Starving Palestinians In Yarmouk Camp Just Thrilled Barghouti Eating Wafers

“Israel isn’t providing enough channels of satellite TV? Well, yeah, come on. That’s like basic stuff.”

Damascus, May 8 – Remaining residents of the besieged Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of the Syrian capital voiced satisfaction that a hunger-striking leader has been sneaking chocolaty snacks while they starve, and that his political stunt has garnered more international attention by far than their prolonged misery.

Yarmouk residents, whose numbers in the camp have plummeted from over 100,000 before the Syrian Civil War to under 10,000 today, suffer constant aerial and artillery bombardment, and a military tug-of-war has seen the camp change hands multiple times over the last several years. Palestinian militias in the camp backing Syrian President Assad’s government initially clashed with the Free Syrian Army, followed eventually by infighting among multiple Islamist groups, including Al-Qaeda and Islamic State-allied groups, the latter of which currently control most of the camp despite the bombardments. The Syrian army’s ongoing siege has made starvation, disease, and lack of medical care rampant in Yarmouk, and the few Palestinians left in its confines offered aspiring Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti congratulations today on his decision to scarf a chocolate-covered wafer on the toilet in his prison cell Friday in the midst of a hunger strike he declared in the Op-ed pages of the new York Times two weeks ago.

“A man has to eat to keep up his strength, as we well know,” gushed a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command fighter named Mustafa Snaq. “And his hunger strike is crucial – I don’t know where the Palestinian people would be without it. Me, I haven’t seen a packaged wafer, let alone a chocolate-covered one, in four years.” He added that it had been approximately that long, as well, since he had last sat on a working toilet.

“More power to him,” declared Willeet Fissis, a member of Aknaf Beit Al-Maqdis, Hamas-affiliated militia. “Remind me again why he’s depriving himself of food? Israel isn’t providing enough channels of satellite TV? Well, yeah, come on. That’s like basic stuff. It makes sense that the world media are giving him all the attention. I mean, we’ve only been beaten and starved for like six years, so a little patience and humility are what we need to exercise right now, you know what I’m saying? By the way, do you have maybe some leather I can chew on? Wallpaper paste? It might make me forget I haven’t eaten in four days.”

The hundreds of Palestinians who died of starvation at the camp in 2014 alone were unavailable for comment.

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