Cheer up, people of Gaza! You’ll get killed on a full stomach

I was always told as a child that breakfast is the most important meal. It gives you the energy to keep going the whole day. And so, in my family, we would regularly eat a scrumptious breakfast.

That was in the past, of course. For weeks now, we have had hardly anything to eat. I myself have been dreaming of having a slice of cheese and a warm loaf of bread dipped in thyme and oil.

Instead, I start yet another day of genocide with a cup of tea and a tasteless, nearly expired “not-for-sale WFP fortified biscuit”, which I bought for $1.50.

I have been following the news recently and have started to feel that my wish for something other than a World Food Programme (WFP) biscuit may soon be fulfilled.

Apparently, the United States has grown tired of hearing Palestinians in Gaza say they are starving. So now, it has decided to end the hunger, or at least the annoying complaints about it.

And so, with unshakeable confidence and pride in its own ingenuity, the US government has announced a new mechanism for delivering food to Gaza. The “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”, an extraordinary name now added to our genocide vocabulary of NGOs and charities, is supposedly set to restart food distribution by the end of May and hand out “300 million meals”. Israel, for its part, has volunteered to secure the “humanitarian” process, while maintaining its killing activities.

While this new feeding “mechanism” is being set up, the Israeli government, “under US pressure”, announced that it will let in “a basic quantity of food” in order to prevent “the development of a hunger crisis”, international media reported. The resumption will reportedly last only a week.

Here in Gaza, where the hunger crisis is already “well-developed”, we are hardly surprised by these announcements. We are well used to Israel – with foreign backing – turning on and off the “food button” as it pleases.

For years, we have been kept in a 365-square-kilometre prison, where our Israeli jailers control our food, rationing it so that we can never go too far beyond the level of survival. Long before this genocide, they openly declared to the world that they were keeping us on a diet, our calories carefully counted to ensure we did not die but just suffer. This was not a fleeting penalty; it was an official government policy.