As Famine Sets In, Even The Flour In Gaza Has Disappeared

My father feels dizzy every single day. I lost four kilograms in just one week. People are collapsing in the streets.

By Dalia Abu Ramadan, Truthout

All we have left is water — and even clean drinking water is becoming nearly impossible to find. Sometimes I wonder: What if they cut that off too? Will I survive just three days? It seems that my death won’t come from an Israeli missile or a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s bullet — it will come from hunger. Slow. Silent. Cruel. And I ask myself: How can a world so devoid of humanity watch such an inhuman war — where children die from starvation — and still do nothing? And when aid finally arrives, it carries not bread, but bullets — like the so-called U.S.-Israeli aid, that feeds war, not life!

On the morning of July 21, my uncle called my mother, his voice trembling. His 22-year-old daughter had just collapsed to the floor. He rushed to her in panic and tried to wake her for over 30 minutes to no avail. Her body was cold.

He called for an ambulance, but the operator said none were available. The relentless airstrikes and critical shortage of emergency services left my uncle and his daughter on their own. So, he and his son carried her with their bare hands, running to what is still called Al-Shifa Hospital. But it’s not a hospital anymore — just tents, stripped of supplies, medicine, and hope.

The nurses successfully revived her. They attempted to draw blood, but starvation and severe malnutrition made it difficult, as they had severely weakened her body. After several failed attempts, they managed to extract just one drop. Then they measured her blood pressure — and the result was shocking: 44. A foreign medical staff member standing nearby couldn’t believe she was still alive.

He said, stunned, “Thank God she didn’t die.”

In Gaza, staying alive is no longer ordinary.

After the medical tests came out, the doctors told my uncle that the cause was malnutrition — and because his daughter hadn’t eaten breakfast, there were no sugars in her body, nothing to help her move or give her any energy.

For more than a year and a half, we have not eaten like normal human beings. Deprived of meat, vegetables, fruits — anything that could benefit us, we cannot consume! But despite all this, we as a people only asked for flour! We forgot the pleasure of food and what fruit means! And all we asked for was flour to keep us alive.