A sack of flour is supposed to last a family about two weeks.
Bread in the morning. Something hot at night. You make it stretch, you get through, and then somebody goes and gets another one.
That's all it is. A bag of flour. The most ordinary object in any kitchen in the world.
In Gaza, people are killed trying to reach them.
Not metaphorically. There are crowds at the aid points, and there is shooting, and people die on the sand in sight of the lorries.
Everyone there knows this. They go anyway, because the alternative is watching your family starve slowly instead of quickly.
And it's usually the sons who go.
That's how it works. The boy is younger, faster, better at pushing through a crowd. So the family sends him, and his father lets him go, and that is a decision somebody has to make at a kitchen door, in the dark, every single day.
One of them didn't come back.
His father went to find him. And he carried him home himself.
There's a photograph of it.
Now every culture on earth has a way of burying its dead, and every one of them involves a shroud. A clean cloth. White, usually. Nothing on it.
It isn't a formality. It's the last thing you will ever do for your child. The final act of care available to a parent, and the only part of a death that you can still get right.
He had no shroud. There is none to be had.
So his son's shroud was the sack of flour he was killed going to get.
Printed plastic, branding still on it. The name of the agency. The words telling you it isn't to be sold.
That is what a father had to bury his child in.
And he had to choose it. That's the part I can't get past. He stood there and looked at that sack and understood exactly what it was and what it meant, and he used it anyway, because there was nothing else, and his son could not be left unwrapped.
Think about carrying that weight down a street. A man carrying his boy in the packaging of the thing that killed him.
The flour was the point. The flour was the why.
And the flour exists. That's what people haven't understood.
There is no shortage of wheat on this earth.
There are lorries sitting within an hour's drive of those crowds, loaded, waiting. This is not a famine that happened. It's an arithmetic somebody is choosing, every day, and has chosen again today.
Which means that boy didn't die of hunger, or bad luck, or war in the abstract.
He died queueing for something that was already there.
His father buried him in the proof of it.
I don't know their names. I've stopped expecting to be given them.
But I know that somewhere in Gaza there is a man who has to live the rest of his life knowing his son's shroud had a brand name printed on it.
Don't let that be a thing that happened once and passed.
Food is reaching people, our women are still going in, every day, with everything they can carry. It isn't enough and it isn't nothing.
Let's make it more.
For the father who had nothing white left,
Hafsa