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When I was younger, I was always taught that breakfast was the most significant meal. It gives you the energy to keep going the whole day. In my family, breakfast would be a regular occurrence.

Of course, that was in the past. For weeks now, we have had hardly anything to eat. A warm loaf of bread dipped in thyme and oil and a slice of cheese have been in my dreams.

Instead, I start a new day of genocide with a tasteless, nearly-expired “not-for-sale WFP fortified biscuit,” which I purchased for $1.50.

I have been following the news recently and have started to feel that my wish for something other than a World Food Programme (WFP) biscuit may soon be fulfilled.

The Palestinians in Gaza have reportedly gotten sick of being told they are starving in the United States. It has now decided to put an end to the hunger, or at least the obnoxious complaints about it.

And so, with unshakeable confidence and pride in its own ingenuity, the US government has announced a new mechanism for delivering food to Gaza. By the end of May, the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” is rumored to be set to resume food distribution and distribute “300 million meals,” an extraordinary name that has been added to our genocide vocabulary of NGOs and charities. Israel has volunteered to support the “humanitarian” process while continuing to murder people.

While this new feeding “mechanism” is being set up, the Israeli government, “under US pressure”, announced that it will let in “a basic quantity of food” in order to prevent “the development of a hunger crisis”, international media reported. Only a week will be allotted for the resume.

We are not at all surprised by these announcements here in Gaza, where the hunger crisis is already “well-developed.” We are well used to Israel – with foreign backing – turning on and off the “food button” as it pleases.

Our Israeli inmates have been rationing our food so that we can never go beyond the level of survival, where we have been imprisoned for years. They made a public declaration to the world long before this genocide that they were keeping us on a diet and counting our calories so we wouldn’t die but instead suffer. This was not a fleeting penalty, it was an official government policy.

Anyone who fought back against the blockade from the outside who was driven by basic humanity was attacked, even killed.

Some claim that there was no reason for the trucks to be allowed to enter. True, they were. They frequently, however, were not, especially when we, the prisoners, were found to have behaved improperly.

I’ve been told that my neighborhood bakery has been shut down numerous times because there isn’t enough cooking gas, or that my favorite cheese has been turned down because our jail guards have decided it’s a “dual-use” item and can’t enter Gaza.

We were good at growing our own food, but we could not do much of that either because much of our fertile soil was near the prison fence, and hence out of reach. Although we enjoyed fishing, it was also closely monitored and restricted. You could get shot if you traveled beyond the shore.

All of this humiliating, calculated blockade was taking place well before October 7, 2023.

After that day, Gaza’s food intake drastically decreased. Even though I’ve lived under the Israeli blockade since I was born, I still felt the shackles of the blockade on Gaza more perceptible than ever. For the first time, I found myself struggling to secure something as basic as bread. The world will undoubtedly not allow this to continue, I recall thinking.

The struggle has only gotten worse, 19 months later, 590 days later.

On March 2, Israel banned all food and other aid from entering Gaza. We are now more and more nostalgic about the earlier stages of the crisis, when the suffering was milder tolerable.

For instance, we could still have tomatoes in our cans a few weeks ago because our stomach-rotting canned beans were still available. But now, vegetable vendors are nowhere to be found.

I’d like to re-experience the slight disgust at the sight of worms squirming through infested flour because it would allow my mother to make bread again because both bakeries have closed and flour has almost all but stopped. Finding unrequited fava beans is all I could hope for now, in my opinion.

I recognise that others still have it much worse than I do. The struggle to find food is agonizing for parents of young children.

Take, for instance, my barber. When I last went to him for a haircut two weeks ago, he looked exhausted.

“Wish you a thought. Bread hasn’t been eaten in a while. Whatever flour I manage to buy every few days, I save for my children. I only consume what is necessary to survive and not feel hungry. Simply put, I don’t understand why the world treats them this way. If we are not worthy of life in their eyes, then at least have mercy on our hungry children. He said, “It’s okay if they want to starve us, but not our children.”

After 19 months of continuous Israeli killing, this may seem like a cruel sacrifice, but it is what parenting has evolved to. Parents are consumed by fear, not just for their children’s safety, but for the possibility that their children might be bombed while hungry. Every home and tent-hold in Gaza are in adolescence.

The famine-spreading landscape in the few barely functioning hospitals is even scarier. Babies and children looking like skeletons lie on hospital beds, malnourished mothers sit by them.

