The famine we are experiencing in Gaza has a face beyond hunger. When chaos devours the faces of the starving, and Israeli brutality manifests in shattering what remains of our collective spirit, it feels as if all the world’s evil has converged into a single moment, lurking within us, waiting to pounce in moments of weakness.

We have endured harsh periods in our history, but what is happening today, at the heart of a genocidal war, resembles nothing we’ve known before: a cruelty without bounds and an unprecedented breakdown of social relationships.

Many say this is natural: that in a fight for survival, human instinct drives us to self-preservation. But even if the values of solidarity crumble and looting groups emerge to exploit the chaos — chaos deliberately fueled by Israel — we are no longer facing isolated cases of misery. We are witnessing the transformation of entire groups into gangs that control markets and ravage what remains of our human ethics.

Gaza has never seen days more brutal than those it is living now, under the weight of war and famine. But hunger alone doesn’t kill. What’s even more dangerous is the erosion of our communal fabric, the disintegration of solidarity, and the turning of widespread vulnerability into a jungle where only those who steal, loot, and dominate can be heard.

Palestinians have endured painful experiences before, but what we are witnessing today is not merely a humanitarian catastrophe. It is a sharp social unraveling, a descent into calculated chaos, deliberately fed and managed by the occupation.

In its prolonged war, Israel does not stop at bombardment and starvation. It pushes things to the brink of internal collapse. It wants Gaza without infrastructure, without a society, without bonds. Amid famine and the brutality of an occupation bent on dismantling society, looting groups have emerged, profiting from this breakdown. Over time, these groups have taken on organized forms: hijacking trucks, stealing aid, and spreading corruption through what remains of our social immunity.

Those carrying out these acts are no amateurs. They have accumulated “expertise” from past gangs and have become more structured — setting prices, forbidding even the discussion of reducing them. They sell baby formula and control the market, just as Israel controls our life and death. An alternative authority in a time of anarchy. One of them told me shamelessly: “We need to raise prices before the truce that will bring things back to normal.”

But what “normal” is this? Normal has become the exploitation of the weak, the looting of the poor, and the imposition of cruelty as a daily language. Young men delivering aid were bombed, left to bleed, and their trucks were looted in plain sight. Nothing deters anymore: no conscience, no authority, no community. And most dangerously, these phenomena are not detached from the political context.

Israel is compounding this collapse, betting on it, waiting for it. It knows that the weapon of chaos is no less lethal than bombs. Every delay in aid delivery, every deliberate withdrawal, every vacuum in authority feeds into one project: the internal disintegration of Gaza. We are not only facing famine, but a strategy of societal annihilation.

The crime is no longer only in targeting the human body, but in fracturing the human spirit, turning people into predatory beings forced to pounce just to stay alive. Israel doesn’t just kill us, it pushes us to devour one another and watches the scene with cold silence. Only a ceasefire, no matter how temporary, can stop the bleeding for now. But it doesn’t heal the wound, it merely postpones its death.

More alarming is the desperation chasing after aid trucks under the pretense of hunger, all for a bag of flour. Over time, people overcome their fear and turn into human beasts chasing bags of flour or aid boxes. From gentleness, they slip into indifference, then into habitual theft. Different age and social groups are heading willingly toward death for flour they might never even receive. The same happens to those who risk going to dangerous areas controlled by the Israeli army to check on their homes, many never return.

It is a journey of death just to see their house, to affirm what remains of their belongings. The homeland has become either a standing house or a demolished one. Are these really our youth? Have they surrendered to despair and defeat? Have their dreams been reduced to a bag of flour, and then to a stolen truck? Who is banging on the walls of the tank? Who will stop this collapse? Who will awaken the Palestinian spirit from its slumber? Enough with the spiritual death. Enough with this collective suicide through the loss of ethics and the dream of a future.

The cost is grave: hundreds of martyrs and wounded, shattered lives, and broken families. Our society doesn’t just need a ceasefire: it needs to reclaim its roots, its values, its self-protection. It needs to rebuild trust. It needs a real authority capable of halting this collapse. Otherwise, the famine won’t be the final chapter — only the beginning.