Until you die full!

The least of the talk

Tears welled up in his eyes, and his heart, freshly bursting from an open wound, was about to fall into his hands as he told me the story of his younger sister, who has been battling cancer for months, amid a severe shortage of medicine and food in the hospital where she is being treated in Gaza City since the start of the war, which is about to enter its second year.

My interlocutor, whom I met on an occasion in Ramallah, was confiding in me, in a trembling voice, a request he was unable to fulfill. His older sister had asked him to intervene, using his connections in Gaza, to transfer his sick sister from the north to Nasser Hospital in the south. When he asked her about the reason for her request, given that the hospitals were almost identical in terms of providing medical services, she told him: “Until you die of hunger,” because food is more readily available in hospitals in the south than in the north, which suffers from a severe shortage of food and medicine.

In shocking details from Gaza, people are suffering from emaciation and severe weight loss, terrifying those who venture onto the scales. Many young men are fainting and falling in the streets, their stomachs ravaged by famine, as they crawl towards aid traps with empty stomachs.

By the time the newspaper goes to press, the highly anticipated meeting between Trump and Netanyahu has already begun, and a ceasefire agreement is expected to be announced on Thursday and take effect on Friday morning.

We can only hope and pray that this bleeding pain and suffering will end.