Babies are dying with their mouths open, heads tilted back in search of milk that no longer exists. Their ribs pierce their skin. Their eyes glaze over. The muscles no longer twitch because the body has nothing left to burn. They are being starved like "pests". Like "vermin".
Like warnings to the rest of us.
No wheat. No rice. No formula. No water. Just dirt and dust and rats and flies and flesh loosening from bone.
No wheat. No rice. No formula. No water. Just dirt and dust and rats and flies and flesh loosening from bone.
In Gaza, a father eats grass while his daughter chews the collar of her shirt to keep from screaming. The screams do nothing. There are no more hospital beds. No doctors left with supplies. No morphine. The child will scream until she doesn’t.
That silence isn’t peace. It’s death.
This isn’t famine. It’s policy.
This isn’t chaos. It’s strategy.
This isn’t war. It’s extermination.
Starvation is not a byproduct: it is the tool. Every calorie denied is accounted for. Every aid truck turned away is measured. Every Palestinian child buried in a shallow grave is part of a quiet arithmetic scribbled down in air-conditioned war rooms where no one bleeds, no one smells the decay, and no one ever has to carry their brother’s jaw in a plastic bag.
They are not dying.
They are being killed.
Killed by embargo. Killed by blockade. Killed by bureaucrats and bombs and white-collar sadists who wear suits while drafting death like it's legislation. And it is. That’s exactly what it is.
And none of this began in 2023. It began long before: codified, documented, and bragged about.
In 2006, Israel’s National Security Council devised a calorie-counting regime to limit Gaza’s food intake without triggering formal famine. It was called a “starvation diet,” and it was not metaphorical. Dov Weisglass, a senior advisor to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, announced it plainly. Israeli officials calculated, to the decimal, the absolute bare minimum of calories each person in Gaza could survive on (adjusted for age and gender) and blocked everything else. The consequences were catastrophic.
This is not a new emergency. It is the continuation of a genocidal rubric long enacted.
By 2012, the United Nations had already declared Gaza unlivable by 2020. That declaration was not based on politics, but on water, air, and waste. By that year, over 95% of Gaza's water was already unfit for human consumption.
Tap water caused kidney disease. Infant diarrhea. Lifelong neurological damage. Children grew up drinking poison. And even then, the world shrugged.
By 2019, before this latest massacre, almost 1 in 3 Gazan children were already stunted from chronic malnutrition. Their growth impaired. Their brains underdeveloped. Their bodies aged before their time. Decades of blockade had already robbed them of futures long before the bombs began falling again.
This was not a sudden collapse. It was a long, slow crushing.
And the West — the precious, righteous West — claps from the balcony. Sometimes it cries crocodile tears on television. Sometimes it gives press conferences in which it regrets the situation. But never enough to stop the money. Never enough to stop the weapons. Never enough to say: not in our name.
Because it is in their name. In their weapons. In their dollars. In their silence.
Aid is delayed until it rots. Flour is banned because it might help a child live. Bodies are stacked like garbage beside hospitals that no longer have power to keep the dead cold. Cats eat the flesh of the unburied. Limbs stick out from the earth like broken antennae, reaching for help that never came.
Israel tells them: leave.
And then flattens the place they flee to.
Then tells them to leave again.
And bombs the next camp.
And the next.
And what does the world do?
Hosts concerts. Funds summits. Takes selfies. Drinks. Laughs. Shops. Scrolls.
Western cities move like nothing is happening. Wine is poured. Dogs are walked. Banks are open. Pilates classes continue. CEOs tweet about innovation while the arms they profit from tear the organs from toddlers in Rafah.
It’s not ignorance. It’s indifference.
Because everyone knows.
Everyone has seen the photos.
The child whose body was split down the middle. The rows of corpses labeled only by age. The newborns laid on the metal floor of an incubator-less hospital. The girl with no legs who whispered her name until the breath left her.
These are not numbers. These are children. And they are dying with our permission.
