A bag of flour. Photo: Ahmed Dremly

I watched a video last week that I wish I couldn’t see: A small boy, no older than 9, crying over the body of his martyred mother in front of a journalist’s camera. His eyes were red, his shoulders shaking, dust still clinging to his face. In another video, he testified, “My mother came back to us with her shroud instead of a bag of flour.”

That boy is Ahmad Mohammed Zaidan. And I haven’t been able to forget his face since. His mother had left that day just to get food. That’s all: a little flour, a few canned goods, if she got lucky. But she never returned. She was killed in western Rafah, surrounded by gunfire, panic, and chaos.

Ahmed’s mother was only trying to feed her children. But like so many others, she became a victim of what the world dares to call the American “humanitarian aid.”

Ahmed’s tearful face was shared on the news, across social media, and around the world. But for him, it wasn’t a story, it wasn’t content, it was the moment his world collapsed.

Aid massacres

When the first Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) site opened on May 26, 2025, it came with bold promises. It was billed as the solution. It consists of four centralized aid hubs (in contrast to the UN’s 400 distribution points prior to Israel’s humanitarian aid blockade), guarded by U.S. private contractors, coordinated with Israeli oversight, and allegedly designed to bring order to Gaza’s hunger crisis.

According to Israeli and U.S. officials’ claims, aid was supposed to flow safely to the most vulnerable. But just two days later, tanks, tear gas, and bullets greeted the crowds who gathered in Rafah. Instead of food, they found death. On August 1, 2025, the UN reported that over 1,373 Palestinians have been killed and more than 4,000 wounded at aid sites. Mothers, children, and elders are all caught between hunger and bullets.

It’s hard to explain the feeling of being watched while trying to survive, of having your basic needs locked behind fences, guards, and guns. And with any wrong move, you could be shot. It’s a line between hunger and death and most of us are forced to stand on it.

‘Forgive me’

Israa,* age 28, is from Khan Younis. Now she lives in a tent in Al-Mawasi—a so-called “safe zone” that doesn’t feel safe at all. Her family was forced to flee months ago. “We lost our house,” she told me. “But losing Abdullah… that broke something deeper.”

Abdullah Hammad was her cousin, 31 years old, an orphan who raised his younger brother and sister like a father. “He was the one who held us together,” she said. “Even when we scattered.”

He worked as a cleaner, even during the war—one of the few still earning anything. Doctors Without Borders hired him when everything else shut down. He was engaged to be married at the end of July. “She was sewing her dress,” Israa said. “Now she sleeps next to the bag containing his clothes.”

On July 3, 2025, Abdullah went to the American aid center in Khan Younis. He went there almost every day. “Not because he wanted to,” Israa said, “but because he had to. There was no other way to feed the family.”

That day, an Israeli artillery shell struck the crowd. Abdullah was killed instantly. “It wasn’t random,” Israa said. “They were aiming at the people. He told us before he left,‘If I don’t come back today, forgive me.’ It’s like he knew. Like he could feel it.”

When the news came, the family went silent. “We still don’t believe it. He wanted a home. A wedding. A peaceful life. He had plans. He had a future.”

I asked her why people still go to those centers. She didn’t hesitate. “Because we’re starving. What do you expect people to do? Stay home and watch their kids cry from hunger? What’s worse—dying slowly, or dying all at once?”

Before we ended, I asked if she had anything she wanted the world to know. “Tell them he wasn’t just another body. Tell them Abdullah had dreams. A fiancée. A date on the calendar. A kind heart. He was human. We all are. But the world doesn’t treat us like that anymore.”

It’s a trap

Sameh,* age 40, is from Beit Lahia. Before the war, he worked as a writer for Al-Raya newspaper and the Ma’an News Agency. Now, he’s unemployed and displaced in a tent in Al-Shati refugee camp with his wife and three children. When I spoke to him, he didn’t start with anger. He started with exhaustion, the kind that comes from hunger, from fear, from waiting in line not for bread, but for a chance at it.

“They starved us for over 100 days,” Sameh told me. “No food was allowed in. Nothing. Then they opened these so-called American aid centers protected by Israeli soldiers. It’s not food. It’s a trap.”

He was talking about the GHF centers. Sameh made his way to the Wadi Gaza center near Netzarim in the middle of the Gaza Strip.  “It was like a playground surrounded by barbed wire, and the aid was inside. They open the gate at random. No one knows when. It could be in the morning or at night. A green flare means the center is open. Red means it’s closed. If it’s daytime, you hear a drone announce it. And that’s when the chaos begins.”

