That narrow strip of land, stretching like a beauty mark on the forehead of the world, suffers from more than war. Today, it writhes between the jaws of famine and bullets. While the earth bleeds, the world is content to watch from behind screens.
Despite the United Nations officially declaring the outbreak of famine, nothing has changed. A declaration that should have stirred the conscience of humanity instead created only fleeting noise in news bulletins. Death does not rest. The Zionist forces continue to prevent food, water, and medicine from entering, in a crime that requires no witnesses—only beating hearts and humanity unshackled from interests.
Dr. Muneer Al-Bursh, one of the witnesses to the unfolding truth, warns of mass deaths, particularly among children and the sick. More than 20,000 children require continuous treatment, while the number of fatalities rises daily, bleeding figures with no one to staunch their flow. Hunger here is not merely a shortage of food, but a deliberate assassination of the right to life.
Inside Gaza’s hospitals, cold corridors lack electricity, diagnostic equipment, and sufficient blood for transfusion. The cry is urgent: they need blood units—not for luxury, but to keep lives alive. The hospitals themselves are bleeding—their walls pierced by bombardment, their staff’s hearts pierced by helplessness.
Al-Bursh added: “The Israeli enemy continues to prevent the entry of food, supplements, and medicines, despite famine in the Gaza Strip being declared by the world’s largest international body,” stressing that what is taking place is a total siege on starving patients facing death in the absence of urgent action.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health announced that 71 Palestinians were killed and 339 were injured this Thursday alone as a result of Israeli bombardment. In a statement, the ministry said that among those casualties were 22 killed and 203 wounded while seeking aid, raising the total number of “bread martyrs” to 2,180 and the injured to over 16,046.
In the same 24 hours, hospitals recorded four additional deaths due to famine and malnutrition, including two children, bringing the total famine-related death toll to 317, of whom 121 are children.
The ministry further reported that from March 18, 2025, until this Thursday, 11,121 people were killed and 47,225 were injured. Since October 7, 2023, the overall toll of Israel’s assault has reached 62,966 killed and 159,266 injured.
“Have you ever seen a crime committed live, without anyone stopping it?!” In Gaza, journalists are killed for telling the truth, and doctors are killed for treating wounded children. Hospitals are bombed, schools destroyed, children driven from classrooms, and entire cities erased from the map.
So far, 18,489 students have been killed. What memory remains when an entire generation is extinguished?
“There is no safe place in Gaza. No one is safe,” said UN Commissioner Philippe Lazzarini. Yet, the world has not listened enough.
Nearly 700 days since the war began, Lazzarini warned: “People are still being killed and injured as the Israeli army intensifies and expands its operations. Hospitals, schools, shelters, and homes are bombed daily. Health workers, journalists, and humanitarian staff are killed on a scale unseen in any modern conflict.”
He added: “As if this were not enough, hunger threatens everyone in Gaza with a slow and silent death, or death while desperately searching for food.”
The crime expands, the pain multiplies, and death spreads like an inescapable shadow. It is a slow, silent death, marked only by the cries of mothers and the silence of small bodies breathing their last without ever tasting milk.
More than 1.1 million children in Gaza suffer psychological trauma, their bodies shrinking with every missed meal, every cold night without shelter. Their frail images—protruding bones and hollow eyes—stand as a stain of shame on humanity’s conscience.
Amar Amar, UNICEF’s Regional Director for Advocacy and Media for the Middle East and North Africa, said the ongoing Israeli bombardment has inflicted not only killings and injuries but also deep psychological scars on around 1.1 million children, gravely damaging their development.
“During this period, grave violations have spread widely,” he said. “Children face daily realities of deprivation from aid, starvation, forced displacement, and the destruction of hospitals, schools, water networks, and homes. What we witness in Gaza is not merely a war on children—it is the destruction of life itself.”
He emphasized that over half a million people are trapped in famine, with preventable deaths mounting. Malnutrition among children is escalating at catastrophic rates: in July alone, more than 12,000 children were documented with acute malnutrition. Nearly one in four suffers from severe acute malnutrition—the deadliest form, leaving long-term consequences.
Meanwhile, the so-called “civilized world” holds conferences on ethics, raising slogans of freedom and justice, as Gaza’s children are driven to their graves. Even when aid arrives, it is dropped from the sky like feed for animals as if they are caged, without assurance of delivery or organized distribution—amid relentless bombing, displacement, and starvation.
Every day, roughly 100 people are killed and over 600 are injured by Israeli airstrikes across Gaza. The Ministry of Health has issued an urgent appeal to all relevant bodies to supply hospitals with blood units and components. Daily demand exceeds 350 units, but blood banks are dangerously depleted due to famine and malnutrition, undermining community donations.
Entire cities—Jabalia, Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, and Gaza City—have been reduced to ruins. Homes are now rubble, their inhabitants dead, displaced, or missing under debris.
Aerial footage from aid drops revealed the full scale of devastation: northern Gaza, especially Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia, shows virtually no buildings left standing. Jabalia appears as a grey mass of destruction, devoid of life. In Gaza City, images show vast damage and hundreds of tents sheltering forcibly displaced Palestinians.
The world has turned its face away, closing its eyes deliberately. But Gaza cannot sleep, nor shut its eyes to its children. It sees death in a thousand forms, living it a thousand times a day. It bleeds—but it does not surrender.
Gaza’s plea requires no many words, only a living conscience. For those who do not hear the cries of its children now, tomorrow’s tears of regret will be of no use.
