About three weeks ago, my parents, my two-and-a-half-year-old son, and I were diagnosed with malnutrition. Like so many other people in the north of Gaza, we have had to deal with extreme levels of exhaustion, dehydration, anxiety, and weight loss. Every day is a fight against starvation and disease. I have had the most severe symptoms, including kidney problems. But the emotional trauma that comes from seeing my child and parents in need of food and essential nutrients like dairy and protein supplements and being unable to provide anything for them is just as bad.

Every day starts with the same challenge: make it to the next day. We stumble through the destroyed city desperately trying to find food and wood to burn so we can cook what we get. Gas, electricity, and other basic supplies aren’t available.

No matter how much we try, we don’t have enough to keep us healthy. In the morning, I queue for hours to get our gallons filled with water. After midday, I attempt to find my family medication and food. Most of the time, I fail to get any of it. Finding clean drinking water is an extra burden, and usually an impossibility. We are forced to drink tainted water and to accept a trap we have no way out of: The same thing that is helping us stave off dehydration is also infecting our bodies and hurting our stomachs.

Israel and some of its supporters are working hard to pretend that none of this is happening. Benjamin Netanyahu says there is no starvation in Gaza. Palestinian Israeli politician Ayman Odeh was forcibly stopped from speaking in the Knesset after he referenced the hunger crisis. And, in the United States, the lobby group AIPAC has been pushing talking points saying that “reports that people are starving in Gaza are false.”

How dare they? At least 23 children have died from malnutrition in northern Gaza. Even the US State Department says that famine could be setting in. It is a hideous lie to say otherwise.

But you don’t need statistics or outside experts to know the truth. You just need to look at us. I want to tell these people to come to Gaza and try to spread these lies to our faces. They will see what we know: Starvation is widespread here. You can see it in our faces as you walk down the street. Nobody looks the same anymore. The toll that lack of food has taken could not be clearer.

When people deny that we are starving and dying, they are denying our very humanity—our right to the universal values of freedom, equality, and peace. We are being erased from history and existence. If that fact isn’t enough to end this nightmare—if we can’t even have our suffering acknowledged—then we should all stop pretending that we are humans who care for each other equally.

We who are left here in Gaza yearn for the day when we have the chance to live fully normal lives in our own homes and lands. Right now, our lives are pure agony. But we are determined to resist the drive to exterminate us, and to attain our basic human rights. It sometimes feels as though there is nothing to hope for right now. But in the moments that hope creeps through, it is the hope that we can one day be free, equal, and at peace—not better than anyone else, but just like people everywhere.