I've been tracking events so closely in Gaza for months that I've come to feel as if some part of me has taken up residence there. My mind is full of scenes and stories that I did not witness in person, irreal and inescapable, like a nightmare that just won't end. Details and images float ominously by, suggesting, incredibly, a cataclysm even broader than what we realize — I recall the voice of 6-year-old Hind Rajab begging for help before she died — but then they, too, disappear into a long thread of general death and destruction. Still, when I started hearing that some of Gaza's children were starving to death, it stopped me. It would be a terrible milestone, and I wanted readers to pause and feel that weight. To say this conclusively, though, I would need more than social media posts — of which there were plenty. Chilling videos of babies, ashen and emaciated. Fathers and mothers weeping. Skinny children scrabbling for pinches of fallen flour. But I needed context, details, somebody who'd give their name and say, This is what happened. Experts or eyewitnesses on the ground. Getting their testimonies was even harder than I expected. I reached out to activists in Gaza who posted social media content on starvation, but didn't hear back. The international aid organizations were surprisingly skittish; some didn't respond to messages, or wanted to talk off the record. People in Gaza were like distant shadows, moving half-seen behind a blind of electricity cuts and telecommunications blackouts and bombs. They were out hunting for food, phones unreachable. They'd turn their phones on at some point, see a message from me, and reply — then disappear again before I could ask a follow-up question. The people of Gaza are caught in a Catch-22: Their best hope for help is to let others know what's happening. But the Israeli bombardment has killed many of the journalists who could tell the stories, cut off communications, and turned daily life into an battle for survival. Escorted trips with the Israeli army notwithstanding, outside journalists have not been allowed into Gaza. Only the people of Gaza can tell its story now, but they're hungry and exhausted and shellshocked and, anyway, many in the West still treat their accounts as suspect. One morning I awoke to a harrowing seven-minute voice message on my WhatsApp from a young mother in Gaza City. She described mixing cornstarch and water into a simulacrum of pudding "to try to silence the hunger of my children" so they "can somehow be full. But this is not a real food." People were afraid to approach aid trucks, she said, because Israeli soldiers shot at them. She said plainly that she, her neighbors and her children were all starving, and that "whoever is still alive here is alive by accident." "It is true, it is very, very true," she said, that "children are dying." Children are dying. I was desperate to ask her — which children, do you know the families, what did you see, is it just something you heard? But she wasn't online anymore. I never got through to her again.
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Thursday, February 29, 2024
Will starvation come for Gaza’s children?
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