Stop calling this a food crisis, because a crisis suggests confusion or happenstance, and nothing about what is happening in Gaza is unintentional. People are not running out of food; they are being pushed into starvation so deep that families are forced to eat expired flour crawling with insects, soaked in rodent waste, and covered in mold because there is literally nothing else left. And when hunger reaches this level, the body no longer asks whether food is safe, only whether it exists. What kind of world allows parents to knowingly feed their children food that may poison them just to stop their stomachs from screaming, and then still dares to talk about values, rules, and morality?
Mothers are not preparing meals; they are making impossible decisions that no human being should ever face, deciding whether mold will kill slower than hunger, whether sickness is better than starvation, whether today’s bread will keep their child alive long enough to see tomorrow. When children are hungry for days, when their bodies weaken and their eyes dull, insects in flour stop being shocking, and contamination stops being a warning sign.
There is food in this world, there is aid waiting at borders, there are trucks loaded with flour, grain, and medicine, so why are people in Gaza starving if not by willful denial? Why are supplies blocked, delayed, and inspected into uselessness while children faint from hunger and parents watch their babies turn to bone day after day? If food exists and people are denied access to it, what else can this be called except starvation used as a lever, and why is this still treated as a political debate instead of a moral emergency?
And even now, with children eating flour that smells of rot and moves with insects, the world still asks for more proof, more verification, more dying bodies, more footage, more “credible sources” as if starvation needs permission to be believed.
As if a child must starve on high-definition video before their suffering qualifies as real. As if famine must trend, must go viral, must be certified by the very systems that helped create it. And until then, the world delays, debates language, questions numbers, audits agony while children chew on putrid, crawling flour because starvation offers no choice.
Yumna Zahid Ali
Karachi, Pakistan
