Feast
By Rakhee Bhatt | July 24, 2025
She smooths the blanket on the sandy ground.
The thin tent offers shelter, for now.
She whispers a prayer heard by the world.
Yet what she needs remains just out of reach.
She steps outside, greeted by heat and dust.
She glances at the space to her right.
Her neighbors have been gone for a while.
She knows why they haven’t returned.
She walks along a dirt path with no name,
bearing the distance on her blistered feet.
She feels the echoes of what used to be,
a lasting proof that love cannot be erased.
She comes upon the market, at long last,
but the stalls are barren again.
Another day where food exists,
just not for them.
She traces the way back slowly,
her body almost breaking with each step.
What fell from the sky did not take her,
but what’s withheld may soon.
She returns to the home she pieced together.
Her children look up, eyes wide with hope.
There is nothing left to promise them.
She can’t tell tales anymore.
They sit on the blanket on the sandy ground.
The habit remains, even as the plates stay bare.
The knife cuts the air as their hunger cries.
They taste the famine dressed as feast.
Gaza is being deliberately and systemically starved.
This week, over 100 international aid and human rights organizations — including Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, and Amnesty International — issued a joint statement calling on governments around the world to take action as hunger spreads in Gaza.
For the past 657 days, Palestinians have endured the horrors of bombardment, displacement, and siege. Since March 2, 2025, a near-total blockade has cut off food, fuel, medicine, and clean water. These supplies sit just beyond the border, deliberately withheld by Israeli forces who are backed and armed by the United States.
Massacres occur at aid lines. Medical teams and journalists collapse from hunger. Children whisper they want to go to heaven, because “heaven has food.”
This is a manufactured famine, and it is all part of a decades-long campaign to erase the Palestinian people.
According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a Phase 5 famine — the most severe level of food insecurity — occurs when:
—at least 20% of households face extreme lack of food
—at least 30% of children suffer from acute malnutrition
—two or more people per 10,000 die each day from starvation or its complications
Gaza has surpassed all of these thresholds.
At this stage, even an immediate flood of aid may be too late. Severe malnutrition has already set in. More will not survive. Those who do may suffer lifelong harm physically, cognitively, and generationally.
Experts warned this would happen. They were consistently ignored. Aid was consistently blocked. Now, people are not only bombed, but they are also starved in real time as we watch on our screens.
This is more than starvation. More than genocide. There is not yet a word for all this. It is cruelty without end.
Our elected officials have made their priorities clear: profits over people.
But we are not powerless, especially together. There is strength in refusing silence, in bearing witness, in speaking up. Palestinians are still resisting, still enduring, still rising. We must do the same.
Keep going. Everyone is needed. No effort is too small.
If you’re able, please consider supporting the organizations below that are working on the ground and at the border to deliver aid and save lives: