaza, after more than 600 days of genocide.
The US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s (GHF) aid distribution hubs, which began operating on 27 May, are a grotesque theatre of cruelty, preying on our desperation. Of course, thousands of starved civilians, skeletal from hunger after nearly 90 days of total Israeli siege, would surge towards the first distribution site to open.
For us in Gaza, the GHF is not a humanitarian organisation but a criminal US and Israeli mafia. But people have no choice but to try to get food wherever they can find it. After the desperate crowd overwhelmed the centre, Israeli forces opened fire, killing at least three people and injuring dozens of others.
I spoke to a family I know that has not tasted bread in weeks. They have been living on lentils, if they can even find them. There are 11 adults and many children. One woman in the family lost her husband in an airstrike about three weeks ago and is raising four kids alone.
The woman’s brother, Mohammed, who is 25, went to the so-called aid hub, walking for many kilometres under the heat of the sun. When he got there, all he saw was chaos and gunfire. Some people were taking away whatever they could carry. Others – younger children and older people – were leaving with nothing at all because they couldn’t fight their way in. “It was utter chaos and horror,” Mohammed said.
My cousin, Yousef, who lives in Deir al-Balah, also went to the hub in Rafah, walking around a dozen kilometres from central Gaza to the south, the first day it opened. “It was like something I have never seen before,” he said. “So terrifying and wrong. I regret going there.”
When the gunfire started, there was no place to take shelter. “We were running, and there was only sand ahead of us. I’d rather be starved than go back,” Yousef told me. He returned to his kids empty-handed.
Why is Israel insisting that GHF take over the distribution of aid, after starving us for three months? Why not step aside and let the experts – the UN and known NGOs – do their job? Because this is what Israel wants. It wants the chaos. The manipulation of humanitarian assistance serves a sinister purpose: to force us into the southern part of Gaza, stripping us of our homes and dignity, and leaving us to an uncertain fate.
Now, there is talk of a new ceasefire, but what has been reported of the proposal doesn’t serve us in any way. It doesn’t offer a solution. It doesn’t require Israel to withdraw from Gaza or offer a permanent end to the war. There’s no guarantee that we would be allowed to return to our homes or that aid would be allowed to move freely into the territory. Still, we are so exhausted that we are looking for any opportunity for a pause. We are desperate for any solution.
Distraction
My own family, after being displaced again from our home in eastern Gaza City, feels tempted daily to go to the south, because that is where the aid is. For now, we are still at my sister’s house in the west of Gaza City. We are refusing to go south because we are afraid Israel will not allow us to return if we leave again – maybe ever.
We are some of the fortunate ones because we have the possibility of going to my brother’s home in Deir al-Balah, which can fit us all. But we’d rather stay here, all of us living in one room. I also still have a source of income, and so does my father, unlike so many others.
Still, to withdraw money from our accounts, we have to pay a 40% fee to brokers, and a bag of flour costs $500, a bottle of cooking oil is $40. Even though we struggle to afford food at these skyrocketing prices – I don’t think anyone can. So, we try to eat as little as possible, one or two meals a day in tiny portions.
As I write this, I keep thinking about how awful decisions taken by evil people are changing the course of our lives and those of generations to come. They have shifted attention away from the massacres that are happening now to these shameful, so-called aid hubs.
Every headline now talks about these hubs, but what about the killing and airstrikes that take place day and night? I hear them constantly, but no one is talking about them. What about Israel taking over entire cities and razing them to the ground – first Rafah and the north, now Khan Younis. This is the bigger plan. The GHF and the distribution hubs are just part of it.
The world already knows
We live in utter fear and exhaustion. We hear Israel wants to displace us from the entire Strip, maybe to Libya or Sudan. I report on all of this as a journalist, yes – but I also experience it as a Palestinian, a human being, stripped raw by what I see, hear, and feel every day.
I walk through decimated neighbourhoods where people once held weddings and played music. Now, they scrape food off the floor of aid trucks. People collapse in front of me during interviews – from hunger, grief, or dehydration. Some can’t speak at all. One mother held her sick child in her lap and whispered, “Tell them. Tell the world we didn’t deserve this.”
But the world already knows. That’s the worst part. They know that at least 54,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, are dead – at least. They know that we are being starved, that children are dying of malnutrition in hospitals with no electricity, no antibiotics, and no water.
Every silence, every denial, every diplomatic dance around the word “genocide” has cost us lives. We have lost all faith in the international community.
They know that areas controlled by the Israeli military and subjected to displacement orders cover over 80% of Gaza, while the vast majority of Gaza’s population live in tents or beneath tarps on sewage and mud-soaked sidewalks or sand dunes. They know that bakeries, schools, mosques, and ambulances have been turned to ash; that journalists, doctors, and aid workers have been deliberately killed. They know all of this. But they do nothing.
Instead, the world offers us crumbs and calls it compassion. After months of starvation and siege, European governments are now starting to talk about “reviewing” their trade deals with Israel and beginning to threaten to take “further concrete actions” if Israel doesn’t cease its current offensive and allow in aid. This is supposed to be progress?
Every silence, every denial, every diplomatic dance around the word “genocide” has cost us lives. We have lost all faith in the international community. The United Nations, whose charter promises to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”, now merely publishes PDFs and graphs and issues statements while Gaza is bled dry.
The brutal truth
This is not about Hamas. This is not a war on terror. This is a war on life itself. The starvation, the displacement, the bombing of hospitals and schools – all of it is deliberate. Israel’s leaders have said it out loud from day one, when former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant called Palestinians “human animals”. Government ministers openly advocate for ethnic cleansing and for blocking aid to starve us.
What does resilience mean when you are forced to choose between eating the last expired loaf of bread or giving it to your kids?
This is not a misstep. This is a doctrine. And it’s working.
I speak with people every day who say they no longer want to stay. “We want to leave and never return,” one man told me while scavenging for food in the al-Yarmouk area in Gaza City.
The truth is brutal: Israel wants us gone. The world is fine with that. And Gaza is being erased – not just by missiles, but by indifference.
And we? We are told to be strong; to be “resilient”. It’s a grotesque word. What does resilience mean when you are forced to choose between eating the last expired loaf of bread or giving it to your kids? When a mother has to wrap her child in plastic because there’s no burial cloth? When a journalist like me must interview a family moments after they’ve lost everything – because I know if I don’t, no one will ever know they existed?
We are not resilient. We are abandoned. Betrayed. And yes – we are angry. The world will one day ask how Gaza disappeared. Let this serve as the answer. You let it.
Edited by Eric Reidy.
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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
