Count The Ribs
There is a photo you need to see. A woman holding her son – barely more than a skeleton – wrapped in a garbage bag because there’s nothing else to dress him in. Not even clothes. No food. No shelter. Just skin, bones, and a gaze that should haunt anyone in power with even the faintest sense of responsibility.
This is Baby Muhammad and his mother. The photo was taken by Ahmed al-Arini in Gaza, and carried by the BBC. They live in a tent “that resembles a tomb”, and like countless others in the Strip, they are dying of hunger. According to UNRWA, one in five children in Gaza City is malnourished — and the numbers are climbing every day.
Look at it. Really look at it. Don’t scroll past. Count the ribs. Stare at the garbage bag. Take in every inch of the image and ask yourself why we’re here. Ask yourself why no one – not in Valletta, not in Brussels, not in New York – has done anything meaningful to stop this.
And then remind yourself: this would not be justifiable even if the person starving were an adult who had committed heinous crimes. But it’s not. It’s a child whose only “crime” is being born of a people who have refused to give up on the idea of something better. If not for themselves, then for their children.
That photo has shaken people. Again. Social media is ablaze once more. There’s a fresh round of concerned posts, urgent carousels, prayers and hashtags. Gaza is back in the headlines. And while it’s tempting to dismiss this as cyclical – and it is – there’s something more specific happening here.
Starvation is different.
In many ways, it’s worse than the other deaths we’ve seen inflicted by Israeli weapons. It lacks the immediacy of a missile or a bullet. It takes time. It deteriorates. And for all our exposure to violence, we’re still not desensitised to this. We’ve seen children on fire, children pulled from rubble, children with limbs blown off or heads shattered by sniper fire – and somehow even those images started registering less over time. But starvation is unfamiliar. We weren’t raised to fear it. We believed it was unthinkable in this age. And yet here it is. Staring us in the face.
That’s why people are looking again. Hunger cuts through where bombs no longer do. It’s disturbing in a new way. It has made people pause. Made them ask questions. But not a single tangible action has followed.
Let’s be honest: if this were happening in any other country, we wouldn’t still be debating whether to maintain a trade agreement. We’d be talking about strikes. About no-fly zones. About regime change in Tel Aviv. But instead we are here, once again, dilly-dallying over wording, waiting for some mythical diplomatic off-ramp to materialise, while children starve to death wrapped in plastic bags.
And while this moral failure belongs to many, we must first account for our own. Malta’s Prime Minister has spent the last year dangling recognition of Palestine like a treat for good behaviour – a vague promise, always just around the corner, always retracted when the spotlight fades.
Our Foreign Minister, too busy enjoying his first taste of high-level diplomacy, won’t dare upset the apple cart. And Roberta Metsola – President of the European Parliament, Maltese, Catholic, a woman who built her entire career on the illusion of moral clarity – is either far less powerful than she’s spent years leading us to believe, or she is powerful and is deliberately choosing to do nothing.
And if it’s the latter then she is either being blackmailed or is far more indebted to Israel than we’d like to admit. Those are the only plausible explanations left. We’ve watched as a lack of leadership hardened into cowardice and then slowly metastasised into complicity.
This isn’t just about failed leadership. And it’s not fair to say it’s a failure of the people either. Because if anything, we’ve seen an extraordinary mobilisation – maybe the most sustained global outrage since the Iraq War, and even that pales in comparison to what we’ve seen over Gaza. From London to Kuala Lumpur, millions have marched, boycotted, shouted, donated, resisted. They’ve been relentless. They’ve made their feelings clear. They’ve applied more pressure than most politicians have ever experienced in their lives.
But it hasn’t made any difference.
The problem this time isn’t apathy. It’s that the mask has slipped. We’ve learned that the “rules-based international order” is a myth. The rules only apply when they suit the powerful. Human rights are conditional. International law is optional. Democracy, it turns out, is theatre – and the stage collapses the moment we ask for anything real.
So, what now?
If you are literally sick to your core from watching children starve to death, from seeing families torn apart, heads blown off, entire generations erased – and if you’ve marched and petitioned and voted and begged, and still nothing has changed – what are you supposed to do?
Do we still pretend the democratic process can deliver justice, when it’s been exposed, in real time, as incapable of doing so? Do we keep obeying rules that no longer serve humanity? Do we go quietly back into a system that lets this happen?
Or does morality now demand disobedience?
Because let’s be clear: the only time these institutions do react with urgency is when they’re the ones being threatened. Just imagine, for a second, if people stormed the European Commission – not for narcissistic nationalism, but to demand an end to genocide. Do you think that would be met with understanding? With moral reflection? No. It would be met with the full force of the state. Instant outrage. Condemnation across the board. Arrests. Trials. Broken skulls and frozen accounts. This should scare all of us.
The question is no longer just political. It’s moral. What does morality require when the system fails entirely? When the law protects killers and punishes those who try and stop them? What happens when the avenues for peaceful resistance are not just ignored, but criminalised?
What we’re watching isn’t just another injustice. It’s the collapse of the idea that law and democracy offer a path to peace.
So, to our leaders I say: look at the photo.
Count the ribs. Count the days since this began. Count the excuses.
And then ask yourselves: What was the price of your silence?
It better have been worth it. Because history will not forget you.
READ NEXT: Opinion: I Used To Think Like Those Pro-Choice Youths. But I Couldn’t Ignore the Truth About Abortion Anymore