Sameh described how people—sometimes 20,000 to 30,000 at a time—wait all day in the heat. When the gate opens, they surge forward, crashing through barbed wire, trampling over each other, trying to grab whatever they can from the aid.

He said it never lasts more than 10 minutes. “I’ve gone twice. The first time, I left with nothing. The second time, I found a few things on the ground—a kilo of lentils, a kilo of chickpeas, a kilo of peas, and some salt. That’s what I brought home to my kids.”

Sameh told me that only about 10% of these people actually get anything. Organized gangs always push to the front, looting the best items—flour, sugar, oil—and then reselling them at outrageous prices.

He said the Israeli army watches and lets it happen. In fact, it feels like they want it that way. “There’s no safety. No system. Just weapons, fear, and starvation. The gangs take what they want. The rest of us crawl on the ground like animals. That’s what they have turned us into.”

Sameh has seen more than just hunger. “I saw a young man next to me get shot in the leg. He fell down and screamed, but no one could help him—they were too busy trying to grab food. Another time, a boy no older than 17—he was right next to me—took a sniper bullet between the eyes. Dead. Just like that. Another guy next to him was hit in the chest.”

Sameh paused before adding something that shook me. “You know what? I’d rather die trying to feed my children than watch them die of hunger in front of me. I have no money. I can’t buy anything. If I don’t go, we starve. If I do go, I might not come back.”

He said Israel allows this violence to continue because it wants disorder. When trucks entered through Netzarim or Zikim in the north, he said, Gazan families organized secure delivery to UN warehouses.

It worked—until Israel blocked it. “They don’t want dignity. They want panic,” he told me. “These centers are just a show. They open them so the world can say, ‘Look, Gaza is getting help.’ But what does that help even mean if we can’t reach it? If we have to risk our lives just to get a bag of flour? What kind of aid is this, if we can’t even survive the line to receive it?”

Creating monsters

Sabri* is 25. He’s the oldest of five, and ever since his father died, he’s had no choice but to become everything—brother, provider, protector. He studied engineering at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) and used to work as a freelancer to support his family. But when they fled, he had to leave his laptop behind. Their house was later destroyed, and now he’s no longer able to work or find a way to help his family.

“I walked from Al-Shati camp to Rafah,” he said. “I left at 4 in the afternoon. I didn’t get back until 3 the next day.” Twenty-three hours. All of that—the walking, the waiting, the risk—for just three kilos of flour. But it’s not just the distance, it’s what you face when you get there.

Sabri told me the crowds form in layers. “At the front, there are groups of people who come to take the most valuable stuff and throw the rest on the ground,” he said. “They’re not like us. It’s easy to label them, but in a place where law and order have collapsed, people do what they can to survive — even if it means taking from others.”

Behind them, a few desperate people try to collect what’s left. And the ones who truly need the aid? They usually leave empty-handed. Sabri was one of them. “Some people don’t even go for food,” he told me. “They just collect the empty cardboard boxes to burn as firewood.”

He said he was lucky this time. He got something. But that luck came with a price. “The shooting started in front of me. People were screaming and trying to cover. But I stayed. Because my brothers were hungry. What else could I do?”

Hunger doesn’t scare him anymore, not the way the silence at home does, when his siblings look at him with tired faces, waiting for food. “I didn’t care if I died. I just wanted to come back with something.

“This war—this way of helping—it’s made monsters out of people. People kill each other for a sack of flour. That’s what they’ve done to us.”

He says that it’s normal now. Like that’s what life should be: risking death for food.

But it’s not normal. Nothing about this is.

Insects creeping out of the flour. Photo: Ahmed Dremly

It feels like a game, but we are not playing. What kind of help is this? Where feeding your family feels like breaking the law; where aid comes wrapped in barbed wire and guarded by snipers; where people must risk their lives just to eat.

If the world truly wants to help Gaza, start by treating us like human beings.

We don’t need pity, we need protection; we need a future; we want to live, not die trying to eat.

We are not players in a game; we are not your footage; we are not actors in a show, we are not numbers on a screen.

At the end of the international series “Squid Game,” the player 456 whispers: “We are not horses. We are humans. Humans are…”

He never finishes. Neither do we. Because in Gaza, we’re never given the chance.

*Last names have been withheld to protect their safety.