Monday
It seems there’s no escaping the chronic grief that has gripped everything in Gaza. Against my will, my identity as a Gazan has become tied to a life reduced to nothing more than a tent and an aid queue.
A scene I witnessed remains etched in my memory. I was on my way to visit my friend Ola. The street was half-rubble, lined with shattered storefronts and twisted metal, the smell of dust still heavy in the air. Just before reaching Ola’s house, I heard rising voices and hurried footsteps. I turned cautiously.
A relief lorry had entered the neighbourhood at speed. People rushed towards it with a thirst they didn’t bother hiding. Some climbed onto its back, grabbing whatever bags and cans they could reach and throwing them from the lorry. No one cared what the packages contained. People tried to catch everything that was thrown. Some bags hit the ground and burst open, scattering their contents across the street. Anything caught was a treasure.
The crowd swelled quickly. Tense faces, pushing bodies, orders flying through the air: “Grab this!” “Pick up the bag!”
The scene looked like a real battle, but the only weapon was hunger. In the chaos, a funeral procession slowly passed through the crowd. Four men carried a coffin draped in a flag. Chants of “Allahu Akbar” rose above the noise. No one stopped. The crowd simply parted for a moment to let the body pass, then returned to the scramble behind the truck. Here, death passes beside you like it’s part of the scenery.
On the edge of the crowd, a man in his sixties was bent over silently, picking up scattered grains of lentils and rice – one by one – from the ground, reaching between feet, dust and debris. As I got closer, I recognised him. It was Ola’s father.
I walked past quickly. I didn’t want him to notice me. I didn’t want him to know that I had seen him like that. I felt a weight in my chest I couldn’t shake, but I kept walking.
The truck continued on and vanished from view, but people kept chasing it until their breath ran out. After several minutes, the noise faded. One by one, people headed home. The lucky ones returned with something, anything, for their children. The others returned empty-handed, carrying only their disappointment.
I continued on until I reached Ola’s house. When she opened the door, I followed her into the living room, saying nothing about what I’d seen. Moments later, her father entered. He was holding a small bag carefully, as if it contained something fragile. Ola took it from him eagerly, opened it, looked inside, then said with a pained expression: “The rice is on top of the lentils – and it’s full of sand and stones, Baba.”
He didn’t answer immediately. He sat beside her and rested his back against the wall. Ola softened her tone. “Never mind,” she said. “Thank you. We’ll sort it out.”
She poured the contents of the bag onto a large tray. Dust lifted into the air. I sat beside her and said, “I’ll take care of the lentils. You do the rice.” We removed the stones, blew away the dust, and separated the good grains from the broken ones. We didn’t speak much.
Inside me, thoughts were colliding. I just stared at what lay between my hands, picking up lentils, one by one – as if I were organising some of the chaos this day had created.
If I hadn’t lived through this famine myself, I would never have believed true hunger was real. I used to think hunger was just a passing sensation, something your body uses to tell you it’s time to eat. You open the fridge, answer the call, and that’s it. I don’t know when the fridge turned into a decorative piece: useless.
But the hunger here feels nothing like that. True hunger doesn’t knock only on your stomach. It knocks on your dignity, too. It slows time: an hour feels like a day, and a day feels like an entire life of waiting. It changes you. It reshapes your thoughts, redefines sufficiency, rearranges your priorities. It teaches you arithmetic in a new language: number of loaves, number of meals. It shrinks your dreams gradually, not by forcing you to give up on them, but by sapping the strength needed to chase them.
The most dangerous response is to get used to it: to wake up each morning without expecting anything, not searching for a meal – just continuing to exist. True hunger blends into life, dissolves within it, becomes part of your identity, your character, your daily vocabulary.
But this pain is not my fate. I want it to stay unfamiliar, no matter how long it lasts. I want it to remain an intruder in my heart, no matter how often it returns. Normalising pain means surrendering to the idea that there is no alternative. It means withering while breathing. It means death while we’re still alive. I can’t accept this.
I believe that joy – however small its margin – has a right to exist, even in the narrowest alleys of this siege. I believe it is my right to say, with clarity and courage: “This pain is not me.”
Sunday
My body, barely midway through its twenties, behaves as if it has endured 70 wars. I wake to a heavy dizziness that drags me downwards, as though I’m drowning in a bottomless void. I cannot lift a bucket of water, nor sweep the floor, nor stand long enough at the sink. Every motion feels like combat, every postponed meal a dream deferred, every waking moment weighed down by headaches, hunger, and fragility. I don’t know when breathing became a burden, or balance a luxury, or why getting out of bed became the first triumph on my daily battlefield.
