Questa puntata non è come le altre: cercheremo di fare del nostro meglio, ma è una puntata totalmente dedicata a Ornella non solo per le cose che faremo, ma perchè il nostro cuore è da due giorni lì. Ornella è stata una di noi, abbiamo perso un compagno di giochi e giocare è difficile adesso...ma è il nostro mestiere, che è anche il suo. Cercheremo di farlo nel migliore dei modi
@fabfazio #OrnellaVanoni #CTCF
For days I had been preparing for this one day, not with strength, for I have little left, but with what remains of faith. Faith not in salvation, nor in men, but in duty, the stubborn, almost irrational duty to go on living when everything around you calls for death.
I had resolved to reopen the clinic. It was not a grand act, no, God forbid, but perhaps one small act of defiance against despair. For is it not true that even a spark trembles more brightly when surrounded by darkness?
At seven in the morning, I stepped into the street. The air smelled of dust and fatigue, and I felt both pride and shame, pride that I still walked, shame that I still could. We opened the doors, and people came, limping, pale, wordless. They carried their pain as if it were a second skin. And we worked, my hands trembling, my thoughts somewhere between heaven and madness. We had little medicine, yet we prescribed hope as though it were a drug that might trick death itself.
Until two in the afternoon, the world was reduced to one sound, the sound of suffering met with trembling compassion. A mother’s cry, a child’s shiver, a man’s silence. How strange that such a day, filled with pain, could feel almost holy.
When the last patient left, I wanted to rest. But rest, here, is indecent, a sin against those who cannot. So I walked to the market, following a rumor, the kind of rumor that, in our city, has replaced faith. I searched for medicines I could not find. I returned home empty-handed, empty-stomached, my body exhausted but my mind restless, burning, alive.
And then came a call.
“There’s a supermarket selling frozen chicken,” said the neighbor, his voice trembling like that of a man announcing salvation.
Without thought I ran. How absurd, how profoundly human, to run for a piece of meat while people lie dying. Yet I ran, as though my life depended on it. For perhaps it did.
I stood in line for over an hour, surrounded by faces that looked like mirrors of my own soul, faces of those who have lost everything yet still believe in the redemption of a small thing: food, warmth, survival. When my turn came, I bought two chickens. Only two. Yet in my heart it felt like I had won a war.
At 7:06 p.m., I returned home. My hands trembled. My back ached. I placed the two frozen bodies on the table and sat in silence.
And then the question, cruel, childlike, inevitable, rose within me:
Which was the greater victory today?
That I reopened the clinic and touched the wounds of the living?
Or that I brought home two dead birds for my family to eat?
Tell me, who among us can still tell the difference between the sacred and the absurd, between mercy and survival, between the healing of bodies and the feeding of mouths?
Here in Gaza, the smallest act is transfigured into a moral weight unbearable to the soul. To save a patient or to find food, both demand the same courage, the same humiliation, the same grace.
And so I sat there, my eyes fixed on those two chickens, and I felt, I swear I felt, that they were staring back at me, cold and mute, yet filled with the same mystery that governs all existence.
Perhaps this is how man survives: by assigning holiness to the trivial, by finding God even in the marketplace, even in hunger, even in absurdity.
Tonight, I am both doctor and beggar, both savior and fool. And if God still walks among us, He must walk disguised, perhaps as a man clutching two frozen chickens, refusing, in his own small way, to surrender.
#WoundedGaza
A journalist asked me what message I would like to leave for my readers, and I thought of sharing it here as well.
I want to thank everyone who stood with us, everyone who supported us, and everyone who helped carry our voices to the world.
But I need people to understand something. The war is not over. Our daily reality has not returned to normal. We are still walking a long road toward a just peace, toward dignity, toward the stability our people have long been denied.
This is why I wrote my book, to record the pain, the resilience, and the moments the world never sees, so that one day no one can say they did not know, they did not see, they did not hear.
