The Story My Journalist Friend From Gaza Never Wanted to Write: Their Family Is Starving
Rafah, southern Gaza, October 2003. Photo © James Rodgers
THE PICTURE ABOVE is from Gaza. It was taken more than 20 years ago. The world’s shame at what is happening there now will last much longer than that. There are still small ways in which we can help. This post explains one.
On Saturday 26 July, I received a message from a Palestinian journalist whom I have known personally for over two decades. We met when I worked in Gaza between 2002 and 2004 as the BBC’s correspondent in the territory. Part of it read,
The famine is devastating my family in Gaza, and I’ve truly become unable to bear the burden alone.
I spend 70% of my salary every month just $150 a day to feed my parents and siblings with bread only bread.
The price of a single kilo of flour has risen to 250 shekels and they need four kilos a day to prepare just one meal for the family.
I appreciate your help if you and your friends are in a position to do so.
The price of flour, given in shekels, is approximately £55 or US$74 at current rates of exchange.
Should you wish to donate, the link is here .
The journalist has left Gaza with their immediate family, but is now the main means of support for their parents and others trapped inside the zone of war and starvation. I reproduce this extract from their message with their permission.
This is hardly an isolated case. Four of the world’s leading news organizations warned in July that their journalists were unable to feed themselves and their families. The journalist who contacted me I know to work always to work to the highest professional standards and to be a person of great integrity and dignity. That message must have been so hard to send, but not asking for help risked literally fatal consequences.
The Israeli government and military are starving the people of Gaza. They are also depriving the world of information about what is happening in the territory. Israel, which controls access to Gaza, does not let international journalists go there to report what is happening.
Yet many things are happening, inside and outside Gaza. Already traumatized by more than two years of this war with its colossal loss of life and property, people there face death either from lack of food, or when they try to collect it. The Israeli military has killed tens of thousands of civilians, at least some of them, according to persistent reports–there’s one example here–arbitrarily.
Outside Gaza, governments have done little. The European Union and the United Kingdom have little influence over Israel, though there have recently been diplomatic moves to try to exert some pressure. The United States, the only western power that the Israeli government might listen to, has emphasized Israel’s right to self-defence–even when its military action seems to go far beyond that.
In a post on the conflict in January 2024, I argued that, ‘In the longer term, the conduct of the current war in Gaza will breed a new generation of Palestinians willing to take up arms against Israel.’
To that I now add the guarantee that starvation in Gaza will shame, for decades to come, those who stood by and allowed Gazans to starve.
A detail of an Israeli fortification behind a destroyed building, Gaza, October 2003 Photo © James Rodgers