Bullets failed to end life, but hunger ate away what remained of Arab dignity.

Sohaib Al-Mizriqi

The specter of famine is looming over the besieged Gaza Strip, claiming children one by one. Residents face critical days as bakeries close due to flour shortages, the World Food Programme depletes its food supplies, and drinking water becomes scarce.
In a scene that has become familiar on the streets of the Gaza Strip, Palestinians fall to the ground and lose consciousness, stricken with extreme hunger caused by the Israeli policy of starvation, siege, and the closure of crossings.
In a painful and tearful scene, recorded in front of the eyes of citizens, cameras, and the world, on one of the streets of Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, a number of passersby gathered around a woman in her fifties after she suddenly fell to the ground, a victim of "hunger" that had exhausted her body and the bodies of all age groups of citizens.
This unprecedented humanitarian situation is the product of a Zionist scheme with clear objectives, going beyond the generals' plan proposed by Giora Eiland, which calls for cutting off aid to northern Gaza and terrorizing and displacing civilians, leaving only the resistance fighters in northern Gaza, with no other means of escape left. Their only options are death by hunger and thirst, or death by Israeli missiles. Ultimately, the plan's goal is to eliminate the Palestinian resistance.
This necessarily falls within a Zionist plan aimed at eradicating the Palestinian presence through systematic genocide and starvation.
To this day, in the war of extermination against the people of northern Gaza, Palestinians remain steadfast on their land, despite Israeli loudspeakers calling on them to evacuate and despite the rockets and missiles falling over their heads.
The bitterness of the Palestinians' experience of displacement from the north of the Gaza Strip to its south, and the horrors they endured, are still vividly present, especially after they contacted their relatives and warned them of the horrors of displacement. Add to this the unsafe route of displacement, which remains a lifeline for the entire journey.
The Palestinian is faced with the choice between death by displacement or death by staying. Until this article is written, they choose to remain under the destroyed houses and in the residential areas that are being destroyed, as an inevitable choice, especially after those near and far have abandoned them, and the international community, with all its humanitarian organizations, has left them with their tragedies. Their comrades and friends have let them down, leaving them with nothing but themselves and their resistance.
Starvation in Palestine is used as a deadly psychological and colonial weapon, affecting the Palestinian will and mind beyond the physical. This violence is not limited to reducing or preventing access to food resources; it represents a pattern of organized violence that seeks to reshape Palestinian consciousness under conditions of oppression, powerlessness, and constant existential threat, with the aim of breaking individuals' resilience and survival. In this context, Foucault's concept of "biopower" is evident. The Zionist colonial power exercises strict control over the boundaries of life and death by controlling the flow of essential resources, especially food, through checkpoints and crossings, restricting imports, destroying agricultural land, targeting fishermen, and even obstructing the delivery of humanitarian aid. Thus, Palestinian lives are transformed into a "managed existence" dependent on the decisions of the occupying power. A pattern of existence based on fragility and dependency is imposed on them, weakening their psychological and cognitive capacity to resist or even envision an independent future.
In the context of the psychological warfare through starvation waged by Israel against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the starving body becomes an invisible battlefield, where starvation is used as a silent weapon to dismantle individual and collective will. Chronic hunger not only deteriorates health but also leads to the collapse of cognitive functions such as concentration, memory, and decision-making, weakening the motivation to resist and reshaping Palestinian consciousness under the harsh pressures of daily life.
Yet today, despite all the war methods based on physical liquidation through various and diverse means, including systematic military killing or physical starvation, the Palestinian people are writing a legendary heroic epic against the global conspiracy that seeks to uproot our Palestinian Arab people, obliterate their natural identity on their historical land, and replace them with a foreign body that has no connection to the land, history, or identity.