Maryam: Story of Small Body Driven to Slow Death by Zionist Enemy’s Starvation

Gaza city: Although she is nine years old, her body appears to belong to a three- or four-year-old girl. In Gaza City, lying in the "Friends of the Sick" hospital, lies Maryam Dawas. Her hunger tells a chapter in the tragedy of more than two million people starving in a genocide perpetrated by the Israeli enemy in the besieged Gaza Strip. According to Yemen News Agency, Maryam lies with a thin body unable to move, exhausted by the starvation practiced by the Zionist enemy against more than two million and four hundred thousand people in the besieged Palestinian Strip, with American partnership, Western complicity, and suspicious international and regional silence. Maryam lost more than half her body weight during the 22 months of the ongoing Zionist war of extermination and starvation, dropping from 25 kilograms to only about 10.5 kilograms. Her protruding bones and lack of food, care, and medicine are not unique among Gaza's children, but they make her body a painful witness to one of the most brutal chapt ers of starvation and genocide perpetrated by the Zionist enemy in full view of the entire world in modern history. Her mother recounted Maryam's suffering to the Turkish Anadolu Agency, despite repeated attempts to treat her in hospitals and provide her with therapeutic milk and medical butter. Her starving mother, a displaced person from Beit Lahia who resides in a shelter west of the city, described how Maryam began to gradually lose weight over the past year and a half. In a voice exhausted by fear, anxiety, and hunger, the starving child's mother added, "Maryam is fading away in front of me, and no one is saving her. We no longer have food or therapeutic milk." She adds, "Even when we were able to admit her to the hospital last month, her condition did not improve, she stayed there for a full month, receiving therapeutic milk, but she left with the same weight and thinness." Umm Maryam points out that the aid entering the Gaza Strip, despite its scarcity, often does not reach those who deserve it and is stolen according to a systematic and deliberate policy pursued by the Zionist enemy, in partnership with the United States and the West. A report issued by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza confirms that the number of victims of the starvation policy pursued by the Zionist enemy has risen to 180 martyrs, including 93 children, it also notes that five citizens died in the last 24 hours alone as a result of starvation and severe malnutrition. While the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) described the situation in Gaza as tragic, it warned that children are dying at an "unprecedented" rate due to the policy of starvation and genocide. Inside a small hospital room, Maryam continues her silent struggle against starvation, while her starving mother also struggles to cling to hope. She appeals to the world: This is a child... She does not deserve to die this way... Aid is a right for every human being... Would you have remained silent if this were happening outside of Gaza? Why don't you force th e enemy to deliver her to us?! Maryam's tragedy is not an isolated incident, nor a societal phenomenon. Rather, it represents the genocide of more than two million people at the hands of a brutal enemy that has turned starvation into yet another weapon with which to kill an entire people, with American and Western partnership, regional complicity, and a disturbing international and humanitarian silence.