What Gaza Needs Now- My family is starving. My neighbors are dying. I’m compelled to share these injustices because they need to stop. Mosab Abu Toha June 12, 2025 in The New Yorker: "For the G.H.F.’s efforts to be called humanitarian, they would need to reach every city, town, and refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. They would need to deliver nutritious food to mothers, children, and sick people every day. They would need to take place far from any soldiers and weapons."

Photograph by Mahmoud Issa / Reuters

What Gaza Needs Now

My family is starving. My neighbors are dying. I’m compelled to share these injustices because they need to stop.

By Mosab Abu Toha

June 12, 2025

On May 15th, from our home in Syracuse, New York, my wife, Maram, and I video-called her family in Beit Lahia, the city in northern Gaza where we both grew up. They were eating a small meal of plain white rice. “That’s the only type of food we’ve had for weeks,” her father, whom I call Uncle Jaleel, said. On a normal day, a similar quantity of rice would have fed about two people, but, for seventy-five days, Israel had not allowed any trucks of food into Gaza. This meal would have to feed Maram’s parents and four of her adult siblings. I could see some plates and a bowl nearby. “They have nothing in them,” Uncle Jaleel said. “We let ourselves imagine there is salad and some chicken and pickles as we chew the rice.”

Often in the past nineteen months, a situation that could hardly get any worse has gotten worse. Late that night, one of my relatives called me and said that explosions in northern Gaza sounded like the end of the world. My relatives could hear screaming, followed by more blasts. Meanwhile, my friend Sabir, who has been sheltering in southern Gaza since October, 2023, missed about ten calls because his phone had been charging. “I felt panic,” he told me. I know the feeling, because I experience it whenever my relatives call me from Gaza. When Sabir returned the calls, he learned that air strikes on his family home had killed his four-year-old nephew and his five-year-old niece. (A spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces said that the I.D.F. was not aware of this strike. When asked about the bombings of my relative’s neighbor’s house, the spokesperson said that the I.D.F. had conducted a strike on “terror infrastructure,” but was unaware of subsequent bombings.)

The final death toll on May 15th was a hundred and forty-three, bringing the total since October 7th to more than fifty-three thousand, according to health officials in Gaza. I can usually tell how bad the violence is based on how many of my loved ones are affected. This time, a former colleague and a friend’s father were among the dead. Many families, including some of my relatives, were forced ... READ MORE https://www.newyorker.com/news/essay/what-gaza-needs-now

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