And I want to say this clearly: the people of Gaza are not heroes, they are human beings. They are mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters who have simply reached their limit. They are tired, tired of loss, tired of burying their loved ones, tired of starting over again and again.
My message is simple: do not look away.
Keep speaking. Keep sharing. Keep standing with Gaza.
Because our struggle is not a headline to move past.
It is still happening, right now, every single day.
#WoundedGaza
Since early morning, my family and I have been living in a state of total psychological collapse.
Today we learned that our homes, our land, and our entire neighborhood, every house belonging to our family and our neighbors, have been completely erased. Bulldozed. Flattened into a barren stretch of yellow dust.
From the first light of day, we have been living the full meaning of defeat.
We have lost more than seventy members of our family. We have lost our land.
We now have no home to return to, no walls to protect us, no place left to call our own.
And then, one of Hamas’s leaders appears on television declaring that “the people have not been defeated,” that “Gaza has stood firm and fought a historic war.”
So let history record this:
I, Dr. Ezzideen Shehab, from Gaza, together with my family, my friends, and their families, did not fight any war.
We were the victims of an annihilation ignited by Hamas from within our homes, only for the Israeli army to descend upon us and unleash its full cruelty on the civilians of Gaza, while Hamas’s fighters vanished into their tunnels.
Let history record the truth: we were defeated, utterly, painfully, and completely defeated.
And it is we, the people of Gaza, who have the right to say whether we were defeated or not, not those who sit comfortably in Qatar or Turkey.
We were crushed, humiliated, and broken after our city was destroyed, occupied, and erased from existence.
We were displaced, stripped of everything we had built, left to wander through the ruins of our own lives.
And somewhere amid all this, I understood something simple and terrible:
My mother’s tears are holier than the homeland itself, and my father’s brokenness matters more to me than any flag.
Because what meaning does a homeland hold when it devours the ones you love, when it glorifies death but forgets the living?
We were not steadfast. We were held hostage in our own land.
We could not leave. We could not change those who claimed to rule us.
We were trapped between a merciless occupier and rulers who feed on our suffering.
And if there is one moment in my life when I must speak the truth, without fear, without hesitation, then this is that moment.
Let it be written clearly:
We were not soldiers in a war.
We were the bodies buried beneath it.
#GazaGenocide
For days we have obeyed, as though obedience might purchase our right to live. We left Gaza City and went south, into the so-called “safe zone,” that bitter parody of salvation. But there is no salvation here.
Tonight the house beside us was chosen, chosen as if by some cosmic tribunal to be torn apart. And so we sit together in a single room, pressed so close we can hear one another’s hearts. The walls tremble with our silence. The air itself feels guilty for remaining still. We are no longer people; we are the condemned, awaiting the sound that will deliver the verdict.
There are no safe zones in Gaza. The whole of this land has been turned into a graveyard where the living walk. Every home is a coffin with its lid not yet shut. We do not live. Life has fled from us. We simply endure, suspended on the edge of a scream, waiting for the instant when light and sound and dust will rush in and erase us.
And if we die tonight, it will not be as martyrs or as soldiers, but as shadows passing wordlessly into the dark, proof that the world was watching and did not move.
#GazaGenocide
A Letter from Hell
(Part 1)
I write this not as a doctor, nor a son, nor a man.
I write this as one who has descended into the bowels of hell and returned, not with prophecy, but with silence in his throat and blood under his nails.
What you are about to read is not a message. It is a confession. A cry. A record of our descent.
And God help me, perhaps a final prayer.
We are trapped in a spiral, a great, grinding wheel of misery that turns not by accident, but by the hands of men.
It is not fate that starves us. It is not Heaven that bombs us.
It is the logic of the powerful, the rituals of violence, the cold arithmetic of geopolitics that has made our streets into slaughterhouses.
Each morning, I wake with the same thought: Has the battery died?
