When Fir’awn Fears Formula Milk

In July 2025, Professor Nick Maynard, a British consultant surgeon from Oxford University Hospitals, returned from a medical mission in Gaza with testimony that should have shaken the conscience of the Ummah and the world. While serving at Nasser Hospital, he revealed that Israeli authorities routinely confiscated baby formula. Let that sink in: infant milk—blocked and seized at the borders of a besieged land.

This is not security. This is strategy. And it is not new.

What kind of regime fears milk powder?
The answer lies not in modern security doctrine, but in the story of Musa and Fir’awn. It is the same psychology that governed Fir’awn’s edict in the time of Musa (peace be upon him)—a fear not of weapons, but of wombs; not of armies, but of birth cries. It is the fear of demographic resistance. The fear that the mere existence of a people will undo the narrative of conquest.

Thousands of years ago, Fir’awn watched the growing number of Bani Isra’il in Egypt with dread. He did not wage war on men armed with swords; he ordered the killing of newborn boys. “Kill every male child,” he commanded, fearing the rise of a boy who would deliver the people from oppression. That fear, irrational yet absolute, was not about rebellion. It was about numbers. Presence. Survival.

In today’s Gaza, the siege functions on the same frequency. The occupier sees every Palestinian birth as a threat to their dominance. Milk powder becomes subversive. Hospitals become battlegrounds. Wombs become weapons. There is no other explanation for why infant formula is treated as contraband, why malnourished mothers are denied sustenance, why maternity wards run short of power, fuel, and oxygen.

It is not ignorance. It is wilful cruelty.

When powdered milk is confiscated at checkpoints, it is not a mistake. It is a deliberate message: your survival is a threat to us. Your children are not civilians, but future challenges to the status quo.

This is why the siege is not merely military—it is existential. It targets the very beginning of life.

Meanwhile, the international community debates the recognition of a Palestinian state, as if the formalities of diplomacy can replace the right to live and breathe. The symbolic acceptance of Palestine as a state, a two-state solution, or whatever else serves the West will not solve the problem of bloated babies or mothers with no milk. This is sham politics at its best. What sovereignty can exist where a mother cannot feed her child?

What kind of state endures when baby formula is more feared than bullets?

The psychological thread linking Fir’awn and today’s occupation is no coincidence. In both cases, domination depends on elimination—not just of fighters, but of infants. Not only of resistance, but of reproduction. It is the fear of survival that fuels cruelty.

Professor Maynard’s testimony is not simply a medical report—it is a call to conscience. It reveals a system that resorts to killing. If it cannot erase the past, it tries to erase the future.

But just as Fir’awn’s tyranny was undone by Divine decree, so too will injustice in Gaza be overturned. The child that Fir’awn feared—the one placed in the river by the command of Allah—grew up to be the liberator of his people. History teaches us this: tyrants may kill a generation, but they cannot kill a destiny.

The liberators of today will not rise from palaces or parliaments—but they may already sit silently within the ranks of the military. Not those who serve rulers who have long abandoned Palestine, but among soldiers whose conscience is still intact. Those who possess the means to confront occupation must know: these babies are not dying in the future—they are dying now. To break rank in the face of tyranny is not betrayal—it is divine alignment. Whoever moves to end this oppression joins the honoured company of the Prophets and the martyrs. Like Musa (peace be upon him) before Fir’awn, it is not permission that is needed, but conviction.

Let it be recorded: in 2025, Occupiers feared baby formula, saw children as threats, and starved infants in the name of security.