How One Child Asking for Bread for his Birthday Got his Wish
by joshua tucker
Photo: Ashraf Amra - UNRWA: United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.
Life is “beyond atrocious” in Gaza, humanitarian and journalist Arwa Damon told Democracy Now! on July 30th, 2025. “Nothing is happening to stave off the genuine starvation we are seeing throughout the Gaza Strip.”
“I have said this consistently since I first went into Gaza more than a year ago,” Damon said, “if anyone goes into Gaza - within the first 15 minutes, the vast majority of what Israel is claiming just unravels before your very eyes.”
A study published in the Harvard Dataverse by a Ben Gurion University Professor on June 3rd, 2025, estimates that approximately 377,000 Gazans have been disappeared or killed, since what even Israel’s leading human rights organizations are now calling a genocide, began on October 7th, 2023. That was the day when Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians and military installations near Israel’s Gaza border wall killed 1,139 people in Israel.
That 377,000 estimate is more than 6 times the 60,839 dead bodies that have arrived in morgues since the genocide began, which the Gaza Health Ministry has been able to count as of August 3rd, 2025. That includes the bodies of nearly 20,000 murdered children.
Gaza’s population in 2022 was 2,375,259 people. They had survived during Israel’s long siege before October 7th, 2023, partly because the Israeli government at that time opened its Rafah border crossing with Egypt, allowing over 500 trucks on average per day to deliver food into Gaza.
Israeli authorities have continued blocking over six thousand trucks from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) alone from entering Gaza. Though those trucks and thousands more have been parked near border crossings for months.
On March 2nd, 2025, Israel began a total siege of Gaza with no food allowed in. By mid-May, Israeli officials began allowing a trickle of trucks in. The total aid Israel allowed into Gaza from March through June was less than one-quarter of the amount of food that the U.N. estimates the people of Gaza need to survive for that period, according to an analysis by The Guardian.
“We need to occupy all of Gaza, stop humanitarian aid, and encourage migration,” said Israeli Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben Gvir, on July 3rd, 2025. “Inside the Israeli government’s starvation of Gaza, from an aid group trying to deliver food,” that’s how Damon titles her latest article for the Atlantic Council, where she is a non-resident senior fellow.
More people died of starvation in Gaza during the 11 days in late July 2025 than had died in the previous 21 months of the conflict. Starvation deaths are rising rapidly, and more people report being unable to stand.
In 2015, Arwa Damon founded the International Network for Aid Relief and Assistance (INARA) after she “bore witness to the suffering of children in war zones for more than a decade and a half,” as a CNN Senior International Correspondent. She worked on two trips with her organization’s children’s medical and mental health projects in Gaza.
Israeli authorities have blocked Damon’s return to Gaza. Israel denied five visa applications by the humanitarian with no reason given, during a so-called ceasefire in February and March 2025, Damon says. She noted that visa denials have now increased by over 40 percent for Gaza-bound medical and humanitarian personnel. Now, Damon connects with INARA personnel in Gaza online from Turkiye. Describing a video that she got from a team member in Gaza, Damon said, “One of the boys tells Yousra, our program coordinator, that it’s his birthday the next day. And his mother says he asked her for bread on his birthday — not a cake, just bread. And then, do you know what happens? Yousra returns on her own time with this, a bread birthday cake, because this is the sort of kindness and gentleness and generosity that defines Gaza and how its people look out for each other, whichever way they can.”
