“Why can’t I have a pomegranate?”
The little girl’s question sank his heart. How would my colleague, Hatem, explain to his daughter that there are no pomegranates, and barely any flour? How will he explain that real people are doing this to her on purpose? Starving her little stomach as a weapon?
As I sit here in Australia, watching “our ally in the Middle East” deprive my family and friends of food, I can’t help but think: it could have been me.
The only difference between me and Hatem’s daughter is a few thousand kilometres. Geographic luck is why I am safe, why I have clean water, a fridge full of food, a home without drones buzzing overhead.
But it doesn’t save me from the guilt. I sit glued to the screen as my colleagues, with sunken cheeks and frail bodies – barely able to stand – try to document their own starvation for Americans, Australians, anyone, to take action.
It doesn’t stop me from wondering why – as the UN secretary general calls this the highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger recorded by its system “anywhere, anytime” – my colleagues still need to “prove” their own starvation.
It doesn’t stop me from feeling that perhaps, as humans, we are all unlucky. Because we are living in hell. We live in a global system that lets you bomb hospitals and starve children. We live in a world that allows this to happen.
I stare at the empty Word document. I have tried to write this article for a week now but can’t seem to find the right words. What words could ever be enough? What sentence could capture the feeling of watching an entire people slowly vanish?
What words can I offer if footage of a child with a distended stomach isn’t enough? If a mother crying over rice grain isn’t enough? If people fighting for food scraps dropped from the sky, hospital wards filled with toddlers but empty of medicine, and lines for nonexistent water, are not enough?
What I feel is something more than heartbreak. It’s rage. No child should go to bed hungry, let alone die from it. No mother should have to choose which child gets to eat. No people should be punished simply for existing. No one should know what it’s like not to eat for days.
Yet, here we are.
Israel is deliberately starving Gaza to death. The starvation is not a byproduct of genocide – it is the genocide; deliberate, calculated and human-made. It is starving more than 2 million people slowly, painfully and publicly.
Before that, it flattened our homes, burned people alive in their tents, displaced millions, and targeted schools and universities. It turned Gaza, a place once filled with life and joy, into rubble. It turned schools into a place children would sleep, learning only how to survive – or how to die.
And now, finally, it is openly starving us to death. Parents watch their children go hungry, feeling helpless. Infants are born without the chance to grow. Supermarket shelves are empty. Aid trucks are blocked. People are dying, not only from bullets but from hunger.
These are not statistics. These are my cousins, my neighbours, my friends. People I grew up with. People I used to share a sandwich with at school recess.
It is hard for me to believe they are now skin and bone, counting their days without food. Some tell me they have stopped counting.
You and I are watching a human-made starvation, with full internet access, with journalists risking their lives to show us. There is nothing hidden. Nothing secret. We know. And knowing comes with responsibility.
To speak up. To protest. To donate. To demand our governments take real action. To refuse to be complicit.
These acts may feel little, compared with this scale of human cruelty. But if I were watching my hungry daughter ask about pomegranates, I would want every human on this planet to try doing something. Anything.
Because anything is infinitely more than nothing.
• Plestia Alaqad is an award-winning journalist and author
