There is something worse than starvation in Gaza | Israel-Palestine conflict

I woke up one morning in July to a flurry of messages lighting up my phone. Every news channel, every social media post, every conversation buzzed with cautious optimism. “Negotiations progressing well”, the headlines declared. “Truce imminent”, “Massive aid convoy preparing to enter”.

At that moment, we were deep in the throes of famine; some days, we ate nothing at all. You can imagine the cautious joy that flickered in our hearts, the way hope travelled through our messages. Friends wrote to me, their words trembling with tentative relief. “Could this really be the end?” one asked. “Will we remember what safety feels like? Will there finally be bread?”

We dared to dream. We imagined the silence of ceasefire, the taste of warm bread, the comfort of a full meal. Some shops tentatively reopened. Prices dipped slightly. For the first time in months, bread seemed almost within reach. For a fleeting moment, life seemed to return to the streets.

In Gaza, even the most battered communities breathe differently when hope appears – even if it is for a few hours.

My neighbour – a war widow raising seven children alone, including an infant who cries endlessly from hunger – told me how her children weep from empty stomachs while she cries from helplessness. When the truce rumours spread, she dreamed of feeding them properly, of ending their suffering. Like all of us, she watched that hope disintegrate.

By the next morning, everything had collapsed. A new headline, cold and final, sealed our fate: “Negotiations fail. No truce.”

Shops that had barely reopened were shuttered. Flour vanished once again. Prices soared beyond reach. Outside Gaza, the media still spoke of aid convoys “on their way”, but on the ground, there was nothing. Empty words. Empty trucks. Empty hands.

You can imagine how hearts broke that day. How the spirit of a people dreaming simply of bread was crushed. How mothers searching desperately for food for their children felt.

The fragile hope that had lit our eyes vanished, leaving only hunger, fear, and silence.

This was not the first time it happened. It had happened many times before. And it happened again afterwards.

Just last week, we found ourselves waiting, this time for a single word from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after Hamas reportedly accepted a ceasefire proposal. The uncertainty was unbearable. After several days of silence, the Israeli government made impossible demands, effectively killing the latest attempt at negotiations. The news plunged us back into yet another cycle of despair as hunger, displacement, loss and grief take their toll.

I believe these repeated bouts of ceasefire headlines are not unintentional — they are another form of punishment for the people of Gaza. Another form of torture. We are bombed, starved, displaced and then the news finishes us off.

Hope is dangled in front of us, only to be ripped away, leaving us weaker each time.

It is a deliberate, systematic policy aimed to wear off a defenceless population. It is designed to break our spirit, to make us live in constant uncertainty, to strip us of the basic human right to hope for tomorrow. This cycle – hope raised then shattered – leaves deeper scars than starvation.

While we wait for the news, the hunger tightens its grip. Walk outside and you see it etched on faces: men wiping tears, women collapsing in the streets from exhaustion, children too weak to play. Hunger is not just a physical state – it is an unbearable weight that crushes the soul.

Mothers stop planning meals because they cannot promise they can put something on the table. Children learn early that good news often sours by morning. Families sell their last possessions when aid is announced, only to be left with nothing when it fails to arrive.

This repeated devastation breeds more than mistrust of governments and the media; it erodes the very concept of hope. Many here no longer ask, “When will this end?” but “How much worse can it get?”

According to the World Food Programme, 100 percent of people in Gaza now suffer acute levels of food insecurity, with all children aged below five years facing acute malnutrition. Famine has been officially announced.

Israel continues to claim that its blockade measures prevent supplies from reaching Hamas, even though the US government – its biggest ally – and Israeli officials themselves say there is no evidence of resistance fighters looting aid.

Amnesty International calls the Israeli siege of Gaza “collective punishment” and “a war crime”. The Geneva Conventions explicitly prohibit collective punishment and forced starvation.

And so, I cannot help but ask: Where is the world in all of this? How can an entire planet watch two million people be starved, bombed, and stripped of dignity, and still do nothing?

This silence is heavy; it crushes the spirit as much as hunger does. It tells us that our suffering is acceptable, that our lives can fade away without consequence.

History will condemn those who committed these crimes, but also those who stood by and allowed them to happen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.