Opinion Where humanity ends in Palestine, a writer offers his library in exchange for food

Asentence is not a loaf of bread, releasing steam as it is torn apart and dipped into fresh olive oil and zaatar. A beautiful metaphor offers little where the fragrance of a fresh meal is in danger of becoming a memory, and even the coldest can of beans does more for a hungry stomach than any word in any language can. And so, Omar Hamad — pharmacist, tailor, writer and eyewitness to the death and starvation in Gaza — shares an appeal on social media, offering his library in exchange for a sack of flour.

Because what place do books have in a land where access to food is now wielded like a weapon? “I once plucked roses from language,” Hamad recalls in a short essay on LitHub. But even for a writer, books can qualify as a necessity only when the sharp edge of hunger is sheathed — not when there are mouths to feed, wounds to salve, bodies to count. Twenty-one months of conflict have made Gaza, as United Nations officials have reported, “the hungriest place on Earth”. From rice to lentils to baby formula, even the most staple of foods have been made scarce by Israeli blockades and reports emerge every day of desperate, hungry people being crushed to death by others who are just as famished and just as desperate, begging for relief at aid hubs.

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This is the double tragedy of Gaza where, for millennia, olive trees and poetry grew in equal profusion. Literature may be immortal, but for an entire population that faces starvation, books, too, have been reduced to mere possessions, emergency currency to be exchanged for food. The cultural devastation of Gaza since October 2023 is heartbreaking, with libraries, museums and ancient cultural sites destroyed by bombing. But as hunger stalks through the Strip, there will come a time when the world must reckon with a greater, incalculable loss.