Carol Mullan

“We should keep our feet on the ground to signify that nothing is beneath us, but we should also lift up our eyes to say nothing is beyond us.” Seamus Heaney

[MSF International @MSF]

We call for the immediate release of Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, and the 95 Palestinian healthcare workers who remain detained by Israeli authorities since October 2023.

https://t.co/PdsA4iQCiq

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Those who have lost their lives in the Mediterranean Sea are victims both of decisions that were made and of decisions that were not made. Indifference to the common good and corruption in their countries of origin; a global economic system that generates poverty and exclusion; fear that fuels prejudice and contempt; the belief that such problems do not concern us; the criminal calculations of those who profit from the suffering of others; the slow and difficult transition from mere emergency management to the development of comprehensive and shared policies. #PastoralVisit #Lampedusa

[Shamrock Rovers FC @ShamrockRovers]

The boy from Crumlin.

#FIFAWorldCup

[Carol Mullan @carol112]

@ProfRobHoward Thanks for your really helpful sharing of your papers and other interesting research. I really appreciate it!

[Alex Crawford @AlexCrawfordSky]

Eleven children killed or injured every 24 hours in Lebanon, UN says - https://t.co/VRg3ak1x2k

[Courtney Mares @catholicourtney]

In response to a personal attack by President Donald Trump the night before, Pope Leo told journalists on the papal plane to Algeria:

“I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do, what the Church is here to do. We are not politicians. We don’t deal with foreign policy with the same perspective he might understand it, but I do believe in the message of the Gospel, as a peacemaker.”

(Video: @OSVNews)

[Alex Crawford @AlexCrawfordSky]

The saddest advisory: after at least 100 Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon, advice should you come across a parentless child. It says stay calm and reassure them, take them to the nearest rescue centre, call the authorities

[NASA @NASA]

We see our home planet as a whole, lit up in spectacular blues and browns. A green aurora even lights up the atmosphere. That's us, together, watching as our astronauts make their journey to the Moon.

[MOHAMMED𓂆 @Mo7mmd30]

Everyone felt sad for the penguin walking alone and the monkey rejected by his mother. But this video is far more heartbreaking, yet it didn’t receive the same attention.

[BBC News (World) @BBCWorld]

Israeli forces kill Palestinian couple and two of their children in occupied West Bank https://t.co/m5llYcCo6l

[Carol Mullan @carol112]

@campbellclaret @Waterfront_Hall Thanks a lot to you and @Scaramucci, for a really enjoyable and thought provoking evening!

[Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza]

Does a man ever truly hate his own homeland? His house? His parents who bore him?
I had thought such hatred impossible.
Until the day I stood where my home once stood.

When I returned, I could not recognize the earth that had once carried my childhood.
The street was gone. The walls were gone. The air itself was gone, filled now with the dull silence of ashes.
I wandered in circles, like a ghost among ghosts, unable to find the spot where my father once planted the olive tree, where my mother once called my name from the doorway.

The place knew me no more. Even the dust refused to remember us.
It was as though the very earth had spat us out, as though it had grown weary of our footsteps, our blood, our prayers.

The clinic, my small temple of mercy, lay beneath the rubble of neighboring homes.
No sign, no remnant, no sound. Only the smell of iron and the strange, choking sweetness of decay.
I did not feel grief then. No. What I felt was something darker, more obscene: betrayal.
It was as though God Himself had turned His face away, and in His silence I saw not absence but rejection.
In that moment I understood what it means to hate the ground one walks upon.
I thought, perhaps this land is tired of us.
Perhaps it never wanted us at all.

Since that day, I have forbidden my parents to return.
What could they see there but the carcass of their life’s work, a home that cost them forty years of hunger and sweat, now pulverized into memory?
They have seen the photographs, yes, but a photograph cannot show you silence.
It cannot show you how silence hums after the bombs, how your footsteps echo where no walls remain to echo them back.

For weeks I went back there, unable to stay away, standing before the ruins as one stands before a grave that refuses to speak.
I waited for the stones to answer me, to tell me it had all been a mistake,
to ask my forgiveness for abandoning me.
But they said nothing.
And I began to hate them.

Yes, I hated the house, the street, the land, even the people.
Because here, love is not the opposite of hate.
Here, love begets hate.
Every tenderness is a wound. Every attachment is a sentence to loss.

