#Tigray IDPs Starved in Camps, Dispossessed at Home

About fifty internally displaced people from Western Tigray have died since July in a single camp—Hitsats—according to Tigrai Television. They did not die in fighting. They died of hunger, illness, and abandonment. They died because displacement has been allowed to become permanent rather than treated as the emergency it is.

What is happening in Hitsats is not an isolated tragedy; it is a warning. Hitsats is a symptom, not the problem. The crisis is structural. We already know where this path leads. Months ago, a two-year-old child in one of Mekelle’s displacement camps was killed by a hyena—another brutal emblem of the neglect and indignity hundreds of thousands are forced to endure.

There are 146 displacement camps across Tigray. None of them is fundamentally different from Hitsats, and none will be spared the same fate. Camp life itself is the problem. Rations are inadequate—often no more than 15 kilograms per person. Livelihoods are impossible. Dignity is stripped away. Prolonged displacement is not protection; it is a slow descent into starvation. If nothing changes, today’s tragedy in Hitsats will simply be replicated, camp by camp.

While this is unfolding, Tigray’s political class remains trapped in internal power struggles—arguing over authority, structures, and precedence—while the people they claim to represent die quietly in tents. History will not be kind to this moment. When people are starving, politics that still stares at chairs becomes morally indefensible.

Yes, emergency humanitarian assistance must be delivered immediately. Those who are starving must be fed now. Those who are sick must receive medical care now. But let us be honest and stop pretending that camps are protection. Camps are killing people. They strip families of dignity, livelihoods, and the ability to survive on their own. No society can warehouse hundreds of thousands of its people indefinitely and still claim to value life.

The truth is uncomfortable but unavoidable: the only sustainable solution is return—return to land, to farms, to work, to life.

Return, even under imperfect security conditions, should not be off the table. At this point, it is necessity. Perfect safety does not exist in post-war Ethiopia and never will. Making it a precondition for return is not caution; it is a sentence to prolonged suffering and death. A farmer on his land, even under risk, has more agency and a better chance of survival than a family condemned to indefinite camp life.

Return also matters legally and politically. It is the frontline defense of the land itself. Western Tigray is claimed because Tigrayans lived there—for centuries. That claim lives or dies with presence. Every family that returns, every house reopened, every field replanted is a rejection of ethnic cleansing. Absence, by contrast, hands victory to the occupier. If people do not return, ethnic cleansing succeeds not only through violence, but through time.

Waiting for perfect security, a full political settlement, or complete administrative restoration before return is a trap, and a deadly one. Delay allows occupiers to entrench control, alter demographics, and normalize dispossession. Raya and Tselemti have already shown the lesson: imperfect return preserves people and claim; perfect safety in camps preserves nothing.

If the interim government has a better option, it should implement it now—today. Not after another assessment. Not after another round of negotiations. If such an option exists, people must see it immediately in their lives.

But if there is no alternative—and all evidence suggests there is not—then the moral choice is clear: begin organized, voluntary returns under minimum safeguards, even under imperfect security conditions. What Tigray cannot afford is waiting without action while people die in camps.

The choice before Tigray is no longer theoretical. Either return people to their land, or continue to watch them die in displacement while debating conditions. Restore livelihoods. Restore presence. Let administration and legality follow the people—not necessarily precede them.

If this moment passes without action, Tigray will not only lose land; it will lose lives, history, and moral authority. Return the IDPs. Return is not surrender. It is survival.