Ashen faces of children not opening their once sparkle-filled eyes, ashen faces of mothers who have lost their babies, fathers desperately digging to find life underneath the rubble. Only to find muffled screams, lifeless bodies – passing on, leaving hell in the hopes to find heaven? A land they might hopefully… finally call home, where they might at last be free?
“I am not just a number!” This was a tweet of a young Palestinian woman, I read several days ago. With no means of communication, there is no telling, if she in fact has become what she feared the most – becoming but a number.
Since the beginning of the siege in Gaza, the most vulnerable have borne the brunt of asphyxiating hate and devastating violence. And now, you hear, watch and bear witness to more than 4000 children dying, countless orphans or rather WCNSF (a wretched acronym coined in Gaza): Wounded Child No Surviving Family in dire need of care. According to reports, 40 percent of wounded are children. Doctors taking out shrapnel, treating severe burns and so much more. Helpless, hapless!
I recently read another tweet for I couldn’t bear to watch the video of a girl writhing in pain in a hospital surrounded by tanks and snipers. Same hospital that has been left with no fuel or electricity. Where 37 premature infants had to then be taken out of their incubators: their key to survival. Three infants are already dead. It is mind numbing, gut wrenching to even comprehend that the fate of the rest might already be sealed!
A UN Women report had earlier revealed that more than 493,000 women and girls have been displaced from their homes in Gaza, 900 women are now heads of their families due to the deaths of male family members.
These are all mere numbers! Figures drenched in blood, yet nonetheless, it seems that it is all these will ever be – mere numbers. While people across the world come out in numbers to protest, rally and campaign, it seems highly unlikely for the powers that be to curtail.
Trouble not just brews, it simmers and erupts once you stop calling spade – well, a spade! This is not a war. Wars are not fought with those fighting for survival in concentration camps. It is not even an unequal battle, if one’s assumed foes are actually civilians.
Yes, there can never be any justification for violence, regardless of which side one is on. That said, oppression does create pathways to resistance and inescapable radicalization.
It is indeed not untrue to claim that history repeats itself for we never learn! We are a fickle specie hell bent on death and destruction. Human rights, democracy, free speech and justice are just imperialist farcical mumbo jumbo coined to divert and appease us – the bewildered herd.
If there is hope, one might just find it underneath the rubble…
Image by hosny salah from Pixabay [Palestinian photographer currently living in Palestine Gaza Strip]
