by Paul A. Freeman
Almost 55,000 children in Gaza are estimated to be acutely malnourished, far more than have so far been ifentified as victims of the potentially lethal condition, a study published in the Lancet, the respected international medical periodical, has revealed. —The Guardian, October 8, 2025
The end game always was annihilation;
no two-state compromise—a single nation
arising from two genocides, one borne,
the other wreaked on Palestinians torn
from city, town and village decades past,
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip their last
two footholds. See the hospitals and schools
bombarded out of malice. We’re not fools!
As bombs rain down from drone-filled skies on homes,
encampments, playgrounds, mosque and masjid domes;
as roads are ripped to smithereens and aid
is bait, a lure, where civil lives are paid
through bullets to enhance starvation’s bite;
as trudging refugees endure a plight
designed to force them from ancestral lands,
anyone who’s human wrings their hands,
knowing when the war creeps to cessation,
the end game always was annihilation.
Paul A. Freeman is an English teacher. He is the author of The Movement, a dystopia-Americana novel set in a future United States. It is available from Amazon as an ebook download and as a paperback. His first book, Rumours of Ophir, a crime novel taught at ‘O’ level in Zimbabwean high schools, was also translated into German. In addition to having two novels, a children’s book and an 18,000-word narrative poem (Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers!) commercially published, Paul is the author of numerous published short stories, poems and articles. He works and resides in Mauritania, Africa.