Those born over 55 years ago, who lived in shacks, stalls, and makeshift structures in slums, may still remember the feeling of waiting in line for food.
It’s a sensation experienced as shame, indignity, and degradation. Reaching out for a bag of food, for a few cans, for a loaf of bread because you have no other choice to feed yourself, to feed your family.
Even if until a few weeks ago, a few months ago, you had a home like all other homes, with a warm bed, food, and happy moments. Even if you had a garden capable of sustaining you in times of poverty.
How much more shame, anger, and sadness can one feel when hearing their children say “I’m hungry” for days, seeing their pale faces and bones protruding from their bodies, when seeing their parents not complaining, but unable to walk due to the weakness caused by lack of food, when seeing them fall ill.
It’s not just reaching out, it’s risking one’s life for a bit of food.
The Israeli people have experienced this feeling in its most extreme form.
Evidence is provided by black and white photographs of another era with people who are nothing but moving skeletons, photos with dead bodies piled on top of each other forming a hill of bones because nothing else was left when they died of hunger.
Those who experienced all this cannot fail to understand the tragedy of a person who, unable to swim, dives into the sea to retrieve a packet of food that has fallen there.
It’s not recklessness. It’s despair.
Just like desperation is chasing the shadow of a plane to be the first to reach the point where the packet will drop, only to have it fall on you and kill you.
And it is a sign of desperation to turn into a mob, like a herd of animals rushing towards the minimal food found.
Hunger can kill a person.
It doesn’t just annihilate them. And the Israelis, in the genocide they are committing, have also included the lack of access to food.
They are not hunting down Hamas terrorists. They are leading a people to death.
A torturous death, washing their hands of it, because people are dying due to their own responsibility trying to secure food.
Palestinians are not trampled outside a supermarket to take advantage of offers.
They are killed chasing food packets. Such a shame for humanity.
