Today we’re sharing with you the third episode of Nour’s diary, our psychologist living in Gaza.
Thank you, Nour.
We are not forgetting Gaza. ❤
Aurélie Godet, press officer
“No one dies of hunger”; an old saying we used to repeat with calm certainty. Gaza, with its generous land and abundant meals, has always been a place of giving. But it wasn’t Gaza that failed; it was that saying that lied to us. This war showed us: hunger kills here now.
I wish I were telling you something else, I wish I could share stories of life, of beauty, but perhaps you already know; or perhaps the world has chosen not to know; that for many months, famine has been besieging us like the bombs. After months of complete siege and systematic starvation, bread, flour, and medicine became weak threads of survival we clung to. But the cruel twist is that those threads themselves have been turned into weapons. Aid is no longer just aid; it’s humiliation, a tool of control. Bread is no longer just something to fill an empty stomach; it has become part of the battlefield. Beneath the open skies, while bombs crush children, people are forced to risk their lives, sent to dangerous distribution points, chasing what could be their last meal.
In Gaza, in the 21st century, after 19 months of war, people are starving to death. The scenes are endless: children wasting away, the elderly breathing their last without medicine, crowds pushing behind trucks, parents breaking under the weight of helplessness. The numbers confirm what our eyes see every day: The entire 2.1 million population of Gaza is facing prolonged food shortages, with nearly half a million people in a catastrophic situation of hunger, acute malnutrition, starvation, illness and death. But numbers don’t capture the sound of a child crying because hunger makes their belly hurt, or the scream of a parent who cannot find a single piece of bread. And here we are, nearly 80 years after the United Nations made ending hunger one of its defining global goals in the mid-20th century. What does it say about the world that, eight decades later, entire populations are still starving? There should be nothing but shame.
Instead of opening the crossings or stopping the war, humanitarian aid in Gaza has been twisted from a gesture of solidarity into a means of political control. Its distribution has been outsourced to private security firms. Aid has been turned into armed checkpoints, where soldiers with guns decide who eats, who starves and who dies. Even now, with Gaza’s people pushed to the edge of famine, we refuse to swallow humiliation with our bread. We won’t accept life as a favor from those who have spent years trying to break us. The solution is clear: unrestricted aid, open crossings, dignity intact.
We are thrown leftover food
What’s happening here feels like those brutal survival films; The Hunger Games, Squid Game; but this is not a movie. This is Gaza, and here; we are forced into a deadly survival game; not for money or fame, but for flour, for bread for our children. Simple rules: walk for kilometers under bombing, wait in line under the threat of snipers, freeze when the bullets start. Each step could lead to food or to death. Is there anyone left to stop this madness or is the world just waiting for the next season of our suffering?
One of my relatives told me, with shaking voice: “My siblings’ cries broke me. My mother’s helplessness killed me. I had no food to give them. I walked three kilometers, said goodbye to my family; not knowing if I would return. When I got there, bullets started flying, people were screaming, bodies on the ground. I crawled away; I don’t know how I’m still alive.” Another friend, who managed to return with a small food parcel, said: “It was soaked in blood. That food came with humiliation and fear. I felt my dignity shatter twice; once by hunger, and again when I realized I had become part of their show of control.”
How can this be called humanitarian aid? Poisoned aid; given only after the wound has been inflicted; like medicine offered to the dying far too late. Gaza is starved by design, then tosses scraps of food as if enacting a warped show of humanity. Militarizing aid isn’t new in war, but here it’s taken to an obscene level. This isn’t relief; it’s exploitation of our hunger. The message is clear: You’ll only eat if you surrender. Your children will only survive if you bow to the hand that starved you. But tell me; why are people shot just for trying to reach food? Deep down, as Gazans, we all know the answer but maybe the world prefers not to ask.
Slow, ongoing pain
Every day, I see the devastating effects of hunger and fear on Gaza’s children. At the Médecins du Monde clinics in northern and southern Gaza, thousands of parents queue for hours; not for full meals, but for food supplements to ease the pain of malnutrition in their children. Just last month, we examined over 5,000 children, in addition to 1,400 cases of pregnant and breastfeeding women. The impact goes far beyond physical weakness; you see it in the hollow eyes, pale faces, and fragile bodies of children too exhausted even to cry.
Growing up here means living with constant fear instead of laughter, with grief replacing childhood play. Sadness has become the language these children speak daily. They are not only dying from bombs, but slowly from hunger, lack of milk, and bodies too weak to fight off even common illnesses.
By April 2025, at least 65,000 children were diagnosed with acute malnutrition, and at least 58 children have officially died from starvation. But we know there are more we never reach. So many little lives ended in silence; lost not in explosions, but in empty stomachs and unanswered cries, they simply fade away, unseen, unfed, unheard.
For months, we tried to prepare. We rationed what we had, we ate less, we pretended to be full so the children could have more. But nothing prepared us for this slow, ongoing pain, not just of bodies, but of spirit. Hunger here isn’t just emptiness in the stomach; it’s a daily struggle to protect our dignity.
We are not just starving for food; we are starving for air, for safety, for dignity.
People here don’t just die from hunger; they die waiting for help that never comes, die standing in line with empty hands and breaking hearts. We have tasted every kind of death; under the rubble, under the siege, under the hunger, and under the silence of the world. The world may be watching a show. But for us, this is life or death.