I wasn’t going to write today.
I told myself I needed to stop, that I’d said enough.
That people were tired of hearing it.
That I was tired of writing it.
But then I saw him.
A baby boy.
Ribs sharp like knives. A plastic bag for a diaper. Skin grey from hunger.
His mother held him like hope could still save him.
And I knew:
There’s no such thing as “enough” when children are being starved to death.
Do you know what starvation actually does to a child?
First, the fat disappears. Then the muscle.
Then the body turns on itself.
Consuming its own organs to stay alive.
The heart slows. The gut leaks bacteria into the bloodstream.
The skin peels open from the inside.
The blood becomes toxic.
But the brain? the brain suffers the most.
Because when a child is starved like this…
They start hallucinating food.
They reach for meals that don’t exist.
Cry for fruit that will never come.
Taste bread that isn’t there.
They dream of being fed and wake up still dying.
This baby boy was alive enough to feel it all, to suffer.
Alive enough to know that help never came.
But not alive enough to fight.
And his mother?
She held him like love could feed him.
Like maybe, just maybe, if she didn’t let go…
he wouldn’t go.
But she knew.
She knew she was holding her son while he disappeared in her arms.
This isn’t just tragedy.
It’s not famine by accident. It’s not climate. It’s not God.
This is engineered.
The bakeries were bombed. The aid was blocked.
The borders were sealed. The water was cut.
This is a weapon.
And this baby boy? He didn’t die.
He was left to die.
Because someone made a decision. To starve a population.
To make food a crime. To let children rot instead of reaching them.
I wanted to stop writing. I needed to.
But Gaza won’t stop bleeding.
Every day I think, “Surely, this is the worst.”
And every day, something even worse appears.
So I’m asking again. And again. And again.
Until someone listens.
Because if I stop,
who will speak for him?
If I stay silent,
who will scream for her?
If we look away,
who will remember what they did to these babies?
Because if we stop now,
they’ll say it never happened.
And we can’t let them.
Carrying every buried child in every word,
Hafsa
