As Gaza slips deeper into famine, former Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf and his wife Nadia El-Nakla have broken their silence with a desperate cry for humanity. With members of El-Nakla’s family now starving in Deir Al Balah, the couple is demanding the opening of Gaza’s borders and an end to what they describe as the deliberate starvation of Palestinians.

In a deeply personal video, they recount the agony of watching their loved ones suffer while governments turn away. “My cousin Sally, her husband and their four children are starving,” El-Nakla says. “My aunt’s baby is seven months old and being starved, food is just a few kilometres away, but they’re being denied it.”

Yousaf adds that Sally’s husband spends his days scouring for food under 40-degree heat, only to return to a tent with empty hands. “This is not a humanitarian crisis,” he says. “This is engineered. This is a siege.”

Their testimony echoes a growing outcry from over 100 humanitarian organisations, which warn of mass starvation affecting over two million Palestinians. Since late May, the new Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, backed by the US and Israel, has reportedly sidelined the UN and, according to the UN itself, coincided with over a thousand deaths of Palestinians trying to access food.

From starving children to doctors too weak to treat patients, Gaza is now a place where the most basic right, to eat, to live, is being stripped away. El-Nakla pleads: “Sally’s life matters. Palestinian lives matter. Open the borders. Let Gaza live.”