What does starvation feel like? What does it feel like to bury a baby your body couldn’t feed? What does it feel like to hear your children cry because their bellies are swollen with hunger?
It has been said that starvation is the worst way to die. It’s slow. It’s cruel.
The body literally consumes itself. Metabolism slows. The body can no longer regulate its temperature. Kidney function is impaired and the immune system weakens. That means if you are exposed to illness or poor water quality, that very often your body doesn’t have the reserves to survive.
When the body is using what is in reserve to function it can’t maintain the nutrient supply to vital organs and tissues. So organs shrink. Muscles shrink. You feel weak. Confused. Angry. Unlike yourself. You become desperate. Anxious. The body is scavenging for any nutrient, any stores that can be used to sustain life. Eventually all that is left is muscle. So your body takes that. Your heart is a muscle. Your body takes that too. You start to experience hallucinations, convulsions and irregular, disrupted heart rhythm. Eventually your heart stops.
There is no definitive time frame. This can take weeks. But not months. Without water, it’s days. With dirty water, with disease, death comes more swiftly. This is torture. This is ancient. It’s barbaric. In a world where we, many, have too much – where Australians throw away more than 300 kilos of food waste every year – no human being should die from hunger.
Right now in Gaza that’s exactly what is happening. 2.1 million people facing food shortages. Almost half a million people on the brink of starvation. Even if food was brought in today, many of those people would have chronic health issues from the organ damage they have sustained from the starvation.
Last night on ABC News I saw footage from Gaza of starving people lining up in the soup kitchens. I watched the faces of children and adults crying and screaming as they scrambled for food. As they pushed and shoved each other to get just a morsel. It’s not something
you can unsee. In an attempt to force the return of 58 hostages, millions of innocent people are being punished as Israel continues to blockade the deliveries of food and medicine. People are being starved as a weapon of war.
The World Food Program has said there are 116,000 tonnes of food sitting just outside Gaza, enough to feed the population for four months, if Netanyahu allowed it in. It is a humanitarian crisis of inconceivable proportions. Since the ceasefire has ended, food prices in Gaza have increased by up to 1,400 percent. The cost-of-living crisis in Palestine has become the cost of dying. Children and babies are most vulnerable to death by starvation. Little kids who can’t comprehend the complex geopolitical narrative that has authored their agony, who don’t understand what a genocide is, are dying in the most painful inhumane way. It haunts me. It should haunt everyone.
Yesterday I travelled to Brisbane to join thousands of people around the country to commemorate the Nakba, when in 1948 over 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, and to recognise the genocide happening in Gaza now. The blockade on food and humanitarian aid must be lifted, the brutal war on civilians must stop and somehow the world community must put differences aside, to stand for peace. For the sake of children who are being starved in the bombed rubble of what was once their home, there has to be hope. Can we not agree on that?
Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox column has appeared in The Echo for almost 23 years. The personal and the political often meet here; she’s also been the Greens federal candidate since before the last two federal elections. The Echo’s coverage of political issues will remain as comprehensive and fair as it has ever been, outside this opinion column which, as always, contains Mandy’s personal opinions only.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
