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13 AUGUST—I received an email from my friend Samia Khoury not long ago. In it she shared a letter written by a man in Gaza. This is the second such letter to arrive recently in my inbox—addressed to another and forwarded to me. The first was published in Winter Wheat and The Floutist under the title “‘What is this madness.”
Samia lives in Occupied Jerusalem where I met her for the first time in April 2024 while conducting research for the project Palestinian Voices. We have become friends across a great distance communicating most often in brief text exchanges. At ninety-one years of age, Samia’s life has been bracketed by two Zionist atrocities committed against her people. She was fourteen and living in the village of Birzeit when the Nakba began. She remembers watching from the shade of an olive tree as a long line of exhausted people approached her village on a hot day in July 1948. When I began writing the essays in Palestinian Voices hers was the first story and voice I published: “In the shade of an olive tree.”
The people Samia saw all those years ago were the displaced survivors of a Haganah massacre in the villages of Lydda and Ramleh in which some four hundred and twenty-five Palestinian civilians were killed. An estimated seventy thousand to eighty thousand people were forcibly expelled from both communities from 11 to 13 July in what is known as the Lydda Death March.
I now publish, with Samia’s permission, a slightly abridged version of her email to me, followed by the letter, published in full, she received from Gaza and signed H. S. Samia’s mention of donkeys refers to a perverse campaign recently launched to “save the donkeys” in Gaza, as if this is a credible _expression_ of Jewish Israelis’ humanity.
May the voices of these two Palestinians reverberate until justice is realized and Palestine is whole and free.
Samia.
When the word Humanitarian is used to describe one of the genocidal traps for the people in Gaza, then Webster’s dictionary needs to be updated. Even the donkeys that are the only remaining means of transportation in Gaza are now being stolen by Israel. What else can they think of?
I suppose it is a blessing to be blind and deaf these days and be spared the agonizing scenes from Gaza. How can the world watch children starve to death while the plates of Arab/Israeli/American/European leaders are filled with food as they discuss Gaza?
Until when will the international community stay silent with no action, while children starve to death?
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H. S.
I am at a loss—by God—I am stumbling in disbelief like one struck, stunned by shock. How can a world so vast, a world that folds the earth in the blink of an eye, splits the atom, and pierces the heavens, fail to save a starving soul? How does it orchestrate this sinister balance, keeping an entire people teetering on the edge—neither letting them fall nor offering a hand to pull them up even half a step? A people left to choose their preferred death: torn apart by shells, drained dry by hunger, or consumed by disease without cure?
Here, in this surreal city, people sit at the mercy of metal frames awaiting coordinates to seal their fate. They eat salt—if they find any—without bread, chew pain instead of thyme and oil, and walk in slow, weary steps—not in play, but in exhaustion; not in joy, but in sorrow. They wander like the lost on a road with no sign, like the trapped in a tunnel with no glimmer of light.
Hungry—yes, but their hunger is not just in their bellies. It is in their souls, stripped bare, and their hearts, stabbed deep.
They perish before the bombs reach them, devoured by hunger that arrived first. They die not because Death has finally called, but because the world has gone deaf to their cries. They are crushed between the hammer of missiles and the anvil of empty pots, each bearing a burden no mountain could shoulder: a child begging for milk, a mother dreaming of a handful of beans, a grandfather gnawing on what stones might sprout, and a father, unraveling at the thought of what meal might shield his children. Will the world explode before he finishes the lentil stew? Or after, when his family wrinkles their noses—as usual?
And now hunger laughs. It mocks. It wasn’t enough that we ate crumbs—it introduced us to “alternatives:” fake meat, faux milk, pretend oil, counterfeit salt. Even water comes with a substitute. So do power, batteries, sunlight, money, and electronic payment. Until we searched for an alternative to the human being. Someone capable of enduring all this madness!
We now cook “substitute meals” trying to convince ourselves that “Flavor lies in faith,” and “Patience tastes sweet.” But truly? Can a human truly remain human amidst all these substitutes?! I dare say it would take a wholly new being—one beyond humanity—to endure.
Yet more terrifying than empty stomachs are the hollowed-out values. When hunger strikes, ethics collapse, and humanity crumbles from within.
I’ve seen it: an angel yesterday, a devil today—clawing at his brother’s flesh over a handful of flour. I've heard stories that make the heart bleed: of a man who stabbed his cousin for an aid parcel of food. I’ve witnessed it with aching eyes, how hunger can erase faith, fold morals, and reshape man—not from clay—but from a pitch-black, foul-smelling substance.
So I ask myself—what madness is this? Is it mere famine, or a test of the world’s humanity?
How is death prepared in the kitchens of global conscience? How is hope trapped inside a tiny piece of land with the size of a sardine tin?
I confess… crafting these words feels like pulling threads from a frayed soul. Not for lack of language, nor betrayal by the alphabet—but because hunger stole my focus, and perhaps, my will to care.
No room remains in the heart for wonder, no tears in the eyes for grief, no cunning in the mind for comprehension.
How do we explain to the world what's happening, when after twenty-one moons it still cannot see?
What manner of image demands such endless gazing to perceive?
Is it some encrypted Van Gogh? A Beethoven symphony only understood when lived? Or perhaps Nietzsche's philosophy needing centuries to decipher?
A world that climbs to the moon every hour, traverses galaxies, bends time itself... yet fails to provide milk substitutes—oh, the irony of substitutions!
Fails to feed a child—guiltless, helpless, nationless—whose only refuge is a mother's hollow bosom.
In Gaza, hunger is no mere instinct—it's a war machine... an ordeal of the soul, a moral reckoning: Is starvation kinder than shelling? Is death by hunger gentler than death by shrapnel?
I'd nearly swear our Prince of Poets, Ahmed Shawqi, composed his verses for us alone when he lamented:
From the war of al-Basus to this cruel inflation— It returns like seven harsh trials… Is there no Joseph among the people to face this? To calculate wisely and see the path rightly? Your servants, Lord, have starved in Egypt— Was it the Nile You gave them, or merely a mirage?
Previously publish in Winter Wheat.
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