Hunger, looting and lost childhoods: Gaza's engineered collapse

It seems that here in Gaza, we have been changed forever. Could something in the anatomy of our brains have shifted over two years of living beyond the limits of human endurance? 

Whenever a friend from outside Gaza asks me how we are doing, I answer: our situation defies words.

I recently shared with friends abroad a one-minute audio recording of an Israeli drone buzzing endlessly over our heads. I told them to imagine that this nerve-shredding noise has not abated for even a moment in the past 10 hours. 

Now imagine living under such crushing psychological pressure, almost without pause, for nearly two years.

What kind of psyche can emerge from such extermination? Will anyone who survives be able to recover?

The wounds inflicted on our souls cannot be captured by news bulletins, nor measured by statistics. They are devastating losses, lodged deep in the core of our humanity.

I ran into a friend on the street, once a university professor before this genocidal war. His face was pale, and his clothes looked as though they hadn’t been changed in months. His expression bore the weight of a lifetime of burdens. 

I greeted him: “How are you?” It was a banal, hollow question, just to start a conversation. He replied: “Our dignity has been humiliated. We live in a time where thieves and looters thrive, while the honourable die of hunger and despair.”

Crushing those who remain

My friend captured reality precisely in that one sentence. Society here is being re-engineered according to a deliberate policy crafted by occupying authorities. 

Since the beginning of this genocide, the Israeli military has targeted thousands of professors, doctors, journalists and public voices across all sectors - pursuing a calculated strategy to strip society of its intellectual and social leadership.

At the same time, the occupation devised a more insidious plan to crush those who remain. It encouraged the looting of the few food trucks allowed in under international pressure, while preventing regular deliveries to warehouses and distribution centres - a clear green light for thieves to attack the trucks, steal supplies and resell them at exorbitant prices to the desperate.

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This policy has produced a new social class of looters, enriched by war and theft. And that is precisely the intended outcome: one of the mechanisms of extermination is to encourage the formation of criminal gangs, disconnected from community values or collective purpose, to dominate the new order.

Respected figures in the community - university professors, teachers, doctors, reformers - are not likely to loot trucks or chase after deadly American food drops. They therefore face starvation unless they can scavenge a few scraps to survive.

This distortion of childhood is not the work of nature. It is the outcome of a deliberate policy sustained by the occupation

There is a particular cruelty in this humiliation. Those who once lived with social respect and professional esteem are now being forced down to the very bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy, labouring to secure a plate of poor-quality food for themselves and their children. They find themselves in a society sliding towards savagery, where human relations are increasingly defined by a brutal struggle for survival.

The children of Gaza have changed. I was recently walking down the street when I saw a group of girls chasing after a truck. One shouted: “Hurry, let’s throw stones at it!” Another warned: “There are armed men riding on top.” A third replied: “It’s fine, we’re not afraid of them!”

This distortion of childhood is not the work of nature. It is the outcome of a deliberate policy sustained by the occupation. 

When food used to enter in minimal but sufficient quantities, guarded and delivered to international agencies for orderly distribution, such scenes never existed.

Israel made the decision to attack those very institutions that organised aid distribution, with the explicit aim of drowning Gaza in chaos and tearing apart the foundations of social stability - destroying people’s humanity and pushing them into savagery in an attempt to strip them of moral legitimacy.

Political actors appear unwilling to take the decisive steps needed to halt Gaza’s comprehensive collapse. The devil whispered to Israel and its allied governments the idea of airdropping aid. It was a perfect scheme, delivering a spectacle for the cameras, while having little-to-no real impact in meeting the bare minimum of people’s needs.

Simple dreams unfulfilled

Each day, a few planes release their cargo somewhere in Gaza. Children watch, clapping and cheering. Yet the load of a single plane is perhaps equivalent to half a truck. Gaza’s daily minimum requirement is about 500 truckloads. If around 1,000 airdrops are needed each day, what’s the point of 10 or 20?

They serve no purpose beyond media theatre. The children’s applause and excitement can only be explained by the novelty of the experience: for once, planes pass overhead without dropping bombs or missiles. That in itself is a new phenomenon for the people of Gaza. 

Before this war, the skies were monopolised by Israeli aircraft of death - and so the children clap at the sight of planes that do not kill them. In this sense, the airdrops might be seen less as offering physical relief, and more as a type of fleeting psychological release; one small way to lighten the otherwise unbearable pressure.

Who could ever measure the damage this war has done to the souls of Gaza’s children?

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My nine-year-old nephew, Moayad, asked me: “When will the war end?” I told him: “I don’t know. But why do you ask?” He replied: “Because we’re tired. Every time they say the ceasefire is near, it never comes.”

I asked him what he would do if the war ended, and he said he wanted to return to Rafah. “Even if there is a truce, the army may not withdraw from Rafah,” I told him. “It’s a border city.”

Then he asked me: “Why don’t you go back to Hamad City, where you lived before the war?” I told him: “What would I do there? My house is destroyed.”

His eyes lit up as he answered: “Why not rebuild it?” I told him: “There’s no cement.” He insisted, with the simple wisdom of childhood: “You don’t need cement. You can rebuild it with the rubble.”

And I thought to myself: if only the world could think with the innocence of children.

A little later, his 10-year-old sister, Ru’a, overheard me reading the news: occupation authorities would supposedly allow some eggs into Gaza. She was overjoyed, turning to her mother and saying: “When the eggs come in, I want you to cook them in every way - fried, boiled, with potatoes, with tomatoes.”

Her mother asked: “All in one day?” Ru’a replied: “Yes, because I miss them so much.”

Like all the children of Gaza, and their parents, Ru’a has not eaten eggs, drank milk, or tasted any kind of meat for more than five months. But weeks have already passed since that report - and perhaps months more will go by - as her simple, innocent dream remains unfulfilled.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.