‘My sister is forced to feed her children grass in Gaza’

In a deeply personal piece, Ahmed Najar tells how his family digs through the rubble of their home for cans of beans, as a 'manmade starvation' persists and governments do nothing

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I spoke to my 75-year-old mother in Gaza just days ago. Her voice trembled - not just from fear this time, but from the sheer weight of hunger. She told me that my brother and nephew had returned to Jabalia, where our family home once stood before it was reduced to rubble by Israeli bombs. They had remembered that there were three cans of beans somewhere beneath the wreckage - left behind in the chaos of displacement. So they made a decision: to go back.

From nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, under the scorching July sun, they dug. With bare hands. In an area still designated by the Israeli military as a “combat zone”. They knew they could be shot. They knew the air could be torn apart at any moment by a drone strike. But they had no choice. They were starving.

And this is what it has come to: Palestinians risking death to dig through the ruins of their own homes, not to bury the dead, but to unearth a few cans of beans. My sister, meanwhile, spent hours searching for something — anything - to feed her four children, who are aged from 10 and 16. She came back empty-handed, except for some grass. That’s what she gave them that day. There was nothing else.

What is happening in Gaza is not famine. This is not some cruel twist of nature. It is not the result of drought or the climate crisis, or a supply chain breakdown. This is manmade starvation. Deliberate. Calculated. Imposed.

The head of Gaza’s largest hospital said 21 children have died due to malnutrition and starvation in the Palestinian territory in the past three days. Twenty-one human beings reduced to statistics. Humanitarian agencies warn that a quarter of a million people in Gaza are now at starvation-risk thresholds, and without immediate assistance, the situation is expected to worsen sharply.