Not mine. I have long been emptied. But the one in my phone.
I need it alive long enough to charge again at the hospital, to remain tethered to something, anything, that suggests we still belong to the living.
There is no water.
There is no breakfast.
There is no “routine.”
There is only a salt-stained bucket of seawater where a sink once stood.
I wash my face, not to cleanse, but to remember that I am still flesh and not yet dust.
I do not eat.
We eat once a day, if we can.
We save what scraps remain for one midday communion: rice, lentils, silence.
I arrive at the hospital, and the doctor greets me with an inventory of absence:
No more orthopedic implants.
No promethazine.
No certainty.
No hope.
The floors are red.
Not metaphorically. Not poetically.
They are red.
And this is what I ask myself: Is our blood even red?
Are we made of the same clay, the same sorrow, the same divine breath that once stirred the lungs of Adam?
If so, then why do we die like vermin?
Why does the world avert its eyes while we rot in full view?
Why does one hostage’s hunger move the soul of nations, while the skeletal bodies of two million children evoke nothing but polite disbelief?
I have lost fifteen kilograms. My bones have names now. My cheeks are hollowed caverns.
The children, God, the children are unrecognizable. They are no longer children. They are shadows with eyes.
And still I said: release the hostages. Every last one. Without conditions.
Because no life should be bartered like coin.
But now I ask you. No, I demand of you. Who will fight for us?
Who will demand our release from this monstrous tribunal of fire and famine?
We did not vote for war.
We did not ignite this blaze.
We are fuel. Nothing more.
We are the tinder that keeps the headlines burning.
I tried to escape. I begged. I bribed. I wept like a child.
But I failed. And now all that remains is this: stay alive, one more day, in a place designed to extinguish life itself.
#GazaGenocide
For days I cannot breathe. My chest burns, my throat closes. We wander like madmen, deranged, waiting for the blow, for the command that will tear us away again. We have known war, yes, two endless years of it, gnawing at us like rats gnaw at the bones of a corpse, but this… this is worse, infinitely worse. They tell us to leave. Again. For the fifth time. Do you hear? The fifth! And this time, O God, this time, we know it is the last. The last. We will not return. Never. Not tomorrow, not in ten years, not even in the fading memories of our children.
The door I shut behind me now will never open again to my hand. That sound, wood against wood, is not a door closing. It is my soul being nailed into its coffin. I am alive, yet I am already buried.
And what is this exile? It is not a journey, no! It is the stripping out of the last trembling thread of the human soul. They do not want men, or women, or children. They want shadows. Shadows crawling over dust, faceless, nameless, memoryless. A people of tents! Yes, tents! A nation whose destiny is canvas and rope, whose highest ambition is a rag flapping in the wind. Lord, is this not a death more merciless than the grave? To leave a man breathing, but rob him of all that makes him man, to condemn him to walk as a ghost who cannot even die.
The city, our city, beloved, betrayed, will be erased, levelled, spat into dust. Its stones scattered like ash in the wind. The houses where children quarreled, where mothers sang, where bread rose warm from the oven, all gone, gone forever. And then, O merciful God, we will forget. Yes, we will forget! In the torment of thirst, clawing for one drop of water, we will forget our streets, our walls, our keys, our doors. We will forget the warmth of winter, the sting of summer nights. We will forget neighbors, quarrels, weddings, songs. We will forget even that we were human.
Tell me, Lord, how can man forget himself? How can memory be ripped from the soul like flesh from bone? Remember us! Remember us before the breaking is complete. Remember the eyes of the children before their light is extinguished. Remember the tears of the mothers, the same as your mothers’ tears. Remember that we screamed, that we did not fall silent, that we tried with the last shreds of our strength.
And look, look with horror, at the abyss of history: how those who once wept in ghettos, who staggered through camps, who suffocated in ovens, now see their leaders prepare our exile. Auschwitz, do you hear its echo? It has not ended. It returns, it mutates, it reappears in new masks. And now the victim wears the face of the executioner. This is the most infernal blasphemy: that those scarred by the Holocaust now see their leaders fashion a Holocaust anew.
