“Gaza still hasn’t run out of food despite having only two days’ worth of food for, what, seven months?”
Meitar, May 19 – Months of repeated false alarms about the food supply in Hamas-governed territory have neutralized a local parent’s go-to scolding to get her son to consume all the food she prepared for him, family sources reported today.
A mother in this middle-class community has found in the last seven months that her attempts to engage her six-year-old’s sense of appreciation and appetite by noting that not too far away, children do not enjoy ready access to good food, unlike he does, have met with complete failure, now that not a single case of malnutrition or starvation has featured among the grim statistics coming the Gaza Strip.
“Mom has really been deprived of her chief vehicle to get my brother to eat by inducing guilt,” acknowledged the mother’s oldest child, a teenage girl. “Until a couple of months ago, it was more or less reflexive for her to counter my brother’s refusal to eat up by reminding him how lucky he is to have food, not like those poor children starving over in Gaza. But the boy-who-cried-wolf of the NGOs, media, and biased political actors who keep warning that Gaza is about to run out of food, and then Gaza still hasn’t run out of food despite having only two days’ worth of food for, what, seven months? You can see how that might undermine the message.”
The mother herself now feels out of options. “I could talk about the children starving in Sudan, I suppose,” she admitted. “Or Yemen. But I never think of those in the moment. The media never talk about them. It’s Gaza Gaza Gaza all the time, and it gives the impression that nothing important is happening anywhere else in the world.”
She recalled her own mother’s admonitions decades ago, but without remembering the specific place or places that featured as the locale of the starving children. “Whoever as starving then, they’re not starving anymore, because they’d be dead by now, after all that starving,” she reasoned. “But that logic seems not to apply to Gaza. It’s the only place I’ve ever heard that’s starving to death but not dying of starvation for months on end. Sounds like a medical miracle.”
The six-year-old provided a different understanding of events. “I hate leftover chicken and he always serves that like twice a week,” he complained. “If she’s s worried about the children in Gaza, send the chicken there.”
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