Branham: Stop starvation in Gaza now 

I will never forget her scream. That’s not even the right word for it. I will never forget the sound of a broken heart. 

I was in Katanga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo documenting the impact of a humanitarian organization’s emergency and relief efforts. I’d just moments before arrived to a community health clinic to meet families who were benefitting from child survival programs.  

But before I could even enter the main building, a woman rushed into the waiting room. Her eyes were filled with a primal panic. She held a tiny bundle in her arms. I looked down and saw her muddy feet and knew she’d traveled hours to get here. She yelled in Swahili, and a doctor rushed into the room. He peeled back the kitenge brightly patterned fabric that held her newborn child.  

The face of this child was sunken into itself. The skin stretched tight and then dripped into folds where there should have been fat and muscle.  

The doctor’s face turned ashen as he called for a nurse. Before the nurse could get there, the mother started to shake. The doctor reached for the bundle, the baby falling into his arms just as she tumbled onto the cement floor. It all happened so fast, but I felt the baby’s life leave us. As if a whisper blew through the room. They were gone. 

As the mother hit the floor on her knees, she let out a sound of unequivocal agony. 

Her cry was like a thunder, tearing a rip through her body, mine, the doctors’, and then vibrating the walls of the clinic. For a moment, it was as if her grief might sink that building, might open the earth’s core, might swallow us all whole. 

I was witnessing the holiness of love and the depravity of injustice at once. The doctor swaddled the child that was no larger than a small pile of bones.  

The baby had died of hunger. The mother’s heart died of grief.  

Twenty years later, I can still hear her keening.  

Today, that cry joins the mothers of the babies in Palestine, who are also facing the unspeakable horror of starvation. One in five children in Gaza City is already acutely malnourished, according to the International Rescue Committee. Dying of hunger is a cruel and brutal death. It feels egregious to describe it, un-dignifying to those who have been intentionally subject to it. 

Like many of you, I am watching what is unfolding in utter horror. The hunger crisis in Palestine deepens. The entire population of two million people in Gaza is food insecure. One out of every three people has not eaten for days, according to the United Nations. 

A high-level conference at the UN in New York is set for early next week. We ask for immediate action to end Israel’s unlawful occupation and devastation in Gaza. Even President Trump this week said there is “real starvation in Gaza.”  

Open land routes for food aid. Ensure timely, unimpeded access from Rafah to Gaza. This makes the difference between life and death. Ceasefire now. 

I, like you perhaps, feel completely helpless and powerless to stop this cruelty. There is no justification for robbing innocent people of food. None. 

This entire crisis is preventable. Let me say that again: This entire crisis is preventable. It’s a crisis of political choice. It is a consequence of inaction. 

I have seen what starvation does to a child’s body. No human being deserves such a fate. And I believe it is up to all of us to shout loudly enough and without end until it stops. The window to prevent mass death is rapidly closing. Let us put ourselves into that window and keep it open as long as we can. End the blockade. Before it’s too late.