Low-Tech

These daily massacres are being enacted on a population who is experiencing what the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) describes as the “worst-case scenario of famine.”

Think about what happens to the starving bodies of children. In the body, the digestive system slows and children's growth and development stall. Heart rate slows, blood pressure drops, body temperature falls. The body begins to consume its own organs, muscles, and bones. The immune system is weakened.

Think about children who are being brutally injured and denied sanitary conditions while starving. Malnutrition directly increases the likelihood of bones breaking and infections like pneumonia, diarrhea, measles, and sepsis. According to Dr. Aqsa Durrani (a physician and epidemiologist who worked this spring at a trauma field hospital in Gaza treating victims of airstrikes) when children are malnourished, even their surgical incisions cannot heal properly because their bodies don't have enough protein to rebuild the tissue. (Time, Jul 31, 2025, "The Medical Consequences of Starvation")

The only means of survival is buying food from markets where there is extreme price gouging, making the smallest amounts continuously more and more expensive the longer Israel prevents aid from reaching Gaza.

My friend Mahrah (@mahrahpalestine) is living in Gaza right now under these conditions. Her parents are losing weight rapidly as they starve. She was studying to be an engineer at Al-Azhar University, and over the course of this war, she is not only losing everything she had, but losing her opportunities. She dreamed of using her skills to rebuild Palestine and support her community. She writes, "My future is what is being lost. I am supposed to focus on my studies, but famine keeps us away from everything."

Her brother Mahmoud is in Egypt, doing everything he can to get her donations to survive, and they miss each other. They need to survive long enough to meet again.

Mahrah's family's fundraiser has been vetted by 90-ghost and shared by fairuzfan. Please support them. They are subsisting on the food they can buy each week with donations.

PHANTOM SUMMONED is a collaborative Dark Souls 2 art zine focusing on the game's many memorable NPC phantom summons. What they lack in dialogue and backstory, they make up for in making our journey through Drangleic just a little bit less lonely. Contains 20 pages of black and white illustrations from 8 participating artists, a must have for all the ds2 loreheads out there!