They are not five years old. They do not understand the words “blockade”, “parachuting”, “negotiation”. They just know they are hungry. Hungry to pass out. Hungry to die. In Gaza, the children fall one by one, killed by war, by hunger, by indifference.
UNICEF now speaks of an “unprecedented” death rate. More than 18,000 children have been killed since October 7, 2023, announces Ted Chaiban, deputy director general of the UN agency, on his return from Gaza. One in three children in Gaza spends days without eating, while 320,000 others are threatened with acute malnutrition. The malnutrition rate now exceeds 16.5%, crossing the critical famine threshold. The faces are dug, the arms too lean to cry, the bellies swollen with a vacuum that kills.
CHAIBAN warns: “We are at the crossroads. The choices made now will determine whether tens of thousands of children will live or die. There is no more ambiguity. It is life or death. And yet, what does the world choose? Press releases. Parachutes. Tons of humanitarian aid dropped in a vacuum.
Friday, Jordan, Egypt, Germany, the Emirates, France and Spain participated in an emergency dropping operation. 126 cargoes, or 148 tonnes of food. A notable effort, but desperately insufficient in the face of the extent of the disaster. French Minister Jean-Noël Barrot himself recognizes that “in the first half of July, 5,000 children under the age of 5 were admitted for acute malnutrition”.
While planes drop cookies, bullets continue to rain. On Saturday morning, 22 Palestinians were killed, including 12 while waiting for humanitarian aid. Hamed Ibrahim al-Qarnawi, his wife, his three children were killed at home, in a bombing in the center of Gaza. A tent sheltering women was targeted in Khan Younès. Even waiting for help becomes a death sentence.
Faced with this, the Israeli government denies any famine policy. The occupation army speaks of “humanitarian cooperation” and denounces the “false allegations”. The word “war crime” becomes a subject of diplomatic disagreement, while children’s bodies pile up in the morgues and under the rubble.
Where is the tolerance threshold? The international community seems to have resigned itself to administering horror in small doses: a few bags of rice, a few humanitarian corridors, some photos that we will look without seeing them. But we do not parachute dignity. We do not drop justice by plane.
What is happening in Gaza is not a natural drama is an organized collapse. And every day of delay, each silence, each hesitation, makes us accomplices. Gaza’s children do not need our tears. They need to save them. NOW.