The journalists are banned. The phones go black. The internet is cut. Not because of war. Because of control. Because genocide works best in silence. Because if people saw what was happening—really saw—they might vomit. They might riot. They might be forced to become human again.
The governments know this. That’s why they erase. That’s why they rewrite. That’s why they call this “security.” That’s why they bomb the camera before they bomb the shelter.
And the Arab regimes? Cowards. Thieves in silk. They sell Palestinian blood for arms deals and photo ops. They flood hotel lobbies while their neighbors are buried alive. They call for calm while children claw at the dirt with their bare hands, searching for mothers crushed under concrete.
There is no forgiveness for that. No explanation. No brotherhood in betrayal.
There is no way to wash this off. No vocabulary precise enough to sanitize what has been done. There is no justification. There is only the smell of rot, the heat of burning flesh, and the sound of shovels digging mass graves that should never have existed.
There will be no redemption in retrospect. No peace in pretending we didn’t know. What’s being done to Gaza is not waiting for history to judge it; it is demanding that the living answer for it now.
By 2019, before this latest massacre, almost 1 in 3 Gazan children were already stunted from chronic malnutrition. Their growth impaired. Their brains underdeveloped. Their bodies aged before their time. Decades of blockade had already robbed them of futures long before the bombs began falling again.
This was not a sudden collapse. It was a long, slow crushing.
And the West — the precious, righteous West — claps from the balcony. Sometimes it cries crocodile tears on television. Sometimes it gives press conferences in which it regrets the situation. But never enough to stop the money. Never enough to stop the weapons. Never enough to say: not in our name.
Because it is in their name. In their weapons. In their dollars. In their silence.
Aid is delayed until it rots. Flour is banned because it might help a child live. Bodies are stacked like garbage beside hospitals that no longer have power to keep the dead cold. Cats eat the flesh of the unburied. Limbs stick out from the earth like broken antennae, reaching for help that never came.
Israel tells them: leave.
And then flattens the place they flee to.
Then tells them to leave again.
And bombs the next camp.
And the next.
And what does the world do?
Hosts concerts. Funds summits. Takes selfies. Drinks. Laughs. Shops. Scrolls.
Western cities move like nothing is happening. Wine is poured. Dogs are walked. Banks are open. Pilates classes continue. CEOs tweet about innovation while the arms they profit from tear the organs from toddlers in Rafah.
It’s not ignorance. It’s indifference.
Because everyone knows.
Everyone has seen the photos.
The child whose body was split down the middle. The rows of corpses labeled only by age. The newborns laid on the metal floor of an incubator-less hospital. The girl with no legs who whispered her name until the breath left her.
These are not numbers. These are children. And they are dying with our permission.
The journalists are banned. The phones go black. The internet is cut. Not because of war. Because of control. Because genocide works best in silence. Because if people saw what was happening—really saw—they might vomit. They might riot. They might be forced to become human again.
The governments know this. That’s why they erase. That’s why they rewrite. That’s why they call this “security.” That’s why they bomb the camera before they bomb the shelter.
And the Arab regimes? Cowards. Thieves in silk. They sell Palestinian blood for arms deals and photo ops. They flood hotel lobbies while their neighbors are buried alive. They call for calm while children claw at the dirt with their bare hands, searching for mothers crushed under concrete.
There is no forgiveness for that. No explanation. No brotherhood in betrayal.
There is no way to wash this off. No vocabulary precise enough to sanitize what has been done. There is no justification. There is only the smell of rot, the heat of burning flesh, and the sound of shovels digging mass graves that should never have existed.
There will be no redemption in retrospect. No peace in pretending we didn’t know. What’s being done to Gaza is not waiting for history to judge it; it is demanding that the living answer for it now.
Every bloated corpse, every starving child, every mass grave dug with American weapons and Western silence belongs to us. Not to our future. To us. To the people who watched and reasoned. To the people who normalized. To the people who kept talking about context while children chewed their own fingers to numb the hunger.
There will be no refuge in the archives, no mercy in memory, no cleansing in time.
What has been done is already unforgivable.
And the only question left is whether we will remain the kind of people who live with it.