Spring naar de inhoud 
After Alaa Alqaisi’s “Beneath the Howl of Hunger”
I accuse.
I accuse a world that watches—from cushioned seats, plates full, conscience empty—as Gaza dissolves into a myth without meaning, a nightmare no one claims. I accuse the architects of siege: those whose silence is strategic, whose power is predatory, who weaponise hunger and call it politics.
I accuse every government—including our Belgian government—every leader, every institution that has reduced a living, breathing people to ash, and then turned away.
I accuse the logic of indifference, the cold calculations that weigh children’s lives against alliances and arms deals. I accuse the pundits and publications that speak of “conflict” when they mean conquest, of “security” when they mean submission, of “ceasefire” when they mean the brief pause before more brutality.
I accuse those who pretend this is too complex to understand. There is nothing complex about hunger. Nothing difficult about bombs. A child drawing flowers on a scorched wall is not a complicated puzzle. What is complex is the denial—the deliberate forgetting that permits atrocity to pass as normality.
I accuse the world of flattening Gaza into a headline, then scrolling on. Of mistaking pity for justice. I accuse the passers-by—on screens, in cafés, in boardrooms and parliaments—who ask how the story ends, but never ask why it began—or why it never ends. I accuse those who would render Gaza voiceless, not through censorship, but through exhaustion. Hunger, too, is a language, but the world stopped listening—or perhaps it never intended to.
I accuse those who see resilience and call it consent. Who see dignity and think it proves survival is enough. I accuse them of taking solace in broken metaphors, of mistaking the flowering cypress for hope, when it is grief in bloom.
If your vocabulary still doesn’t include ceasefire, genocide, occupation, apartheid, settler-colonialism, white supremacy, Zionism, or war crimes—
then stop calling yourselves humanitarians, politicians, or peacekeepers.
To the politicians who speak of “both sides” while funding bombs…
To the journalists who call truth “bias” and silence “balance”…
To the diplomats who toast peace while selling arms…
To the analysts who frame ethnic cleansing as “security strategy”…
To the influencers and celebrities who stay silent to protect their brand—
You are not neutral.
You are well-paid servants and mouthpieces of empire.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
And to the world that one day will turn the page—if it ever does—I accuse you in advance of rewriting the ending. Gaza was not silent. It was starved, but it spoke. It was besieged, but it sang. With fractured grammar and trembling hands, with blurred vision and fading strength, it testified. In the language of hunger, in the syntax of dust, it named the unbearable.
Let it be recorded that the voice did not vanish.
It rose.
You chose not to hear—nor to answer.
— In witness and in defiance, after Alaa Alqaisi