Ghazal, my neighbour’s ten-month-old baby, has been crying since dawn. She wants milk.
Israel is no longer merely an occupying force – that description is now stale, insufficient. Israel has taken up the role of the supreme administrative deity, the Lord of Registries, Permits, Approvals, and Denials. It starves at will, permits whatever goods it pleases, decides whether you deserve to be healed or die at the gates of coordination. All under its omnipotent authority. We live under the rule of a bureaucratic god, His Administrative Majesty, obsessed with delusions of grandeur, one who measures national security by the cholesterol content in our cheese, and the softness of our toilet rolls – each allowed entry only by pre-approved paperwork.
Even before 7 October, we were lab rats in a laboratory run by a state that monopolises air and water and determines the fate of coriander. Yes – coriander. In a CBS News report from 2010, titled “Israel’s Gaza Blockade Baffles Both Sides”, the absurdities of Israel’s blockade policy were laid bare. The report stated: “Military bureaucrats enforcing Israel’s blockade of Gaza allow frozen salmon fillets, facial scrubs and low-fat yogurt into the Hamas-ruled territory. Cilantro and instant coffee are another matter – they are banned as luxury items.”
Not tanks, not explosives, but an aromatic herb is deemed a threat to national security. In Gaza, life was measured by a checklist of what was banned or permitted, curated by the clairvoyant in the Ministry of Defence:
Cinnamon? Approved.
Chocolate? Forbidden.
Plastic buckets? Take two.
School notebooks? Security risk – one might write resistance poetry.
Strawberry jam? Strategic threat.
And then came this war. After two years of relentless bombing and rubble, it’s as if Israel has placed us on a compulsory nutrition programme. We do not choose our meals; our meals are chosen for us. Lentils are permitted, tomatoes are suspicious, and chocolate is a crime. Flour – the white gold – is prohibited; bread loaves are besieged.
This is no accidental famine. This is an engineered one – a war on our bodies, our clarity, our ability to move. And so, we continue to “live” – or pretend to – under a system of forced feeding, where our ration cards are issued from Tel Aviv, and the national palate is dictated by the Ministry of Defence.
Thursday
The endless stream of food videos on our phones is visual torture. Chocolate truffles, fresh bread, our phones flaunt a world that doesn’t acknowledge our hunger. I don’t ask for a hot meal or a varied menu – I only ask that lentils not be the law.
What I feel isn’t just hunger, it’s slow, internal erosion. It doesn’t bruise the skin, but it devastates the soul. This is a cold form of death – without blood, without noise, without witnesses, without headlines.
The administrative God does not stop at controlling our bellies and our prescriptions, it interferes in our families too – deciding whom we love, whom we marry, with whom we live, and who may be officially registered as our child. Under the label of “family reunification permits”, Israel decides who may legally exist in Gaza or the West Bank, and who remains a shadow – an unrecognised citizen in their own homeland. Thousands of Palestinian families remain torn apart because the occupation refuses to acknowledge them – either because one spouse is from Gaza and the other from the West Bank, or because a child was born abroad. According to Human Rights Watch, Israel froze “family reunification” in 2000, later resuming it for only a very limited number of cases, as a “political gesture”, not a human right.
Even survival requires security clearance. Patients in Gaza are not “evacuated” – they are “coordinated”. And coordination can be denied, because their bodies are not yet deemed trustworthy. Thousands of patients, including children with cancer, heart conditions, and kidney failure, wait on endless lists of stamps and signatures to determine whether they will be treated, or buried.
As for the students? Their stories are even more absurd. Bright young minds with scholarships from top international universities, with visas and funding secured are trapped – because “the crossing is closed” or their names are not “security approved”. In the logic of the supreme administrative deity, knowledge is a threat, travel is a gamble, and any Palestinian outside Gaza is a potential crisis. Thus, a scholarship becomes a suspended miracle, and medical treatment becomes a dream with an indefinite delay.
This is not just an occupation. It’s a sarcastic supply manager, distributing food aid to the starving beneath rubber bullets and pepper spray, guarded by an overweight American soldier seemingly assigned to protect sacks of flour.
Israel has perfected the art of total control – over stomachs, minds, hearts, classrooms, and hospital wards. Is there any place left where Israel cannot reach?
Sondos Sabra is a Palestinian translator and writer. Her account of the war appears in “Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide” (Comma Press), out now.
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