And yet, even hatred grows tired.
It withers into exhaustion, into that numbness where one no longer cries or prays or curses, but merely exists, waiting for the next calamity.

A few days ago, my brother came to me with news.
A neighbor had been struck by a stray bullet in the camp nearby.
He bled for half an hour before finding help.
The nearest clinic was thirty minutes away, and the roads to the north were clogged with ruin and despair.
My brother did not ask the question outright, but I heard it all the same:
“When will you rebuild?”

But I said nothing.
Because what could I rebuild on cursed soil?
What mercy could grow from ashes?
I felt emptied of everything, not out of weakness but out of sheer fatigue with existence itself.
I wanted only for the road to open, for a chance to flee this cemetery that insists on calling itself home.

But three nights ago, I saw a video,
displaced families in the north pleading for a small clinic,
for someone, anyone, to treat their wounded children.
I watched them cry into the dark, and suddenly I understood.
My silence was the worst betrayal of all.

If there remains breath in me, then I am still responsible.
If the world has turned its back, then we, the remnants, must face one another.
For what is a homeland, if not the last cry of those who refuse to stop loving,
even when love itself has become unbearable?

And so I will rebuild.
Not because I forgive the land, nor because I have hope left, but because despair itself demands it.
Because a man must either act or drown in his own hatred.
And perhaps, in rebuilding, I might find again a fragment of faith, not in the world, which is cruel, but in the simple, stubborn mercy that still beats somewhere inside the ruined chest of humankind.

#RebuildTheClinic

#GazaWounded

[United Nations Geneva @UNGeneva]

“It is clear there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.”

UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry's report shows #Israel has committed #genocide in #Gaza.

https://t.co/UGjepPwmwo

[Dr. Ezzideen @ezzingaza]

I have no voice left.
My throat is torn from screaming, my soul flayed raw.
I cursed Hamas for October 7, cursed them for dragging two million souls into the abyss, for their arrogance, for their marble rooms where they sat like princes while the people drank brackish water and the children died with flies in their mouths.
I begged them to stop, to beg for a truce, to save one single child, and they did nothing.
They chose their glory, their revolution, their flag, and they delivered us into the jaws of hell.

But look, look at what Israel is doing.
Do you dare call this war?
War is fought between armies.
War has rules. Here there are no rules.
Here there is only the machine, crushing bone, tearing flesh, leaving nothing behind but the smell of burnt hair and the wailing of women.
Here they are not killing Hamas, they are killing Gaza itself.
Every building is marked for death, every street for erasure.
The sky itself seems to agree, it rains fire until the city is ash.

Do you see what they are doing? They are trying to kill memory. When the last man leaves Gaza, there will be nothing to bury him under, no house, no mosque, no church, no school, no market.
Only sand and silence.
And perhaps one day the world will say: “There was nothing here. No one lived here.”

I am ashamed to still be alive. Ashamed that my stomach still hungers when children lie under the rubble.
Ashamed that I still have words, and these words cannot stop a single bomb from falling.

I no longer pray for justice, justice is a lie we told ourselves.
I only pray that the earth itself remembers.
That these ruins rise one day to testify against all of us, against Hamas, against Israel, against me, against you, and that their testimony will be so terrible that even God Himself will shudder when He hears it.

#GazaGenocide

[Save the Children UK @savechildrenuk]

We agree. So when is the UK Government going to stop enabling attacks like these by suspending all arms transfers to Israel, including parts for the F-35 jets being used to bomb civilian targets?

[Mohamed Salah @MoSalah]

Can you tell us how he died, where, and why?

[Emma Murphy @emmamurphyitv]

It’s estimated Gaza had as much, likely more, explosives dropped on it as Dresden, Hamburg and London in WW2. Little wonder it looks like this. Not filmed with anything fancy, just an iPhone through a window. There’s no avoiding the scale of destruction. https://t.co/CFrVtiEh9J

[Channel 4 News @Channel4News]

"The war is now in the hands of three white, Caucasian men who don't seem to want meaningful peace."

Morgan McMonagle, a trauma surgeon who has worked in Gaza twice since the conflict began, says what Gaza needs right now more than health care is food and clean water.

[Jeremy Konyndyk @JeremyKonyndyk]

As a longtime humanitarian who has battled famines and hunger crises, I fear that starvation in Gaza has now passed the tipping point and we are going to see mass-scale starvation mortality.

A thread on famine momentum, famine response, and what it means for Gaza today.