About Gaza: Between Its Hunger and Starvation

Author: علي حبيب الله

Those who have managed to taste bread in Gaza savor their fathers' blood in every bite, while the elders mix water with salt to silence their stomachs from the pangs of hunger. Gazans literally drink their sea on an empty stomach, in a world that appears devoid of its humanity more than we could imagine, and a nation stripped of its stance to stand in the queue of neutral prayer.

Gaza has faced starvation multiple times throughout its history. During World War I, its inhabitants suffered hunger like the rest of the population in the Levant at that time. Miriam Pez Bou Sa'ad wrote in her diary "The Famine of Lebanon: Witnesses and Martyrs" about the starvation imposed by the Turks on the inhabitants of Mount Lebanon, to the extent that some of them resorted to eating the flesh of their deceased relatives. Meanwhile, Al-Tabbagh wrote in his book "Ithaf Al-Aziza in the History of Gaza" lamenting his city Gaza after the Ottoman Turks turned it into an advanced line of defense against the Allied forces, as war ravaged everything in its path, turning soup into food for the hungry...

Some residents in the city and surrounding countryside consumed prickly pear pads that surrounded their homes and lined the roads, which caused swelling in their empty stomachs, leading to the death of some with their bodies bloated on the roads. Then in late 1915, locusts came and destroyed all that had survived the war from crops and vegetables. At that time, the people of Gaza had somewhere to flee to, as their city turned into ruins due to the war; they sought refuge in the mountains, the interior cities of Palestine, and some ended up in Syria and Beirut.

During the Nakba in 1948, Zionists starved Gaza after hundreds of thousands of displaced persons - refugees from Jaffa - flowed into it, with about 220,000 refugees settling in a city whose population was around 80,000. Gaza was severed from its countryside and outskirts, which were its sources of food, threatening it with real starvation but for the sea, which, according to Jamal Zakout in his memoirs "Ghazi: The Narrative of Healing and Hope", turned into a food basket for Gazans, as it has not been so generous today. Gaza, which had transformed into a strip since the early fifties, forgave the sea every time one of its children drowned, remembering its kindness when the stomachs of the Nakba's refugees were empty.

The stomachs of Gazans throughout their modern history distinguish between hunger and starvation; hunger is a condition, while starvation is an event. The event of the starvation of Gazans began with the genocidal war against them on October 8, 2023, which has become one of the most deadly weapons in the war against them and their children, especially taking into account the siege imposed on the strip and its people since 2007. This siege limited their caloric intake, reshaping the bodies of Gazans, their cooking systems, and the types of meals, as most Gazans now have two meals a day instead of the three they used to have before the siege.

Since early March of this year, the occupation has intensified its policies related to obstructing the passage of relief convoys to Gaza, even banning them in some areas within it. Consequently, food distribution points and humanitarian aid centers have turned into death traps, either due to the stampede around them or direct targeting by the occupation army's bullets. In recent months, Gazans have risked their lives when leaving their tents for aid distribution points and centers. Gazan fathers have preferred to die from bullet wounds at food distribution points rather than watch their children starve to death in their tents. The Gazan no longer defends his life against hunger, but rather defends the very nature of his death as he faces hunger—through stampedes, bombardments, or gunfire.

What were once considered agricultural areas in Gaza have gradually come under the control of the occupation forces since the beginning of the war, and the occupation army has destroyed all livestock farms in the strip. Additionally, naval warships of the occupation army have taken on the task of destroying the fishing boats of Gazans at sea, killing many fishermen and arresting some under a starvation policy that intentionally prevents the sea from nourishing the stomachs of the strip's children.

The global "humanitarian" organizations and institutions are not the only ones complicit in the starvation of Gazans; the European Union provides a dirty cover for the occupation under the guise of what are called "food entry agreements" designed by Netanyahu's government as a weapon in its war on the strip to break it through starvation. Monopoly merchants, store owners, and loan sharks in the strip have also conspired for nearly two decades to establish what is known as the blockade economy, and amidst the ongoing war of extermination and starvation for over twenty months, they contribute to the economy of hunger. Woe to the neighbors, such that a country like Egypt, with its heavy history and people, tolerates the slaughter of Gazans by bombardment and then by starvation, while Gaza is an Egyptian extension, and its people are half-Egyptian. Meanwhile, an entire Arab and Islamic nation literally watches the starvation of the last bastion defending its dignity in modern history.

Dozens of children have lost their lives to starvation in Gaza until now, with the number of food scarcity martyrs reaching hundreds, nearly 630. Hunger does not humiliate the dignity of the starved; instead, it redefines their dignity as well if they survive, in terms of detaching themselves from all previous relationships, systems, and concepts associated with their hunger. The community does not return to being a community on its land, nor does it remain a sanctuary for fighters defending it, as long as two million people must revolve around their flesh in search of a loaf of bread.

Standing in the face of starvation, and then replacing action to prevent it with a cold analytical reading in the news and on social media portraying it as a tool of the occupation government and its partners in the war to pressure Hamas during negotiations for a potential deal soon, is the worst of the ongoing horrors of hunger, if not a partnership in it, and a heinous act against the stomachs of Gaza's children. In essence, no ceasefire or truce in Gaza will end its starvation, as the starvation policy has been in place since before the war, and transformed into a weapon during it, and halting its fire in the future may not necessarily mean ending its hunger, as long as it is an extermination war.

The escalation of starvation policies in this brutal manner of extermination extends beyond simply being a pressure tool for immediate negotiations for a ceasefire or an end to the war, to a more brutal step in the theorization of war and delineation of extermination, which pushes to reinforce the viability of migration as a form of dispossession in the eyes of Gaza's people and their stomachs alike.