Maha Hussaini@MahaGaza
At some point of Israel’s starvation of Gaza, hunger stopped being just physical, and started to erode the mind. You would see people wandering aimlessly, not even asking for food anymore. Children stopped playing. Conversations became quieter, slower. People forgot certain tastes. The memory of sweetness faded.
Cravings for anything sweet became so intense that mothers began sharing stories, and sometimes recordings, of their children begging for larger doses of liquid medicine, simply because it tasted slightly sweet. After months of deprivation, they just wanted to experience the taste of sugar again.
Some residents, thinking outside the box, started selling ice cream made from children’s liquid antibiotics, since it contained sugar and a bit of flavour. Everyone knew what it was made of, and that it could be harmful. But people still bought it - including me - because it was the only sweet thing left in a landscape of tasteless survival food. No one was eating for pleasure anymore; we were eating to stay alive.
When people talk about starvation, they often think only of empty stomachs. But starvation is not just a bodily affliction. It eats away at the human spirit. It robs people of memory, emotion and clarity.
Days pass in a fog, filled with survival tasks: fetching water, searching for something to eat, waiting in endless lines, watching others faint beside you.
Some children became unrecognisable; their limbs thin and movements weak, their faces pale and expressionless. Parents, especially mothers, carry unbearable guilt - not just for failing to feed their children, but for the mere act of bringing them into this world, and for beginning to lose themselves, forgetting how to provide comfort.
But as we awoke this week to find crates of sugar, dates and cheese in our local markets, Gaza sounded different. The laughter of taxi drivers - known for their grumpy complaining in times of crisis - rang through the streets. A shift in the city’s mood was almost visible. People described it as a feast after prolonged fasting.
“It feels like Eid,” one Palestinian journalist wrote on social media. “We had tea with sugar and cheese manakeesh.”
Others shared photos and stories of drinking tea with sugar for the first time in months.
The prices remain painfully high, because the amount of goods allowed in is still a fraction of what people need. Regardless, the mere sight of food and the scent of sugar in the markets - the possibility of choice, however limited - was enough to stir something long buried.
It was not normality. But it was enough to remind us that we are still human, after nearly two years of genocide and a siege that Israel said it was imposing on “human animals”.
On my way to work on Thursday morning, street vendors were selling pressed dates by the piece. I bought one and held it in my hand until I reached my office building.
As I climbed the stairs, internally grumbling about having to ascend two more flights after my long walk in the scorching sun, I popped the date into my mouth - and immediately, the sugar hit.
I stopped in the middle of the stairs, closed my eyes, and sighed in relief for the first time in months: “Where have you been all these months, sweet taste? Oh, I’m willing to forget everything that has happened. I’m willing to climb the two floors. I think I can handle the current situation a bit longer now.”
Apparently, dopamine does its job faster when it has been absent for too long. I finished the date, and a few moments later, came back to my senses after being briefly “sugar drunk”.
Now I understand. This is what they are fighting us with: dopamine.
This is the energy they are rapidly draining from the bodies of an entire population. You cannot push a people determined to resist your attempts at forced expulsion unless you first strip them of life, hope and energy.
Full article: middleeasteye.net/opinion/gaza-g…
