I’m a Teenager In Gaza. And I Am Starving.
What hits you first is the exhaustion carved into every face. The sickly pallor. The terrifying weight loss ravaging everyone—yes, including me.
Children of various ages suffering from malnutrition are being treated with limited resources due to shortages of baby formula and medicine at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, on August 11, 2025.
(Hassan Jedi / Anadolu via Getty Images)Over the past 16 months, we have published regular dispatches from Lujayn, a teenager in the Gaza Strip. Lujayn has been displaced, injured, and lost friends and family. Now she, along with the rest of Gaza, is starving. But she is still writing.
We have endured unbearable months. Forget what came before; this is the crushing reality of now. Bombing, displacement, and disease gnawing at us with no medicine to fight back. Hunger tearing into every single body.
My mother and I went out searching for basic supplies. We found little. What little there was? Priced beyond insanity. $100 for a kilo of flour. Over $140 for a kilo of sugar. You’d need Ali Baba’s magical cave just to afford these things!
A week ago, my father somehow got five kilos of flour. My mother divided it, a portion for us, the rest for the neighbors. Because no one has enough to eat.
On the street? What hits you first is the exhaustion carved into every face. The sickly pallor. The terrifying weight loss ravaging everyone, yes, including me.
Children sit by the roadside. They aren’t begging for money. They’re begging for a loaf of bread.
And the occupation? They have the gall to boast about opening their so-called “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”? Don’t be fooled. It’s nothing but a death trap. A new way to humiliate and exterminate us.
You want to know how you get a food box or flour from them? Simple, people run. A desperate, monstrous marathon. The finish line? Maybe a bullet in the head or the body. Or maybe you just get crushed to death, suffocated in the stampede of thousands trying to get any of the few boxes they offer. Or maybe you starve to death on the way back, carried home in the very empty flour sack you hoped to fill for your starving children, carried home dead.
Walking past, I saw people selling their clothes. Their phones. But the worst? The man selling his hearing aids. He didn’t care if he’d never hear again. Just feed the kids waiting at home, that’s all that mattered.
We found nothing. Nothing, not even the medicine my mother needed when we went to what was left of the hospital. Inside? Just rows of people. Doctors trying to pump them full of IV fluids, fighting collapse and dizziness, from starvation.
If you watch the news or scroll through social media? What you see is a drop in an ocean of suffering happening now, right here on the ground.
What does it mean for a human being to starve to death? This is a question I have seen answered many times.
Millions watch. All the talk is about hope, negotiations. We see that hope now like the mythical phoenix, some magical bird that will save us from the beast’s jaws. We know it’s all lies, as much a lie as the phoenix itself.
Has the death of a Palestinian soul by bomb or by starvation become just routine background noise in a century that preaches humanity and human rights??
We hear voices. So many voices around the world are chanting for us, singing for us. God, how that sound lifts our hearts! And it will change the hell we are living but it will take a long time, time that we don’t have.
If the parties wanted a solution? The solution is known very clearly: ceasefire, release all hostages, open crossings, flow of aid trucks, lasting peace, a free state, defined borders, sovereignty, one unified government. So why this endless stream of empty words? This back-and-forth? This pathetic game of “whose court is the ball in?”
Leaders of the world, don’t. Don’t you dare lecture my people about human rights while they die every single day, bombed or starved.
Leaders of the world, don’t. Don’t you dare preach “child protection” to our children while they are bombed and starved in front of the whole world.
My friends around the world, I love you all so much, Please forgive my anger and my sadness, but I swear there is no pain greater than watching an infant who doesn’t even have energy to cry gasp its last breath before the world’s eyes… because milk has apparently become a forbidden weapon in the eyes of the occupation.
—Lujayn, Al Bureij, Gaza Strip, August 2025
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