Write our names, I beg you, I cry to you, on your walls, in your books, in your prayers. Carve them into stone, before they vanish into dust. For tomorrow even you will doubt we ever walked the earth. And when your children ask: were they ever a people? Did they breathe? Did they love? Were they human? What will you answer then, when your own memory betrays you?
And Gaza, my Gaza, is ending. Yes, ending. This is the fifth exile, and the last. The last! An end blacker than the blackest pages of history, darker than the darkest prophecies ever dared to imagine. And yet, even as I write, through tears that blind me, something remains. A silence. A silence heavier than stone, heavier than tombs, heavier even than God’s gaze. A silence that devours the cry itself, that roars louder than all screams combined. That silence will not die. It will haunt you. It will haunt the world. It will haunt God Himself.
#GazaGenocide
I have tried to write. I swear I have. Since yesterday, I have sat with pen in hand, but the words, those traitorous, trembling things, refuse to come. What does one write from hell? What language is left when every syllable is soaked in blood and betrayal?
This morning, I saw a man at the side of the road.
He was not weeping.
He was not praying.
He sat there like an orphaned prophet, staring at the heavens as if to demand: Why have You abandoned us?
At first, his hands moved softly, almost tenderly, like a child learning to pray again after forgetting the words. Then suddenly, violently, they struck the air. He shouted, argued, pleaded, not with men, but with God Himself, as if the sky still held the capacity to blush.
And I stood there watching and felt shame. Shame not because he believed, but because I no longer do.
They now speak openly, not in whispers, not in secret documents, but with unflinching pride, of removing us all. Not metaphorically. Not slowly. But completely. As though we were rot, something to be scraped from history. Gaza, they say, must be emptied. Gaza, they say, is a military problem, not a home. And we are nothing but figures in a strategy, ghosts in someone else’s victory speech.
And the world?
Ah, the world has become a fist. Cold. Tight. Indifferent. It closes around us not out of rage, but out of boredom. We are no longer a tragedy. We are a statistic, a side note, a nuisance.
We do not own the sky. The sky is no longer blue. It is steel. It is hunger. It is buzzing, poisoned, thick with the breath of drones that do not sleep. They pierce even our prayers.
We are not the living. We are not the dead. We are the in-between, smoke clinging to rubble, souls stripped of longing, walking corpses still pretending to be fathers, daughters, doctors, lovers.
And yes, I am that man on the side of the road. But I no longer lift my face. What is the point? God has turned His face from us, or perhaps worse, He watches in silence.
Do you understand what it means to be silenced by heaven?
I tell you, the worst suffering is not to die. It is to remain, to witness, to scream without echo. To know that you were once a person, and now you are a lesson, or worse, a warning.
And still, still we mourn ourselves.
Not with tears.
Tears are for those who believe in resurrection.
We mourn like dust mourns the wind.
We grieve in silence, because we know, we know, soon, there may be no one left to remember we were ever here.
#GazaGenocide
A 33 anni dalla #strage di via D'Amelio in cui perse la vita #PaoloBorsellino e la sua scorta, ecco la testimonianza del fratello #SalvatoreBorsellino. Il video, tratto dal documentario di Antonio Nasso "L'anno del diluvio"
I am a doctor.
And I cannot save a child.
There: I have said it.
What is a doctor, if not a liar with trembling hands?
What is medicine, if not a prayer whispered into the dark, hoping something, anything, will answer?
Four months ago, the child fell ill.
His name is Qasem.
I say “child,” but I mean something more: I mean a flicker of grace in a world that has spat on grace, trampled it beneath tanks, suffocated it beneath bureaucratic signatures and steel walls.
Two years ago, a bomb fell at four in the morning.
