From Gaza, Um Fadi writes to me at night. Throughout the winter, even during the most difficult moments, her tone has been calm, never desperate. They were out of diapers, and without clean water, she couldn't wash Lana, who developed sores on her newborn skin and suffered from bad infections. In just a few months, the mother and her daughters have been displaced ten times; last night was the eleventh.
I met her son and husband in the hospital; Fadi has an unidentified neurological condition, which is believed to be due to a genetic mutation following phosphorus bombs dropped on Gaza while his mother was pregnant. Fadi has never met his little sister; they were in Egypt with their father on October 7 and could not return. Um Fadi and her little ones have been wandering around Gaza for months. Once, she sent me a video of newborn Lana: she was on the double bed, behind her you could see the wardrobe with the mirror and the 1930s style door with the brass handle, the soft light coming from the hallway, a real, tidy, and clean home, a serene place to raise children. Among all, it was the most painful image.
The first time we spoke, this winter, she was living in a makeshift tent made of blankets and plastic. When it rained, mud flowed all around, digging ditches where debris accumulated. Then they had to flee, taking shelter among the ruins of a destroyed house. She sent me videos of the girls sitting among the piles of rubble all around, the dust covering even the sky, and in the distance, the fire and the sound of bombs exploding, night and day with the same insistence. In the background, as in every audio and video that comes from Gaza, the buzzing of drones spying on the population and often firing.
Then the sudden turn. Um Fadi wrote to me a few weeks ago in a state of despair: I am tired, I can't take it anymore, we are hungry, we are scared, please come and get me! That plea, without any real hope of being truly welcomed, felt more like a supplication to God than to me. Nothing of what we are doing together, an army of desperate people who want to save Gaza from our own governments, as well as from Israel, has a positive outcome.
The situation is desperate. I feel it in Um Fadi's messages, it is evident in the messages from everyone writing to us from the Strip. While the previous distribution network led by the United Nations managed about 400 distribution sites throughout the Strip, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, overseen by armed private security contractors, has set up only four "mega-sites", three in the south and one in central Gaza – none in the north, where conditions are harsher. People are thus forced to move in new orchestrated migrations that allow Israel to clear and occupy the lands that become available.
People walk for many kilometers, crossing active combat zones and biometric checkpoints, where snipers shoot without scruple. On the way back, the same road, the same dangers, but with the weight of supplies to bring back to their loved ones along with the burden of the massacre they escaped, the blood spilled on the ground, the bodies of those who did not make it. It resembles the Netflix series inspired by the squid game, popular among children in South Korea, but with a deadly stake in the television version.
The desperate rush to grab the few supplies that are offered, never enough for everyone, while shots are fired from the other side. In one month, about 800 people have died near distribution centers.
All for a box containing 4 kg of flour, a couple of bags of pasta, two cans of fava beans, a pack of tea bags, and some cookies. The alternative is the black market, where prices are unaffordable and drones shoot. A kilogram of sugar costs 120 dollars per kilogram, powdered milk 60, flour 30, salt 15, tomatoes 25, potatoes and onions 35 dollars per kilogram. Eggplants and lentils 30, lemons 70, while coffee is 450 dollars per kilogram. Desalinated water is sold for 100 dollars for 10,000 liters, compared to 15 dollars last year. And a pack of diapers costs 250 dollars.
The few goods offered in a market in Deir el Balah (photo by Khaleel Naji, who also updated the author on current food prices in Gaza)
The fact that the United States has approved 30 million dollars for this controversial aid group in Gaza implies their full co-responsibility in very serious war crimes, including the use of hunger as a method of extermination.
Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University, wrote an essay for theNew York Timesabout nine years ago in which he hypothesized that the world had finally emerged from the danger of large-scale hunger. On the same pages, he now writes: 'I was wrong.' Since 2016, he explains, the decade-long improvement in global nutrition has stalled. Since then, the number of people needing emergency aid has increased by 180%. And hunger – which had almost disappeared globally – has returned to threaten the world.
The problem is political. Hunger has returned to being used as a weapon, which means that humanitarian crises are caused by human actions rather than natural factors. Some political regimes are willing to artificially close all the routes that would allow humanitarian aid to reach emergency areas to provoke crises instead of containing them. This is happening in Gaza.
But world hunger as a weapon of war should not only represent an indelible stain on our conscience; it should frighten us, because besides being a great failure of humanity and its principles, it represents a threat to global security.
Famine causes social collapse, drives millions of people to migrate, and fuels despair and violence. If we think it is a distant problem that does not concern us, we are mistaken: every unhealed regional emergency is destined to metastasize into the rest of this twisted body that is the world, certainly interconnected and destined to live together or die together.
Um Fadi sent me photos of the girls. I have seen them grow over these months, perhaps even age. They are thinner every day, with two long dark lines in the hollows between their nostrils and cheeks, their eyes tired. Last night, while they were fleeing under a sky filled with missiles, she wrote to me: 'I hope we die, all of this is terrifying.' She hasn't responded for hours. May God protect us, those were her last words at dawn. Then, silence. Start writing here...