Magazine, The Immigrant Experience
A mother in Gaza told a story no parent should have to live. Her infant was crying from hunger—days without food. In a moment of agony, she did something she will carry forever: she struck her child to get him to sleep. “I am weak before my children,” she said. “We don’t feel like the world sees us as human.”
In war, there are images that shock. Then there are stories that hollow the soul.
During a recent national briefing hosted by American Community Media (ACOM), ethnic media journalists gathered not just to report, but to bear witness. The speakers brought rare, unfiltered insight from the frontlines:
- Alex de Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and research professor at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, is one of the world’s foremost experts on famine and mass atrocity.
- Budour Hassan, Amnesty International’s lead researcher on Israel and Palestine, has spent years documenting human rights violations across the region.
- Afeef Nessouli, a Lebanese-American journalist and humanitarian aid worker, had just returned from nine weeks volunteering in Gaza where he helped distribute aid and bore firsthand witness to the hunger crisis.
Their words came against a grim backdrop: After nearly two years of war between Israel and Hamas, Gaza is in ruins. More than 60,000 people have been killed—18,000 of them children, according to UNICEF. The majority of Gaza’s 2 million residents have been displaced, left without homes, clean water, or consistent access to food. For months, many have faced what international agencies now describe as catastrophic levels of hunger.
Despite repeated denials by Israeli officials, the global consensus is clear: Gaza is on the brink of famine. Religious leaders, humanitarian groups, and global heads of state—including even President Donald Trump—have acknowledged that starvation is taking place.
UNICEF, the UN Fund for Children’s Emergencies, recently called for “flooding the Strip with supplies using all channels and all gates” to combat the spiraling death rates that accompany aid blockades, war, and hunger.
It was de Waal who said it most clearly: Gaza has been pushed beyond the brink. What the world is witnessing is not accidental suffering. It is engineered hunger. It is starvation as a strategy.
Once a region with decent health indicators despite decades of occupation, Gaza has now descended into the unimaginable. Entire neighborhoods have been leveled. Children go days without eating. Mothers dilute baby formula to make it last. And community kitchens that once provided hot meals have been shuttered for lack of ingredients. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the latest U.S.-backed food distribution program, replaced a functioning aid network with four distant, dangerous “secure sites” that have become magnets for chaos and death.
Witnesses say the strong get fed. The vulnerable are trampled, sniped, or left to rot in line.
Dr. Hassan described how tight-knit communities are unraveling. Starvation, she explained, breaks more than bodies. It breaks social cohesion. It dehumanizes. In Gaza, where neighbors once shared what little they had, people now fight over flour.
Afeef Nesulli, just back from nine weeks on the ground, told of losing 12 pounds himself while watching friends waste away. He spoke of doctors performing surgeries without morphine and of children eating once every three days. And still, he said, Palestinians share, adapt, and find dignity.
This is not just a failure of war. It is a failure of will. The United Nations, humanitarian agencies, and even U.S. intelligence acknowledge the impending famine. But still, aid is blocked. Crops are bulldozed. Desalination plants are bombed. And the world debates Hamas while children starve.
Let’s be clear: You do not create a siege that blocks food, water, and medical aid without knowing the human toll. You do not set up an aid system that leaves people to be shot while begging for flour and then say it is functioning. You do not erase farmland and destroy greenhouses in the name of security.
Unless, of course, starvation itself is the point.
It is the duty of media—especially ethnic and immigrant media—to shine a light where mainstream coverage dims. We understand displacement. We carry ancestral memories of what it means to flee, to hunger, and to hope. We know that dignity cannot be drone-delivered. It must be defended.
The people of Gaza are not statistics. They are not collateral damage. They are not invisible. Their suffering is not inevitable.
What we heard at the briefing was not just testimony. It was an indictment. And a plea.
So let this editorial be clear: It is not enough to call for ceasefires, to ship pallets of rice, or to debate the definitions of genocide while communities wither.
We call on U.S. lawmakers to demand an end to the blockade. We call on the humanitarian sector to restore real distribution networks, embedded with community trust. We call on our fellow journalists to name what is happening for what it is: a manmade famine.
And we call on our readers to look beyond headlines. To feel. To act. To remember that across oceans, human beings just like us are choosing love over fear, sharing scraps, and holding on.
That alone should break us open.
#GazaFamine #HumanRights #EthnicMedia #ImmigrantVoices #JusticeForGaza #AidNotEnough #StopStarvation #MediaForHumanity
