I recoiled in horror at the image of a mother in Gaza with her skeletally starved child published alongside the report on the front page of your print edition (‘We have faced hunger before, but never like this’, 24 July).
Over a year ago I received a letter from the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem notifying me of their honour awarded to my Polish grandparents for saving Roza, a Jewish schoolgirl friend of my father’s sister in 1942, and providing her with false papers, by which she was able to survive the war with great courage and heroism.
I was invited to contact the Israeli embassy in London for an award ceremony for my grandparents. I hoped in vain that the Gaza conflict would end soon. Eventually I replied that while so many thousands of civilians are dying in Gaza, I cannot do this. I am a humanitarian, as were my grandparents. They risked their lives for one girl; I honour them beyond words.
So how can it be that a country that has an institution specifically to research the past to honour those who saved those such as Roza 80 years ago can now treat other innocent civilians as so utterly worthless as to be condemned to slow death? And at such a short distance from where food aid is stockpiled, and beyond that a few more miles, where their own population is as well fed as any western country? The distance from where I live to the Israeli embassy is about 50 miles. About the same distance as Jerusalem is from the starving people of Gaza.
Mark Lewinski-Grende
Swaffham Prior, Cambridgeshire
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