Hospitals in the Gaza Strip reported on Tuesday that 15 people have died as a result of hunger and malnutrition in the past 24 hours, including four children. This brings the total number of people who have died from hunger and malnutrition in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war to 101, of which 80 are children.

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On Friday, officials at Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital said that "hundreds of patients are arriving with severe hunger symptoms, including children and infants in critical condition."

Dr. Suhaib Al-Hams, director of the field hospital in the Al-Mawasi humanitarian zone, warned of an impending "wave of deaths" due to organ failure among displaced individuals.

"The cases reaching us are of people who collapsed in the streets from lack of nutrition. All of them need food even before medicine," he said.

Hundreds of people are reportedly suffering from exhaustion, severe malnutrition and memory loss, all of which are symptoms of prolonged starvation.

On Sunday, the Gaza Health Ministry said at least 67 Palestinians were killed while seeking humanitarian aid in the northern Gaza Strip. The day prior, 32 Gazans were killed after Israeli forces opened fire near a Gaza Humanitarian Foundation facility in Khan Yunis.

Eyewitnesses and local sources said Israeli troops surrounded the area, where thousands of Palestinians had assembled in an attempt to reach a food distribution center, and began firing live ammunition toward the crowd.

Since October 2023, Ahmed Najar's family has been displaced 7 times under Israeli bombardment in Gaza. His mother is disabled; she cannot walk.

Each time they were forced to flee, they moved her using a donkey. Because Israel bombed the roads, destroyed vehicles, and cut off fuel, that donkey was their only lifeline.

Now Israeli soldiers are entering Gaza and taking the donkeys. Flying them out to France. Rescuing them to sanctuaries inside Israel. Loading them into trucks, while families that depended on them are left behind, starving and under siege.

"To rescue a donkey while denying a human being water is not mercy – it is a message. That your suffering is invisible. That your life is disposable. That even your beasts of burden are worth more than you.

What kind of state uses animal rights as a PR tool while carrying out what has been widely described by human rights organizations and experts as genocidal attacks on the very people those animals once served?" said Ahmed Najar.

A public performance of morality while people rot under rubble. While children die of dehydration. While the wounded lie untreated. Donkeys are airlifted to safety. Palestinians are left to die in tents.

And when Israel takes them away under the banner of "rescue," it is definitely not offering mercy but tightening the noose.

Virginia Woolf’s bedroom at Monk House