A single bomb: that was all it took to erase seventy-four names from the Book of the Living. My family, every last one of them, turned to silence in the span of a breath.
But Qasem lived.
He and his mother crawled out from under the ruins, not because of skill or science, but because of some strange divine arithmetic I still do not understand.
Surely the universe would not be so precise in its cruelty as to spare a mother’s life only so she could outlive all four of her children, and watch the last one vanish by inches.
Qasem bruises now.
Not from injury, but from breath, from pressure, from life.
His gums bleed. His tiny hands shake.
His blood turns against him in slow, merciless rebellion.
They call it Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura.
An elegant name, too elegant for something so wretched.
And I, his doctor, his cousin, his useless, weeping doctor, have nothing for him.
No treatment. No transfusion. No hospital bed.
Only forms, permits, border checkpoints, and a phone that does not ring.
We applied for his transfer.
They marked his file “Urgent”: Category A.
But no one comes.
Meanwhile, the boy lies in a tent.
Yes: a tent.
There is sand in his hair. Insects at his feet.
He no longer cries the way children cry.
He cries like a man: quiet, long, accepting.
His eyes are not angry.
They are tired.
Each morning, I go to him, like a priest visiting a parishioner.
I kneel at his bedside, not to heal, but to witness.
To bear the unbearable truth: That a world which allows this is not a world that loves children.
That I am not a doctor, but a mourner-in-waiting.
That Gaza is not a place, but a diagnosis.
Qasem is not alone.
There are over eleven thousand patients in Gaza: their names neatly stacked in files, their diagnoses typed in black ink, waiting on desks that do not move.
More than five thousand of them have cancer.
They do not ask for mercy, only for permission.
They wait for chemotherapy, for radiation, for one open gate.
And I, the man with the stethoscope and the shaking hands, cannot save even one.
The death is not sudden.
It comes in paper cuts, in stamps, in silences.
It comes wrapped in the civility of diplomacy and the white lies of delay.
No: this is not war.
This is accounting.
And every day we wait, one more number is subtracted from the future.
#GazaGenocide
It is night again.
That means the drones are back. The sound is not a sound anymore. It is a presence, like madness humming above your head.
I am writing by the glow of my phone. My hands stink of antiseptic, salt, and something I do not name.
There are no hospitals left in the north. No wards. No beds. Not even walls. Only this place we call a clinic: a half-body, half-ghost of medicine, clinging to life like those who enter it.
And they come. They walk, some for more than thirty minutes through rubble, silence, and smoke, just for a strip of gauze, a word, a chance.
They do not come seeking healing.
They come because there is nowhere else left to bleed.
Today, a woman came. Thirty-seven years old, though she moved like she had already died twice.
Her hands, God forgive me, looked like they had been through a furnace. Cracked. Bleeding.
Eczema? Yes, eczema, I said like a fool.
But what is eczema when the sea has become your kitchen sink?
She told me she washes her clothes and dishes with seawater. And toothpaste.
No, not metaphor. Not poetry. Toothpaste. Because soap costs more than life here.
Because she lives in a tent pitched between death and the next missile.
I told her I would give her cream. I said it softly, like a lie you whisper to a child.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to grab her shoulders and cry out,
"You deserve a home. You deserve a sink. You deserve clean hands."
But my own hands are not clean.
I did not scream.
I handed her the cream and looked away.
I am no longer a doctor. I am a witness.
To the slow murder of dignity.
To a land where medicine is a cruel joke and survival is a sin.
How do you treat a body when the soul is the one bleeding?
The sea should cleanse. But here, it corrodes.
Even the sea is tired of mercy.
And God?
He must be weeping, like the rest of us.
Tonight, I will lie and imagine a world where I do not have to apologize to every patient for being human.
I will imagine a world where handing someone cream is not an act of humiliation.
But I will not sleep.
No one here really sleeps.
We only close our eyes and wait for the next scream.
#GazaGenocide