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Its name is Eritrea. The grave is closer than bread. Death swifter than aid. The grave nearer than the homeland. The sky is stingy, the earth stingy. Its war is wars. Drought left rivers as corpses cracked with thirst. Trees had to die, birds had to migrate. Eritreans had to choose between dying inside their land or dying outside it — or on its edges. And so, they scattered among choices that were all the same.

The place: Wad Sharife camp near Kassala, on the Sudanese-Eritrean border.

The time: no need to specify precisely; days here resemble grains of sand.

The matter can be summed up: each day, children decrease and graves multiply.

No need for long introductions. This is what happened. From the tent, a man in his 50s emerged. He carried in his palms something wrapped in a white cloth. His steps were steady, identical. He did not look back at the tent, where a woman bent over what was left, as though begging to delay an approaching appointment. No crying. No screaming. Death had lost its dominance, reduced to a daily meal once other meals grew scarce. The man walked ahead, followed by two others — one carrying a shovel, the other a pickaxe.

You came to ask the camp residents about their conditions. The answer came in two fresh corpses

Ghassan Charbel

We couldn’t believe it. We stopped him and asked the child’s age. “Four years,” he said. Boldly, we asked, “How did he die?” Surprised, he replied: “From hunger.” He moved on, and we followed.

At the southern edge of the camp lay a field almost filled with small mounds of dirt, side by side. The man placed his son’s body down on the sand, while his companions began digging. Just meters away lay another small body, covered, waiting its turn, for the grave and for prayer. You think of counting the graves, but someone from the camp holds your hand. “The number changes constantly. Every day between 20 and 40. Eighty percent are children.”

You ask the father to lift the white cloth, hoping the sight of his son might shake the world’s weak conscience. He replies simply: “It is forbidden.” With his answer, a bitter, sarcastic smile, as though saying he had tried betting on waiting, only to end up sitting on the grave’s edge. You falter with your pen and paper and step back. For an hour, you remain between two corpses. You feel a desire to kneel before them and apologize for a world too busy upgrading arsenals and waging “Star Wars.”

You came to ask the camp residents about their conditions. The answer came in two fresh corpses. No need to ask about the scale of tragedy or the volume of aid. You feel you should speak words of comfort, but what use is sprinkling words on bodies, sugar on death?

You stare at the mounds of dirt. Nothing moves. The smell of death fills eyes, faces, fingers. A cruel sun burns sand that never fills. Faces have abandoned hope and waiting. Everything tastes of endings. Thin, barefoot bodies wander back and forth with visible despair, like glass about to shatter. Among the graves, an old man approaches you, asking painfully if you have some biscuits or chocolate. The Eritrean doctor explains to him you are a journalist, not an aid worker. Yet the old man repeats his question. And he is right. A scrap of bread or a chocolate bar matters far more to him than an article that makes people sad for a moment, only to forget.

You look again at the pickaxe, the shovel, the waiting body. Soon it will descend into the pit, covered with earth. Soon the desert will devour it. You leave quickly, afraid of seeing a third body, which camp residents say will not be long. You depart, haunted by the words of a man with defeated eyes: that camp residents ask of the world nothing more than shovels and pickaxes to bury their loved ones.

The image of the man carrying his son’s body left a deep wound inside me. I thought I would never again witness such cruelty

Ghassan Charbel

That was decades ago. I was then a correspondent for An-Nahar newspaper. The image of the man carrying his son’s body left a deep wound inside me. I thought I would never again witness a scene of such cruelty.

But the years passed. Our journeys through the grim Middle East took us to endless bloody feasts, morgues overwhelmed by bodies. We witnessed civil wars, suicide bombings, rivers of blood crossing borders, invasions, revolutions, toppled statues. We witnessed maps fracturing, extremists and fanatics unleashed, horrors of prisons and camps, mass graves, machines crushing bodies. Yet still, I always considered the sight of the man carrying his son’s corpse the harshest of all.

I imagined — as many did — that the new century would not allow the horrors of the previous one. That we would never again write about famine joining planes in devouring children. That science, technology and media revolutions would at least prevent famines, if not silence guns and tame planes.

What a horror.

I was rummaging in the chaos of books and days for an unpublished interview when I stumbled upon that old report I had written about hunger victims in the Eritrean camp. Suddenly I realized that journalists, too, fall into naivete when they assume the world learns from the pileup of innocent corpses and acts to prevent the repetition of such horrors.

What a horror.

For weeks now, every time we gather to choose the front-page photo or the lead story for the website, I am seized with deep sadness and terrible shame. The scenes of tiny bodies seeking tiny graves in Gaza are even harsher, more painful than the man carrying his child’s corpse. The scenes of trembling hands extending pots, eyes devoured by hunger. Benjamin Netanyahu’s savagery surpasses by thousands of times the cruelty of drought, desertification and bread scarcity. He has arranged for Gaza a long appointment with two killers: bombs and hunger. The world’s conscience is drenched in shame. It has stared at the small graves for too long.

How can a world of artificial intelligence and astonishing progress allow such an unprecedented massacre?

In Gaza, the grave is closer than bread. In Gaza, the grave is closer than the homeland.

• Ghassan Charbel is editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. X: @GhasanCharbel

This article first appeared in Asharq Al-Awsat.