In the heart of Gaza’s unfolding nightmare, what once were lifelines, aid centres, medical points, food queues, have become deadly traps. Bassem Zaqout, Director of the Medical Relief Society in Gaza, has sounded the alarm: the humanitarian situation is not just deteriorating, it has collapsed.

With hospitals barely functioning and vital units like dialysis shut down, patients with chronic illnesses are dying in silence. “Forty-one percent of kidney failure patients have already lost their lives,” Zaqout revealed, as medicine disappears and treatment becomes a memory of the past.

But the suffering doesn’t end in hospitals, it spills into the streets. Gaza’s roads are now lined with the hungry and malnourished. Children’s bodies are wasting away. At least 76,000 cases of malnutrition among children have been documented, but the real number may be far higher. Reaching them is a near-impossible task in a place where even bread has become a privilege.

Perhaps most horrifying is the reality that aid distribution points, meant to offer relief, have turned into zones of death. “Twenty people were killed today near one centre in Nuseirat,” Zaqout reported. These are not accidents; they are precise, repeated strikes. At least 130 have been killed and nearly a thousand injured while simply trying to get food. Gaza’s starving civilians are being gunned down in full view of a watching world.

And what little aid does arrive is symbolic at best, insufficient and often used to sanitise the public image of those enabling the siege. Less than 1% of the population’s actual needs are being met, while bombs continue to fall and disease spreads through overcrowded shelters.

Gaza is not on the brink of catastrophe. It is living it. And every day the world delays action, more civilians are condemned to die, not by accident, but by a system designed to deny, starve, and silence them.