Starvation as a Weapon, Silence as a Shield

As children wither and hostages decay, the world debates language while bodies collapse.

Let’s not dance around it. Gaza is being starved to death. Not by weather. Not by God. Not by circumstance. But by design.

Israel controls every calorie that enters the Gaza Strip. Every grain of rice, every tin of chickpeas, every bag of powdered baby formula must cross an Israeli checkpoint or rot in the sun. Humanitarian trucks are held at chokepoints for days, sometimes weeks, while children like Mohammad Al-Motawaq waste away — not because they’re cursed, not because they’re collateral, but because some man with a clipboard in a Tel Aviv office decided it wasn’t the right time to let them eat. The system is surgical in its cruelty. It’s not that the aid is lost. It’s not that the aid is missing. It’s that the aid is stopped — on purpose — while toddlers gasp for one more hour of life inside a tarp-lined tent.

Let’s not pretend that Hamas is hoarding flour in a magical pantry under the sea. You cannot hoard what you are not allowed to receive. And there is no hoarding when trucks are still stuck at the border, turned around or delayed while Gaza’s hospitals fill up with skeletons that used to be children. Israel has shut the gates. Israel has bombed the bakeries. Israel has destroyed the food warehouses. And when the world asks why there’s a famine, Netanyahu shrugs and says it’s all just a media campaign. A trick of the light. A Palestinian performance piece in hunger and grief.

And yet — yes — it is also true that Israeli hostages like Evyatar David are being kept in tunnels, starved, emaciated, brutalized. That’s not a rumor. That’s not propaganda. That’s a video — a man so thin his own father didn’t recognize him, a man digging his own grave while someone behind the camera feasts on his despair. And those hostages should be released. Every last one. No freedom movement, no liberation struggle, no resistance worth a damn needs to torture captives or force them to eat from cans like dogs. There is no excuse for it. Just as there is no excuse for starving babies.

But the grotesque symmetry of it all should haunt us: an 18-month-old child is starving slowly under a tent flap. Beneath the ground, a 24-year-old hostage is starving in a tunnel lined with concrete and hate. Both are wasting away. Both are victims of men who claim to be defending something. Both are dying while their captors issue statements about principles and policies.

Let’s drop the theater. Israel isn’t feeding Gaza. And Hamas isn’t freeing hostages. And if this is what “security” looks like — if this is the price of safety, of strategy, of survival — then we have built our moral architecture on corpses.

The blockade is not abstract. It is a noose. And the tightening continues.
The hostages are not symbols. They are human beings, starving in the dark.

And the children of Gaza are not enemies. They are babies with bones instead of limbs.

Let’s stop lying to ourselves. This is not a war. It’s a hunger game with no winners.

Only victims with sunken cheeks and mothers who no longer know how to scream.

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