Vox Populi:

Living with chronic illness means not just fighting disease and hunger, but also trauma and a collapsed health system.

Hunger walks through Gaza’s streets now — barefoot, silent, and uninvited. It slips between tents and bombed-out homes, sits beside the fireless cooking pots, and climbs into the arms of children who no longer cry because they’ve learned that hunger, too, can be ignored.

This is an engineered famine — deliberate starvation under Israeli siege: Markets are empty. Aid trucks are blocked. Weeds are being boiled for soup. Parents are forced to give their children animal feed, sand mixed with flour, or expired canned goods — if anything at all. And still, the world debates: Is this a famine or not? Is it a war crime or just “collateral damage”? Should Israel be held accountable, or protected? Should ceasefire talks include conditions — or should they happen at all?

One of my deepest fears is that the world is beginning to grow used to the images of children and people with chronic illness wasting away from hunger, just as it has become numb to the daily killing of civilians. But for those of us in Gaza, mass starvation is not a distant reality. And the rest of the world cannot let it become the new normal — one that is especially deadly for young children, whose bodies cannot survive prolonged malnutrition, and for people with chronic illnesses who need consistent medication and adequate nutrition.

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