Daily sightings of abused Palestinian children have become commonplace. Even though we are having trouble finding food, seeing them breaks our hearts. We want to help. Perhaps a can of peas could change things, in our opinion. What can peas do, however, for a child who appears to be a fragile shell of skin and bones and has marasmus?

Meanwhile, the world sits in silence, watching Israel block aid and deliver bombs and asking questions in disbelief.

One of Gaza City’s busiest streets, al-Wehda Street, was bombed on May 7 by the Israeli army. A functioning restaurant was hit by one missile as it approached a street vendor intersection. At least 33 Palestinians were killed.

Online images of a pizza table covered in one of the victims’ blood were posted. The bloodbath did not draw attention to the pizza scene in Gaza, which attracted international attention. The world demanded answers: how can you be in a famine when you can order pizza?

In the midst of genocidal famine, there are indeed vendors and eateries. vendors who charge $25 for a can of beans and $25 for a kilogram of flour. A restaurant where the smallest and most expensive pizza slice in the world is served — a piece of bad-quality dough, cheese, and the blood of those who craved it.

To convince people of our worthiness, we must explain the existence of pizza. While tons of life-saving aid is awaiting at the border crossings to be allowed into and distributed by already fully operational aid organizations, the outline of an abstract US plan to feed us seems reasonable to this world.

We in Gaza have seen PR exercises masked as “humanitarian action” before. We are able to identify the airdrops, which were causing more deaths than feeding. We recall the $ 230m pier, which lacked the resources to transport 500 truckloads of aid from the sea to Gaza, which could have been accomplished via an open land crossing in half a day.

We in Gaza are hungry, but we are no fools. Israel’s permission, according to US law, means that it can only starve and murder us. Washington is aware that its top priorities are not to stop the genocide. We know that we are hostages not just of Israel, but also of the US.

Not just famine, but also the fear of outsiders arriving under the guise of aid, which will help lay the groundwork for colonization, are what keep us haunted. I am certain that my people won’t be harmed by the use of food, even if the US plan is carried out and even if we are permitted to eat before Israel’s upcoming bombing.

Israel, the US, and the world should understand that we will not trade land for calories. Even when we are exhausted, we will liberate our nation.

Aamina spends her days confined, and managing her children’s confinement.

The 30-something-year-old feels lucky to have made friends in the Roj detention camp, a group of Somali-British detainees who taught her English and help her look after her children, a favour she reciprocates.

Their living arrangement is a bit better than others, too, thanks to the money her extended family sends her.

She used $150 to buy an additional tent, setting the two up to create a small inner courtyard where her seven-year-old son can run around and expend some of his boundless energy.

They also have a television, on which the children watch nature documentaries – a “window to the outside world” for children who have known nothing but detention camps their entire lives.

Whenever they see a new animal or landscape, the children are full of wonder and questions, and her eldest, a nine-year-old girl, picks up her colours to draw dramatic and abstract interpretations of the world outside the camp.

Aamiina is their constant companion, even homeschooling them with books she borrows from the camp’s educational facility.

She had liked school as a kid, especially history class, and it makes her sad that her children do not feel safe going to the camp school because the teachers scream at them, and the other kids always want to fight.

Trying to create a sense of normalcy, she makes dinner every night as her son watches cartoons after his lessons.

Using whatever she has available, she experiments with recipes, a passion she developed in the camp.

She manages to rustle up quite a few dishes in her rudimentary cooking space, sometimes making her favourite, lasagne, or the children’s favourite, pancakes. When she is feeling homesick, she will make Swedish meatballs.

As smells waft out from her cooking space, she can usually count on one or both of their cats to come and investigate.

An animal lover all her life, Aamiina had adopted the two cats in the camp, taking care of them, playing with them, and keeping them around her and the children, who love them dearly.

Overall, things in Roj are marginally better than they were in the al-Hol detention camp, a three-hour drive to the south, where she and the children spent the first year and a half of their captivity.

But in early 2025, the guards in Roj seemed to get jumpy, raiding more tents and, she heard, even shooting a woman in the hand for trying to smuggle herself out.

One night in February, it was taking her longer than usual to get her two daughters and son to bed.

They had heard a visitor was coming to see them the next day, and were excited to meet someone from outside the camp.

Then, camp security raided their tent, frightening the children, who took even longer to fall asleep.

The next morning, when guards arrived to take them to meet Al Jazeera in the administration office, they felt scared and decided to stay with their neighbours instead.

Aamiina pulled on a face mask and headed out with the guards into the damp, windy day.

