Palestinians Do Not Feed On Pity

More Palestinians have now been killed while seeking aid than were killed on October 7, 2023.

More Palestinians have now been killed while seeking aid than were killed on October 7, 2023. Imagine that for a moment. More people murdered not in battle, not in crossfire, but while waiting, often barefoot, hungry, unarmed, for bags of flour and bottles of water. A new economy has emerged in Gaza, but it trades not in supply and demand, nor in production or capital. It trades in suffering. And it is administered. There are lists, clearances, biometric scans, UN trucks, and bulldozed roads where children once walked to school. There are checkpoints that function less like gates and more like guillotines, deciding who eats and who doesn’t. And there are thousands, tens of thousands, who wait in line anyway, because to wait is to live another day.

But sometimes the line itself is the end. More than 800 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces while attempting to receive humanitarian “aid” in the last month. What is the word for that? It is not war. It is not even cruelty. It is a design. This system of managed famine, orchestrated dependency, and humiliation masquerading as relief is not accidental. It is a weapon. And it tells a deeper story: not just of colonial violence, but of the reconfiguration of humanitarianism itself.