内容摘要：This behaviour has continued into the present day with videos showing soldiers wearing women’s lingerie during a raid in the occupied West Bank.

This behaviour has continued into the present day with videos showing soldiers wearing women’s lingerie during a raid in the occupied West Bank.

Writing in defence of Palestinians – of their humanity, dignity, and rights – is not meant, nor can it be dismissed, as a polemical provocation.For me, it is an act of conscience.

I do not write to mollify. I refuse to qualify what has happened and is happening to Palestinians as “complex” to provide readers with a convenient and comfortable ethical exit ramp.Occupation is not complex. Oppression is not complex. Apartheid is not complex. Genocide is not complex. It is cruel. It is wrong. It must yield to decency.Writing about Palestinians in this blunt, uncompromising way invites all sorts of replies from all sorts of quarters.

Some readers praise your “courage”. Some thank you for “speaking” for them, for not flinching, for naming names. Some readers urge you to continue to write, despite the risks and recriminations.Much less charitably, some readers call you ugly names. Some wish you and your family misfortune and harm. Some readers try, and fail, to get you fired.

All you can do as a writer is to keep writing, regardless of the reaction – whether kind or unkind, thoughtful or thoughtless – or the consequences, intended or not.

Still, one of the casualties of writing about Palestinians can be the loss of the reassuring constancy and tender pleasure of valued friendships.One in five in Gaza face famine as Israel’s blockade continues. What does starvation do to the human body?

Half a million people in the Gaza Strip, or one in five Palestinians, are facing starvation.The entire rest of the population is suffering from high levels of acute food insecurity, according to a recent report by the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).

“The risk of famine in the Gaza Strip is not just possible – it is increasingly likely,” the IPC says.For more than 73 days, Israel has blocked all food, water, and medicine from entering Gaza, creating a man-made crisis, with the IPC warning that famine could be declared any time between now and September.