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Since yesterday, I have returned again and again to the photographs of four children who died beside their mother when heavy rain sent rocks crashing down upon the tent in which they had sought refuge. I have looked at their faces until I could scarcely bear it, yet I have been unable to turn away. They were from Jabalia. From my own neighborhood. They had fled south after the Israeli army took control of their area, leaving their homes behind the Yellow Line. They had abandoned everything they had ever known, carrying nothing but the hope that somewhere, they might be allowed to live. But death, from which they had fled so far, had followed them. It found them beneath a canvas roof, where even the rain had become an enemy. Yet it is not only the manner of their deaths that torments me. It is the thought of their lives. What had these children known of the world? I try to imagine their brief passage through it, those few years that should have been only the beginning of a long and beautiful story. Perhaps one was born to the thunder of bombs, and the first light that entered his eyes was the light of a world already burning. Perhaps another spoke his first word while his mother trembled at the sound of an aircraft. One may have taken his first uncertain steps upon the floor of a tent. Another may have celebrated his birthday while his parents searched desperately for bread. And the eldest? He had scarcely begun to understand life before men decided that war would be the world in which he must grow. What a terrible thing, to be born into a world and never be allowed to discover its beauty! They should have known the innocent happiness of ordinary days. The delight of running beneath trees, of returning from school with some marvelous discovery to tell their mother, of waking on Eid morning to find new clothes beside their beds. They should have known the sweet impatience of falling asleep dreaming of a toy, certain that tomorrow would bring something wonderful. And beyond those small joys, how much more was waiting for them! There should have been years of friendship, laughter, and foolish adventures remembered with tenderness. There should have been the first bewilderment of love, the trembling of a hand held for the first time, the happiness of discovering that another heart could beat for theirs. There should have been a day, twenty years from now, when they would look back upon their childhood and smile at memories whose beauty they had not understood while living them. An entire world was waiting to unfold before them. And of all that life should have given them, what did they receive? Fear. Hunger. Exile. The sound of bombs. The sight of their parents struggling to keep them alive. And then death. Four children, innocent even of the reasons for the war that had swallowed their childhoods, spent their few years struggling for the simple right to remain alive. And in the end, they died. Tell me, in all the tragedies written by human hands, have you ever encountered a story more pitiless than this? What novelist would dare invent such cruelty without fearing that his readers would accuse him of exaggeration? And yet this is no invention. These children existed. They had names, faces, voices, little desires, and hearts that longed for happiness like those of every other child. How monstrous is a world in which a child comes into life with all its promises before him, only to spend his few years struggling to remain alive. And how much more monstrous that, after all his suffering, even that little should be denied him. #SurvivalTestimony

Today, I was reminded that war has other ways of killing people. No explosion. No blood. No body pulled from beneath the rubble. Sometimes, it kills so quietly that the death is eventually called natural. I was speaking to a friend in Gaza today when he told me that his aunt had died that morning. Death has become such an ordinary part of our conversations that I asked almost automatically: “What happened to her?” I meant medically. Her heart? A stroke? An illness? He said: “She wasn’t very old. But during the war, she lost two daughters and three sons.” That was his answer. And I did not ask again. Because somehow, five dead children felt like a complete medical history. What diagnosis could I possibly have been looking for after that? I kept thinking about her. About waking up every morning in a world where five of the people you once carried, raised, worried about, waited for, and called by name are no longer there. Five children. Five voices gone. Five empty places in one mother’s life. I wondered whether she ever woke for one brief second before remembering. Before the first name returned. Then the second. Then the third. Then the fourth. Then the fifth. Perhaps dying that morning was the gentlest thing death had done to her during this war. Her death may now be written down in a few clinical words. Cardiac arrest. Stroke. Natural causes. And perhaps medically, one of those words is correct. But there is nothing