Imagine your lives after 18 months (one and a half years!) without work, with no income, not even one single shekel, and no savings because you could hardly make ends meet even before that.

Eighty percent of the Palestinian residents of the West Bank are in that situation today. And the rest? Well, they are herders, almost all of whom have been evicted from their pastures by the settlers with the army’s backing! Many of the farmers are forbidden access to their fields and olive orchards! And as for the lucky few who do still have work – it’s hard for them to get there because the access roads to most of the villages and cities have been blocked since the outbreak of war! And so it is that almost all the Palestinians living in the West Bank, who had nothing to do with the horrors of the October 7 massacre, are being cruelly punished, purely because of their ethnic background. Two million people – children, the elderly, men, and women are starving.

Several months ago, the elderly woman whom we take to the hospital for injections in her eyes told us that they hadn’t eaten a single vegetable apart from onions for a month.

A group of volunteers headed by Rabbis for Human Rights have gotten organized to raise donations to send food packages to the villages and cities in the West Bank. Each package contains a minimum quantity of groceries (which will last maybe for only a few days): flour, rice, legumes, oil, a tin of tuna, tomato sauce, sugar and pasta.

On Monday, Nava and I travelled to Fasa’il to distribute 80 packages of food to the neediest families (based on a list drawn up by Musa, our contact person in the village). When we finished, dozens of women who hadn’t received packages stood there and in tears begged us for a package – even part of one. But we had none left. We stood there with our heads bowed to their pleas, unable to help.

We left totally dejected. And we couldn’t help thinking that we would soon pay for our cruelty, for bringing workers from China and India instead of Palestinians who are desperate for work, for being complicit through our silence when they were evicted them from their pastures and fields, and for starving millions of people. Such hardship will not go away quietly and one day it will blow up in our faces. And the people will by surprised by their “ingratitude” – after all, we drove their sick people to the hospital when they collapsed.