More Babies Will Have Starved to Death in Gaza By the Time You Read This Essay
We are not equipped to see such violence; we have no means of comprehending such barbarity, writes Fatima Bhutto in this deeply emotional piece.
From the time that I woke up Tuesday morning, dressed my children, fed them breakfast, and sat down at my computer to write this article, three children died of starvation in Gaza.
In the afternoon, when I send a photo of my newborn son, only 2 months old, to my brother so he can see how his nephew is growing, starting to smile and coo, I must scroll through pictures I have taken screen shots of: a skeletal 2-year-old boy in Gaza, Yazan is his name, who will almost certainly die as he has no food to eat. Israel has refused to allow established relief networks like the Norwegian Refugee Council to bring supplies into Gaza for more than 142 days. Yazan’s mother holds him in her arms, herself shrunken from hunger, lifting his shirt so the world can see the fading heartbeat of her son. But the world has seen images of Israel’s holocaust in Gaza for over 650 days, and it has done absolutely nothing.
On Monday, logging onto X, I saw a video of a father holding his bloodied child in his arms and running, screaming for help. But the young child’s legs have been shredded; where his body should be is only burning flesh mingled with the scraps of fabric that once were his trousers.
On Instagram, where I once watched my friends on vacation and the overly filtered faces of strangers, I see a post from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Mosab Abu Toha. He shares a series of WhatsApp messages he has sent to Patrick Kingsley, the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief. Abu Toha asks if the paper is going to cover the news of a fetus, beheaded by an Israeli strike on the Al Shati camp, and murdered along with his mother. “Thank you for the suggestion,” Kingsley replies, “I appreciate it.” In the screenshots, Abu Toha follows up, asking about the story and sending a video. Here is an ACTUAL baby, a fetus no less, beheaded by Israel. Not the Israeli hasbara of sordid lies, made up to manufacture consent for their genocide, such as the 40 beheaded phantom babies. Will they not cover this real, true case? But Kingsley doesn’t reply to Abu Toha, who writes and calls him repeatedly. He may as well be speaking into a void.
I cannot count the images of utter horror I have seen only in these last two days: a little boy called Faisal talking about how he saw Israeli soldiers shoot his pregnant mother in her stomach; a newborn baby who is all bones and has no sucking reflex – it has had no milk and is too weak to attempt that basic, instinctual attempt to feed; children and adults wading through spilled flour desperately trying to gather enough to take home to their families before they are shot by the American mercenaries or Israeli occupation forces, the latter of which routinely kill starving Palestinians at so-called “aid” points; a boy too young to be a teenager – underneath the blood that covers his face, you can see that his skin is smooth he is not old enough to grow stubble. He was killed by an Israeli sniper while trying to find food in Jabalia. I see a video of an elderly man, probably someone’s grandfather, holding a red bucket, waiting for food before he collapses. He reportedly dies right there, upright and hungry. I watch a British surgeon Nick Maynard describe how Israeli soldiers routinely shoot children in different body parts, depending on the day of the week: one day the genitals, the next the knees. I come across a video of children in a tent dancing because their brother had come back from an “aid” point alive, carrying a sack of flour on his shoulders. Every story I read, every image I see, I feel my heart will burst into a million pieces. We are not equipped to see such violence; we have no means of comprehending such barbarity.