By Uzma Ehtasham
It should never take the last gasp of a child for the world to act. Yet somehow, once again, we find ourselves at that precipice, watching as the unimaginable becomes routine. Gaza, a land already scarred by years of blockade, bombings, and broken ceasefires, is once again on the brink—this time not because of rockets or politics, but because of something far more insidious: hunger. The United Nations has sounded the alarm in language stripped of all ambiguity. Tom Fletcher, Deputy Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, warns that 14,000 children in Gaza could die within 48 hours unless aid is allowed to reach them. This is not a projection or a worst-case scenario—it is a reality unfolding in real time. And yet, even with such clarity, the gears of international response grind forward with agonizing slowness.
On Monday, only five aid trucks were permitted entry into Gaza by Israel. After more than two months of near-total blockade, five trucks amount to little more than a cruel gesture. Fletcher himself called it “a drop in the ocean,” and he’s right. This is not a matter of technical or logistical incapacity; the aid is there. The food is there. The medicine is there. The political will is not. What lies just beyond Gaza’s borders is not salvation but shame. Pallets of life-saving supplies—infant formula, IV drips, antibiotics, and blankets—languish under desert sun while children waste away in overcrowded, under-resourced hospitals. And yet the world continues to couch its condemnation in soft diplomatic tones. Fletcher expressed hope that 100 trucks may be allowed in the next day. But hope does not treat sepsis. It does not fill an empty stomach or reverse the damage of chronic malnutrition. It does not pull a child back from the edge of death.
There is a particular cruelty in the nearness of relief. It’s one thing to lack the tools, another entirely to possess them and withhold them. And that is what this moment demands we reckon with—not a failure of capacity, but a failure of conscience. The deliberate throttling of aid is not a byproduct of war. It is a policy. And it is one that robs children of a future in full view of the world. On the ground, in Gaza’s Nasser Hospital, British surgeon Victoria Rose describes a daily litany of deaths that should never have happened. Children dying of infections that any NHS doctor could treat in minutes. Lives extinguished not because of violence but because of silence. “We are losing children we could save,” she told Channel 4 News. Her words carry the weight of someone who has not just seen death but seen it take the most innocent, the most defenseless, with a quiet cruelty that defies justification.
A four-year-old boy, she recounts, died because she could not run a basic blood test. In the UK, he would have lived. In Gaza, there was no blood bank. No reagents. No working lab. Just a mother, a child, and a grief that will never find peace. These are not casualties of war. They are casualties of neglect—preventable, curable, and now irreversible. Rose does not speak as a politician. She does not weigh her words against strategic interests or regional alliances. She speaks as a doctor. As a human being. As someone who understands that when a child dies for want of antibiotics, it is not a political crisis. It is a moral collapse. The world’s response—measured statements from London, Paris, and Ottawa—feels both too late and too light. We do not need more expressions of concern. We need corridors of aid. We need governments to move not with caution but with conviction.
Because Gaza is not just a humanitarian emergency. It is a mirror. A mirror reflecting the lines we are willing to let blur when the victims are distant, when their suffering is politically inconvenient. There is no honor in neutrality when starvation is wielded as a weapon. There is no righteousness in restraint when it results in death. To delay aid is to endorse suffering. To remain silent is to become complicit. Some will insist this is complicated. That there are security considerations. That nothing in the region is ever simple. But these arguments ring hollow when weighed against the image of a mother cradling her malnourished child, knowing help is only miles away but barred by policy. There is nothing complicated about a dying child. There is only right and wrong.
In these next 48 hours, we will be tested. Not as diplomats or analysts or global powers—but as people. Will we allow borders to matter more than lives? Will we let bureaucracy win over basic decency? Will we continue to pretend that suffering on this scale can be viewed through a strategic lens? The time for excuses has long passed. Gaza’s children do not need negotiations. They need nourishment. They need medicine. They need the world to remember that their lives are not bargaining chips, not pawns in a protracted political game, but lives in their own right—worthy of dignity, worthy of aid, worthy of everything we would demand for our own. If the world cannot pass this test, then perhaps it is not the children who have failed. Perhaps it is us.
(The writer is a public health professional, journalist, and possesses expertise in health communication, having keen interest in national and international affairs, can be reached at uzma@metro-morning.com)
