‘I Decided to Starve to Death Rather than Die from [Israel’s] Bombing’

By Roqayah Chamseddine | June 17, 2025 | 9:37am

Photo by Jaber Jehad Badwan

Palestine Gaza

‘I Decided to Starve to Death Rather than Die from [Israel’s] Bombing’

“Gaza is a humanitarian catastrophe like the modern world has never known,” says Omar, a former construction worker from Jabaliya now displaced for the seventh time within Gaza. “Not a single Palestinian family has been untouched by Israel’s killing machine. Every orphan, every amputee, every mother’s tears, all of this comes from Israel and the weapons being supplied to fund these crimes, namely from the United States. The whole world knows the names of our killers.” Palestinians in Gaza who have spoken to Splinter throughout the ongoing genocide continue to emphasize the compounding horrors that they face, and that no end seems to be in sight.

Israel has once again attacked communication services in Gaza. Those who have reached out to Splinter to share their stories over the last year and a half have gone silent after Israel targeted the last major fiber route which was sustaining internet and fixed line services in the Strip. Despite Israel’s deliberate communications blackout—widely condemned by international human rights organizations as a calculated means of obstructing reporting—the renewal of mass expulsion across Gaza continues. Israel’s targeted restriction of communication represents a deliberate strategy to paralyze Palestinian mobility. The obstruction of digital lifelines not only deepens the humanitarian crisis but also prevents those affected from navigating or even documenting their own dispossession.

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On June 12, Israel killed 21 Palestinians who were seeking aid. That is in addition to the 224 killed and 2,150 injured since the start of the US-Israeli Humanitarian Foundation’s initiative. Aid distribution points, marketed by the United States and Israel as places where Palestinians can access food, are makeshift killing fields. Not content with inflicting mass casualties across Gaza, Israel’s starvation campaign is forcing Palestinians into desperate journeys, walking miles from their families in search of any kind of sustenance. Nearly two million Palestinians—over 90 percent of the population—are being starved, and a majority of the children inside Gaza are now suffering from chronic malnutrition.

In harrowing scenes reminiscent of the Flour Massacre that took place on February 29—during which Israeli occupation forces shot into crowds of hungry people who were made to wade through blood-soaked flour—Palestinians now scrounge for grains soaked in their own blood. Desperate mothers who travel over six hours a day in search of bread have been killed trying to feed their children. Meanwhile, community kitchens continue to struggle to remain open, with a majority having closed due to non-stop Israeli aerial attacks and a lack of resources. Israel’s calculated campaign of starvation has systematically decimated Gaza and its people. Dr. Mohammad Hamad, a supervisor at Gaza’s Ministry of Health, wrote that he traveled at midnight with his son Ahmed to get flour, only to return at 6:00 AM without a single kilogram. “We were bombed and shot at, but miraculously we survived. I decided to starve to death rather than die from the bombing.”

Civil engineer Samer Qarman is one of countless Palestinian fathers desperately attempting to feed his family amidst the ongoing genocide while broadcasting the voice of his people to the world. He writes that what’s happening in northern Gaza “is an ongoing crime in broad daylight. The internet and communication blackout is not merely a technical issue — it is a deliberate attempt to silence voices, to erase suffering, tears, and bloodshed that no one can document or hear.”

Israel’s targeting of journalists in Gaza, which has resulted in the killing of at least 227 since the genocide began, is a conscious and barbaric method of silencing anyone who broadcasts the reality on the ground, even if they’re draped in a press vest. In a report published by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs it was revealed that the war on Gaza is the deadliest for media workers ever recorded. Journalists in Gaza are being deliberately eliminated, which is not only a violation of international law but a broader strategy to suppress the indigenous documentation of war crimes designed to permanently silence Palestinian voices.

“They want to silence [us],” Qarman writes. “They want to extinguish the voice of truth. They don’t want you to hear our hunger cries or our children’s weeping. So if my voice disappears — be my voice. If we die and you hear nothing of us — be the cause.”