Starvation a horrible choice to inflict during war
Here in Toronto, we are starting to see joyful signs of spring, the season of hope. Yet every day, we see on the news that in Gaza there can be no such joy. Starvation, malnourishment and disease due to lack of clean water are causing untold suffering and death.
Yes, Gaza is thousands of kilometres away. In our city, it is also close to home.
For me, this suffering is an echo of my own family history. My mother Ho Sze was a hungry child in a war zone, when Japan invaded China during the Second World War. Her father was in a distant war zone and her mother, my grandmother, who struggled to keep her children alive in the face of starvation, died of dysentery.
My mother, still a child herself at just 13, was left to care for her two younger brothers — my uncles — Ah Sing and Ah Ball. As deep hunger set in, my mother risked her life, smuggling food in a tiny boat across a river. She learned to stretch a few grains of rice. She learned to boil bark from trees. She learned the reality of the word “hungry.” In Chinese writing, hungry is spelled as a combination of two characters, “eat” and “self.”
Hungry. Eat self. For the starving, the body has nothing to eat but itself. Until there is nothing left.
My mother somehow managed to survive and to keep Ah Ball alive. Ah Sing didn’t make it.
What happened in my family — just one of millions of families in war zones — is the harsh reality in Gaza. Starvation, now as then, is a horrifying choice to inflict in war.
What Hamas did on Oct. 7 was horrific and without justification. The Israeli government’s continued bombing of Palestinians in Gaza and their starvation is unbearable. All my life I have been an advocate for peace. And through my career, I have worked to end child poverty and hunger. I will always choose hope and compassion. That’s why in early November, I added my voice to a growing international chorus calling for an immediate release of hostages and, critically, a ceasefire.
Heartbreakingly since then, the violence has been intensifying. According to the UN, more children have died in Gaza in the past four months than in all the other conflicts in the world combined in the past four years. And we are at risk of losing untold thousands more as starvation and disease spread. My mother learned to boil bark; in Gaza, people are boiling khubaiza, a roadside weed. But it is not enough. It can never be enough.
There is a desperate need for humanitarian aid — and there has been a heartfelt response from the international aid community. Aid workers in our city, our country and around the world have been responding with compassion — contributing to relief efforts, doing everything they can to provide food to those in desperate need.
But time is running out.
There is a glimmer of hope. Recently, the UN World Food Programme was able to deliver food to 25,000 people in Gaza City. And aid ships are on their way. But over half a million people face famine. They must be able to access badly-needed food, water and humanitarian aid. The opening of road crossings and the safe delivery of aid must be made possible. A ceasefire is critical.
Because of our shared humanity, every death by starvation diminishes us all.
Through faith and collective compassion for each other, we must reach out in any way we can to find the way forward: supporting international humanitarian efforts, calling on the Canadian government to use its influence in any way it can to stop the horror and build a lasting peace, and caring for each other here at home.
Every act of compassion brings hope, in Gaza, in Toronto and around the world.