International Dialogue
Abstract
In this searing essay, poet and author Ibtisam Barakat bears witness to what she names the “Freedom Famine” in Gaza—a deliberate, decades-long deprivation of basic human rights culminating in the catastrophic conditions of 2025. Writing from the United States while in conversation with Gazan author Omar Hammash, Barakat juxtaposes their drastically unequal realities: her safety and his daily encounters with death, displacement, and starvation. Through Hammash’s testimony—delivered amid constant bombardment and interrupted by news of a friend’s killing—Barakat documents the collapse of Gaza’s infrastructure, the mass targeting of aid workers, the lethal failures of international relief, and the killing of journalists that has rendered Palestinians' suffering largely unseen. She situates the genocide within a longer history of siege, occupation, and the systematic stripping of Palestinian sovereignty, challenging global indifference and the political weaponization of humanitarian language. The essay argues that freedom, like food or water, is a human necessity—and that Palestinians have been starved of it for generations. Yet Barakat insists on the enduring power of writing to resist erasure, transforming trauma into testimony and forging a literary space in which Palestinian humanity can be affirmed against all attempts to silence it.
Recommended Citation
Barakat, Ibtisam
(2025)
"Of the Freedom Famine in Palestine,"
International Dialogue: Vol. 15, Article 8.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.32873/uno.dc.ID.15.01.1225
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/id-journal/vol15/iss1/8
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