A Truce Hinging on the Breath of Children

Despite the so-called humanitarian truce, Gaza continues to embrace death in heavy silence, as if the truce were nothing but a brief respite between two waves of pain. Children, whom international resolutions were supposed to protect, are being born today without milk, without food and with bodies withering under the siege, while aid trucks stand at the crossings as a new symbol of the world's helplessness. UNICEF's warning about the withholding of over 900,000 containers of infant formula expresses the system's failure and reveals that the occupation is not stopping its war; it is merely changing its tools. Consequently, death does not come only by bombs now, but by the deliberate withholding of food and medicine, and by a policy of starvation that targets life itself. Between the walls of hospitals, emptied of medicine, and the arms of mothers whose milk has run dry, childhood in Gaza remains a witness to a crime committed slowly and with full awareness, in a world that lost its human sensitivity before it lost its voice.

The statistics of the United Nations appear as official testimonies to an unending tragedy. Behind every truck that passes through the crossings, there is a child waiting for a dose of milk, medicine or a vaccine. Talk of over 5,000 trucks entering in a month does not reflect the reality on the ground, because what is prevented far outweighs what is permitted, and what enters does not reach those who need it. The restrictions imposed by the occupation on vital supplies — from birthing kits to solar-powered refrigerators — turn relief work into a race against time in a locked-down land. The presence of teams from UNICEF and the WHO, who are vaccinating thousands of children against easily treatable diseases, has become a secret, while other supplies remain behind closed fences. Consequently, Gaza today faces a digitally managed siege run by a military bureaucracy in which data become a tool to beautify the crime and hope becomes a long wait at gates that do not open.

Humanitarian aid in Gaza has been converted into a tool of political blackmail, wielded from behind walls; the Zionist occupation chooses when to allow food in and when to block it, turning bread into a bargaining chip and milk into a weapon of pressure. Starvation has become one of the approved weapons of war to subjugate and humiliate people by draining life of its basic necessities. This policy, based on strangling health facilities and cutting off energy from water stations, extends from an old doctrine that considers siege a means to control both consciousness and decision-making. While raising slogans of protecting civilians, a cold war is being waged against empty stomachs, where childhood is driven to hunger, just as it was once driven to fear. From the heart of this pain, a collective memory is forming — one that understands the Zionist occupation kills a person twice: once when it bombs them, and once when it deprives them of life.

Gaza today represents the world's mirror, reflecting the contradiction between what is said and what is done, between the laws that are written and the consciences that slumber amid the tragedy. Therefore, the continued withholding of vital supplies, despite international warnings, places the international community before a stark moral test. Silence in the face of starving children is a crime committed in plain sight of the institutions that are supposed to protect them. The figures cited by organizations do not truly express life; the truth resides in the faces of mothers bidding farewell to their children taken by hunger and in the eyes of children waiting for a meal that never arrives. Humanitarian justice is measured by the action capable of saving what remains of childhood's innocence. From beneath the rubble, Gaza rises as a voice reminding the world that law without a conscience saves no lives, that those who remain silent about hunger are complicit in its creation, and that humanity, when it abandons children, loses all meaning.