Choking Gaza: Starvation, Dehydration, and the Politics of Suffering

It feels like watching someone choke a wounded man and calling it diplomacy. The cruelty is staggering — cutting off water to a population already battered by war isn’t strategy, it’s sadism. This isn’t some cold calculation about leverage; it’s a deliberate act of suffering inflicted on civilians who’ve already endured too much. Mothers rationing bread, families drinking seawater, hospitals running on fumes — this is what happens when political brinkmanship turns into collective punishment.

The fact that Israel is playing this game during Ramadan, when fasting families rely on whatever meager supplies they can gather to break their fast, only sharpens the cruelty. Meanwhile, world leaders are wringing their hands and “expressing concern” as if concern hydrates children or bakes bread. The UK’s warning about international law feels like a whispered scolding at a gunfight — symbolic but ultimately toothless unless there’s real pressure to force a change.

This isn’t diplomacy. This is a population being starved and dehydrated in slow motion, with the world watching from the sidelines. And the longer this drags on, the more one worries that Gaza’s suffering will become just another grim headline — a tragedy people get used to, like background noise.

One can’t shake the feeling that this is the point. Starvation isn’t a byproduct of this siege — it’s the goal. No food, no medicine, no fuel, no power — no life. The logic is unmistakable: squeeze Gaza until they scream loud enough for Hamas to fold. Make it so unbearable that parents will turn on militants if that’s what it takes to stop their children from starving.

And if Hamas won’t fold? If those negotiations in Doha fail yet again? Then what? What’s the next move? Israel has already razed much of Gaza to rubble — are they prepared to let what’s left of the population collapse from malnutrition and disease? How many more bodies need to pile up before the world sees this for what it is?

The United Nations has issued warnings, but words aren’t food. Aid agencies are begging for supplies, but they can only do so much when every border is closed and the sky rains bombs. Meanwhile, half a million people have no access to clean water, and families are boiling seawater just to survive. That’s not just desperation — that’s a death sentence.

And yet, life in Gaza keeps limping forward. People gather what little they can to survive. Mothers cook scraps for their children. Volunteers run soup kitchens, feeding hundreds with ingredients meant for a fraction of that. One reads about Noor al-Ghamari, who opened a makeshift beauty salon in the rubble — a small act of defiance that insists life still has value, no matter how hard the world tries to erase it.

One can’t stop thinking about the sheer stubbornness of those moments — the defiance it takes to open a bakery when the gas might run out tomorrow, or to heat seawater because there’s no alternative. That’s what keeps one furious — the knowledge that the people of Gaza are trying so hard to survive, and yet the world keeps finding new ways to grind them down.

It’s impossible to read this and feel anything but rage — not just at the cruelty itself, but at the silence that follows. There’s no way to make sense of this without acknowledging that Gaza’s suffering is, to many, politically convenient. That’s the ugliest part — the idea that this slow death isn’t a crisis to be solved, but leverage to be exploited.

One doesn’t know what will come from the Doha talks. Maybe there’s still room for a deal — some shaky compromise that spares Gaza from the worst of what’s coming. But one does know this: if the world lets Israel choke Gaza dry, if the collective punishment of an entire population is accepted as a bargaining tactic, then humanity has crossed a line it can’t come back from.

Because no matter what one calls it — diplomacy, strategy, pressure — this isn’t war. It’s genocide.

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