Alvaro

During Ramadan, a charity kitchen gave out three thousand meals a day. Rice, meat- nothing extravagant, but enough to keep people moving, if only barely. The line was always long: barefoot children, hollow-eyed mothers. Then the food dwindled. First the meat. Then the rice. Then the silence. Today, there was nothing. The door stayed shut. A small boy stood closest, holding his container like something holy. His voice barely rose above the dust: “No rice today?” A man in a stained vest shook his head. No words. Just the gesture, final, like a curtain closing on a funeral no one attended. There were no tears left. No surprise. Hunger had become the atmosphere. The children drifted away. Some wandered aimlessly, still clutching their pots. Others returned to ruined homes, tents, hollow rooms with no glass in the windows. The sun burned. Nothing had changed. Their mothers waited, not with hope, but with the resignation of those who’ve made peace with cruelty. A mother doesn’t scream when there’s no food. She listens for her child’s empty return and prepares to say something kind with nothing in her hands. That night, the children slept, or something like it. The body shuts down what it can spare. Dreams were rare. The starving do not imagine. In the photo taken later, their faces showed nothing. Not because they felt nothing, but because feeling had long turned inward, into bone, into soul. And in that emptiness, something vast appeared: That children can starve under an open sky, and no one will come. That hunger is not the only absence. That you can cry out until even God becomes an echo. They would wake again. Wait again. And the days would go on, not because it made sense, but because no one remained to say otherwise. #GazaGenocide‌