natural about burying five of your children and then being expected to continue living. There is nothing natural about a heart being asked to carry that much grief. I do not know what medically stopped her heart that morning. Perhaps a doctor could give it a name. But medicine can tell us how a body died without always telling us what happened to the person who lived inside it. And this is another kind of death in Gaza that I fear we are learning to normalize. The people killed by bombs are counted. The people buried beneath buildings are counted. But what about those who survive the explosion and spend the months and years after it being consumed by what it took from them? The mothers who buried their children. The fathers who lost entire families. The children whose nervous systems learned fear before they learned multiplication. The people whose bodies escaped the rubble, but whose lives never really did. War does not kill only at the moment of impact. Sometimes, it leaves the body alive while something inside it begins to break. And this is why I no longer know when a massacre like this truly ends. Perhaps not when the last bomb falls. Perhaps not when the last ceasefire is signed. Perhaps it ends only when the last person carrying it inside them is gone. Until then, Gaza will continue burying people whose death certificates say they died of one thing, while the people who loved them know that their dying began long before. #SurvivalTestimony

Sometimes I think that, to the outside world, Gaza is not a place. It is a notification on a phone. You open it. A child is being pulled from the rubble. His face is gray with dust. For a few seconds, he has your entire heart. You write This is unbearable. You share the video because people need to see. Then you close the app. Someone calls your name. Your food is getting cold. You have somewhere to be. And the child disappears. I don’t say this to mock anyone’s solidarity. I know much of it is sincere. People have cried for Gaza, marched, donated, spoken when speaking came at a cost. Sometimes refusing to be silent is all a person can do. But since leaving Gaza, I have understood the enormous distance between caring about a tragedy and having that tragedy become your entire life. Here, Gaza can occupy ten minutes of your day. There, there is no button to close it. A mother cannot scroll past her children’s hunger. A father cannot share a photograph of his destroyed home and return to another one. A child cannot turn off the video when it becomes too disturbing. He is inside the image. Here, people cry for Gaza. They march, raise its flag, and write beautiful words. Then the demonstration ends. They eat. They laugh. They make plans. They fall in love. They sleep. And that is their right. That is what life is supposed to be. What hurts is knowing that, at that same moment, someone in Gaza may be searching for clean water. A mother may be trying to make a tent less unbearable for her children. A family may reach morning, count everyone, and call that a good night. This is why I recoil when people search for a “positive side” to October 7: “At least the world knows about Palestine now.” At least. As though awareness can make the dead less dead. Was that the achievement? Was this the price of being seen? Homes destroyed. Friends buried. Children buried. Entire families erased. People who once worried about exams, weddings, salaries, dinner, love. Ordinary people. Ordinary lives. Was all of that worth it so Palestine could finally appear on someone’s screen, be shared, and then disappear when dinner arrived? What kind of devil’s bargain are we supposed to celebrate? We should never have needed to die to be noticed. The world should have known us because we were alive. Our dreams should have been enough. Our laughter should have been enough. Our ordinary mornings should have been enough to prove we deserved another morning. Not our bodies beneath rubble. Not our deaths. The world can carry Gaza in its heart and still put it down. The people of Gaza cannot. For the outside world, Gaza is a cause. For those inside, it is Tuesday. It is waking up and checking who survived the night. The water you cannot find. The home you no longer have. The fear that sleeps beside you. The tomorrow you may never reach. So when someone says October 7 “put Palestine on the map,” I think about the price we paid for that attention. Because Palestine was already on the map. We were there. We were living. We were falling in love. Becoming doctors and teachers. Drinking coffee with people we thought we would grow old beside. Making plans for next summer. Saying see you tomorrow without knowing what an extraordinary sentence that was. The world simply wasn’t looking. And now I am supposed to find something beautiful in the price we paid to make it look. I cannot. Our blood should never have been the evidence of our humanity. To hell with such an “achievement.” We did not need the world to learn how Palestinians die. We needed the world to care that Palestinians were alive. #SurvivalTestimony