“I’m hungry,” a message comes through from a staffer working for my charity, the International Network for Aid, Relief, and Assistance (INARA).
“I swear to you, I can barely stand or make it through the day.”
Hunger pounds the brain, louder than the Israeli drones overhead. Weakened bodies stumble through the streets with empty pots looking for a community kitchen that—at best—is doling out a broth, faces contorted in agony in a crush of bodies. Babies born relatively healthy with pinchable cheeks are wasting away, their mothers’ bodies too weak and malnourished to provide breast milk, and hospitals lack the appropriate replacement formula.
My INARA team recently sent me videos from Gaza of a distribution of fresh vegetables. This is not aid that managed to get in, but local produce from the few greenhouses that are still accessible. The prices are astronomical. The parcels, each with six kilograms (roughly thirteen pounds) of fresh vegetables, cost around $120.
I’m struck by how the little children are grinning as if it were Halloween and they are just about to dive into a major candy haul. Only it’s not a chocolate bar they pull out, it’s a cucumber. And there is nothing imagined about the horror scenes or the skeletal figures around them; it’s all real.
“Thank you, thank you, my daughter, we’re hungry all the time, all day. I didn’t eat at all yesterday,” an elderly woman says to Yousra, INARA’s Gaza program coordinator.