The tension in the sparsely furnished administration office was palpable.

Aamiina, softly spoken and slightly built, fidgeted with her mask as she introduced herself in English, exchanging glances with a stone-faced female guard.

She had forgotten all her Swedish in the more than 10 years she spent in Syria, she said.

Still nervous, she started talking about herself, sharing a brief account of how she travelled from Somalia to Sweden as an unaccompanied minor when she was 11 and was granted permanent residency shortly after.

She spent seven years in her adopted homeland before travelling to ISIL-controlled territory in 2014, when she was 20, a decision she said she would not speak about.

Aamiina said she has done her best with the children, but is mindful that their chances of integrating into a society outside the camp diminish rapidly as they grow older. She believes they must leave the camp soon if they are to stand a chance of living a normal life.

“It’s sad because I came from Sweden. I don’t even have Somali citizenship. [The children] are Swedish… and they are supposed to be there,” she said.

Then, with the guard distracted for a minute, Aamiina suddenly began speaking urgently in fluent Swedish.

“They [the guards] play nice now, but that’s not how they are with us,” she said. “My son can’t go to the camp fence because he says they’ll shoot him.”

Roj, where 2,600 women and children are held, is a smaller and marginally cleaner version of the al-Hol camp, which holds about 40,000 people displaced by ISIL or related to ISIL fighters.

But it has poor sanitation and lacks access to health services, Aamiina said, adding that her eldest daughter has been chronically fatigued and underweight for years.

The charity Save the Children paid for medical tests at a nearby hospital, but the results were inconclusive.

“If we were back in Sweden, I’m sure we could find out what’s wrong with her in a day,” she added.

As the meeting drew to a close and camp guards ushered her out, she whispered: “Please try and meet my husband.

The artisanal Rubaya mining site, which is nestled among the green hills of Masisi territory in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), hums with generators as hundreds of men labor hand-to-export coltan, a crucial mineral used to manufacture modern electronics and defense technology.

Rubaya, a mineral-rich region of the Central African nation that has long been a source of conflict between government forces and various armed groups, including the Rwanda-backed M23, whose recent resurgence has caused the violence to become even more severe.

Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi has negotiated a deal with the Trump administration that would grant him access to minerals in exchange for his assistance in halting the armed uprising and boosting security as the US leads peace talks between Rwanda and the DRC.

Analysts speculated that Rubaya might be one of the mining sites that fall under the purview of the deal, though more details are still undetermined.

The Eastern DRC has endured decades of crisis. More than 7 million people have been displaced due to the conflict, including 100, 000 of the 100,000 who have fled their homes this year, making it one of the largest humanitarian crises in the world.

The Congolese government and rebel groups have been engaged in fighting between the Rubaya mines.

The M23 rebels have controlled the mines for more than a year, leading to a major escalation of hostilities when they advanced and took control of Goma and Bukavu earlier this year.

More than 70% of Congolese people can survive on less than $2.15 per day despite having extraordinary mineral wealth.

Little has changed for the men who depend on mining for their livelihoods in Rubaya’s mines over the years.

Jean Baptiste Bigirimana, a miner for seven years, said, “I earn $40 per month, but that’s not enough.”

Children require education, clothing, and food. He said, “I realize it’s not enough when I divide the money up to look after my children,” adding that he is unsure of where the minerals he mines end up.

The metals tantalum and niobium are extracted from an ore known as coltan, which stands for columbite-tantalite. Both China, Japan, and the United States view them as crucial raw materials.

Tantalum is used in GPS systems, mobile phones, computers, and other automotive electronics, as well as in aircraft engines and other missile components. Pipelines, rockets, and jet engines use niobium.

According to the US Geological Survey, the DRC provided about 40% of the world’s carbon in 2023, with additional significant suppliers coming from Australia, Canada, and Brazil.

The M23 has imposed taxes on the monthly trade and transport of 120 tonnes of coltan, generating at least $800,000 a month, since seizing Rubaya in April of last year, according to a UN report.

Coltrane’s arrival in Western nations is not simple, according to experts.

Analysts warn that if a mineral deal were to be implemented in the eastern DRC, there would be many obstacles, especially given that US investors have largely abandoned the nation in the last 20 years.

US companies would have to deal with security concerns as well as a severe lack of infrastructure if the deal included Rubaya, where all mining is currently done manually.

Regardless of who controls the mines, Bahati Moise, a trader who resells coltan from Rubaya’s mines, hopes that the miners’ workers will eventually be valued just as much as the resources themselves.