‘My sister is forced to feed her children grass in Gaza, while in London my son spits out his peas.'

Independent

23-07-2025

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 man-made 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.
We are watching a slow, deliberate process of extermination, carried out not only with bombs but with hunger, with deprivation, with the systematic destruction of everything that makes survival possible. The UN has warned that Gaza is on the brink of full-scale famine. But famine is not just looming – it is here.
I write this from London where I have lived for 22 years. I work in finance and have a comfortable home in Islington where I am sitting at a table. I walk to the kitchen and open a fridge that hums with abundance. I boil water for tea. I walk past shops and markets with shelves overflowing. And I feel sick. Sick with guilt. Sick with helplessness. I eat and choke on the shame of it.
I sleep and wake feeling like I've abandoned my own blood. My brother is digging through the rubble of our bombed home for canned food, while I feel the softness of my mattress beneath me. My sister feeds her children grass, while my 10-month-old son in London spits out peas because he's decided he doesn't like them.
There is no moral universe in which what is happening in Gaza can be justified.
On Monday, David Lammy and his counterparts from 24 other nations, including France, Canada and Australia, urged Israel to lift restrictions on the flow of aid into Gaza. In a joint statement shared on Monday afternoon, the politicians said: 'The suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths. The Israeli government's aid delivery model is dangerous, fuels instability, and deprives Gazans of human dignity.'
The nations condemned the current aid delivery model, backed by the Israeli and American governments, which has reportedly resulted in IDF troops firing on Palestinian civilians in search of food on multiple occasions. Asked for his personal reaction to the scenes in Gaza, the foreign secretary told BBC Breakfast: 'I feel the same as the British public: appalled, sickened. I described what I saw yesterday in parliament as grotesque.'
And yet, my government – the British government – continues to sell weapons to Israel. It provides diplomatic cover at the UN. It repeats the tired lines about Israel's 'right to defend itself' while my family and thousands like them are being starved to death.
This isn't passive complicity. To me, this is active participation.
Starvation is being used as a weapon of war – and Britain is helping to fund the siege. Our politicians speak of peace and stability while backing a regime that bombs bakeries, shoots at aid convoys, and turns food into a battlefield. They speak of 'balance' while Gaza wastes away. What kind of balance exists when one side controls the skies, the borders, the water, the electricity, the food, the very air?
Only days ago, there were reports of Israeli forces opening fire on a crowd of starving Palestinians waiting for flour. At least 93 people were killed. Shot while trying to eat. Some died with empty sacks still clutched in their hands. What crime had they committed? Hunger?
Every day in Gaza, survival is a form of resistance. Every bite is a battle. Every day my family remains alive is an act of defiance against a world that has accepted their death as inevitable.
After the 25-truck convoy carrying vital food assistance came under fire from Israeli tanks, snipers and other gunfire shortly after passing the final checkpoint, the World Food Programme said: 'Gaza's hunger crisis has reached new levels of desperation. People are dying from lack of humanitarian assistance. Malnutrition is surging with 90,000 women and children in urgent need of treatment. Nearly one person in three is not eating for days.'
I cannot describe the torment of knowing my loved ones – my mother, my father, my sisters, brother, nieces and nephews are starving – while the world watches and does nothing. Knowing that the country you now live in, pay taxes to, and try to call home is directly involved in their suffering. The guilt doesn't go away. It shouldn't.
Because we are enabling what is happening. With silence. With money. With political cowardice.
The children of Gaza are not starving because the world can't help. They are starving because the world has chosen not to. Because their lives have been deemed expendable. Because Palestinians are not seen as fully human. And because many in the West still believe that Israeli power must be protected at all costs, no matter how many innocents it crushes.
I write because I have no other weapon. I write because my voice is the only thing left to send across the border. I write because if I don't, then the silence wins.
But I also write to ask: what will you do?
One day, this will end. One day, the dust will settle. The graves will be counted. And Gaza will ask: Where were you? What did you do while we starved?
And I will ask too.
Because my family is starving. My people are starving. And the world is watching.
And if you look away, you are part of it too.