"Is it difficult coming back?"
Surgeon professor Nizam Mamode, who was working in Gaza a few weeks ago: "Yes"
"How do you feel when you return?"
"I feel quite angry that this country.. is letting this genocide go by and doing nothing about it"
"A breast feeding baby was shot by a quad copter through the head"
Yesterday the UN commission of inquiry published a report detailing how Israel deliberately targets & kills Palestinian children
The Independent Int'l Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory presents new report to the UN Human Rights Council.
"The evidence shows that Palestinian children have been deliberately targeted & killed by the Israeli security forces."
https://t.co/vMARqOLxpC
There are wounds that belong to the body. There are wounds that belong to war.
And there are wounds so deep that neither flesh nor medicine can fully explain them.
One afternoon, a mother entered the clinic carrying her child in her arms.
She did not look different from any other mother. She held him with the same careful tenderness, the same instinctive protection with which women have carried their children through every century of human suffering.
I asked what had brought her to us. “Diarrhea,” she answered.
It was an ordinary complaint in an extraordinary place.
But as I leaned closer, I noticed dark patches scattered across the child’s face. I pointed toward them.
Before I could speak, the mother interrupted softly. “That is not the worst of it.”
Then she turned him over.
What I saw upon his back seemed less like a disease than a sentence.
A vast dark lesion spread across his small body as though some invisible hand had written its sorrow upon his skin. The same marks had already reached one of his hands. Quietly, patiently, they continued their advance.
“What is it?” I asked.
The mother shook her head. “We do not know.”
Had she visited a specialist? Once.
She had been given a cream and sent away with the terrible gift of uncertainty.
Then I asked the question that revealed the true illness.
Why had she never sought another opinion?
The answer did not come immediately. Some silences require courage.
When she finally spoke, it was not medicine that stood accused.
It was humanity.
Her husband refused to take the child outside. He was ashamed. Ashamed of his own son. Ashamed of the gaze of strangers. Ashamed of questions. Ashamed of whispers.
He blamed his wife for the child’s condition, as though suffering were inherited from guilt and disease were evidence of a crime.
Sometimes he would not even leave the house himself, fearing that others might see the child and, through the child, judge him.
At that moment the lesion upon the boy’s skin became the smallest tragedy in the room.
For there is something more terrible than a disease. It is abandonment.
There is something more painful than physical suffering. It is teaching a child that he must hide.
The world has always possessed a cruel habit. It sees what is unusual before it sees what is human.
It notices the scar before the smile, the deformity before the soul, the wound before the child.
And little by little, those who are stared at begin to disappear, not from life, but from sight.
They are kept indoors. Kept silent.
As I looked at the boy, I found myself wondering how many battles he had already inherited.
A battle against disease. A battle against war. A battle against poverty.
And now, a battle against shame.
He had chosen none of them. No child chooses the burdens laid upon his shoulders.
Yet there he sat, carrying them all.
Small enough to fit in his mother’s arms. Heavy enough to carry the failures of an entire society.
Perhaps the saddest part was not what covered his body.
Perhaps the saddest part was the possibility that his family had suffered alone for so long that they had begun to mistake despair for destiny.
War does more than destroy buildings and hospitals. It destroys the systems that guide people toward hope.
It leaves families alone with terrifying questions and no one to answer them. Alone with shame where there should be support. Alone with fear where there should be treatment.
And after enough years of carrying that burden alone, people begin to believe that nothing will ever change.
That there will never be a diagnosis. Never be a treatment.
Never be a future different from the one they see today.
#WoundedGaza
Reporter: Some members of the Jewish community, including Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer, were alarmed by the language you used at the rally last week, calling AIPAC monsters who move dark money.
Mamdani: I want to be very clear. We’re talking about a status quo where children are being killed on a daily basis. More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military since the so-called ceasefire.
Even an Al Jazeera journalist, Ahmed Wishah, was killed this past Saturday by an Israeli strike. And when I am speaking about AIPAC, I’m speaking about an organization that has been supportive of the status quo, that has fought any attempt to actually deliver safety to people not just in Palestine but, frankly, throughout much of the region.
And it is a status quo of immorality. It is one that I will not accept. And when it comes to the way in which they defend the status quo, oftentimes they defend it through direct contributions, as we are seeing right now in New York 13.
Oftentimes they also support the status quo through dark money, by funneling money that would have previously come directly from AIPAC through other organizations whose contributors’ identities are only made clear after an election.
And I think it is important that when we ask ourselves how such death and destruction is happening overseas, we also name those who allow it to take place.
Just saw a video of a kid in Gaza with a hole in their head that was even more disturbing than the dozen other times I’ve seen that since 10/7. She had a softball sized hole in her head and a Mickey Mouse shirt on.
If anything we are too nice to people who support Israel
💢 BREAKING | Israel has carried out a double-tap strike in Gaza, killing Raghad Ashour, an 18-year-old student from Beit Hanoun who was on her way to take her general secondary education examination per @MosabAbuToha. At least 5 others were wounded, according to initial reports from journalists on the ground.
🎥 Anas Ayyad
@TechTradeBlue@ultras_antifaa Dumbass take, verging on deeply mentally challenged.
So is he supposed to give away all his intelligence and management talent for free or cheap? He cant change the system we’re in.