IN HER OWN WORDS: SARAH’S STORY A MOTHER WITH CANCER, GRIEVING THE LOSS OF HER DAUGHTER I am Sarah, a mother of seven. We were bombed while sheltering in a school. My daughter Bisan, only twelve years old, was killed, along with her grandmother. Several of my other children were badly wounded with burns and severe injuries. So many people I loved were gone in a single moment. I live with cancer, but my medications are no longer available, leaving my health to deteriorate day by day. My husband, once a construction worker, is now partially disabled and incapacitated. Every day my children cry for food. My three-year-old daughter weeps at night from hunger, and I have nothing to give her. Once I heard that a clinic in Nuseirat was distributing nutritional supplements and biscuits. I went there, thinking I could keep some for my children and maybe sell part to buy flour. I stood in line from six in the morning until one in the afternoon, crushed among the crowd. At last, my body gave up and I collapsed. I already can’t access my cancer treatment, which made me weaker. When I woke up two hours later inside the clinic, I saw my little daughter sobbing, shaking me, begging me to wake up because she thought I had died. That moment broke me completely. Starvation here is not accidental; it is engineered. Israel is enforcing a slow death on us, depriving us of food, medicine, and dignity. Hunger cuts across everyone, but for women like me the suffering is multiplied. I am a cancer patient, a grieving mother, and a survivor of violence inside my own home. My husband, instead of supporting us, forced our seventeen-year-old daughter into marriage without her consent or mine, just to relieve himself of responsibility. Every day I carry the full burden alone: feeding the children, finding water, caring for the sick and injured, enduring violence, and trying to hold the family together while my own body grows weaker. The weight of survival falls heavily on women. The grief, hunger, and exhaustion have destroyed my mental health. I live with constant anxiety and despair. Many days I wish for death, because living like this feels unbearable. What I need is simple and urgent. We need the famine to end, food to be restored, safe shelter with basic services, and medical treatment for those like me who are battling cancer without medicine. I want my children to go back to school, to have hygiene supplies, to receive aid without humiliation, to simply live like human beings. Above all, I want peace. 25