I’ve trained myself to turn my eyes away. Not because I don’t care. Because my heart can’t bear any more. Because I see too much already. In the hospital, I see mothers carrying their children in pieces. Fathers who’ve stopped speaking. Babies who’ve never opened their eyes. I sew skin, I stop bleeding, I sign death certificates with fingers that tremble behind gloves. But outside of work, when my shift ends, I no longer watch the videos. Not of the explosions. Not of the children dug out of the rubble like broken dolls. Not of the women who scream until their throats give out and no sound comes. But today, something made me stay. A video. A woman, covered in dust, was holding her son, what was left of him. Still, she held him as if he were whole. She leaned close, pressed her lips to his ear, and whispered: “I made you bread.” Her voice trembled like a candle about to die. Her hands shook as she stroked what was left of his hair. She didn’t look at the wound in his skull. She looked at him like he was just sleeping in too long. Then she lay down beside him, pulled his body into her chest, and closed her eyes. As if she could dream him back. And I understood something terrible: She believed the bread could bring him back. Do you understand? This was not poetry. This was not metaphor. This was a mother who believed that if she could have only brought him bread, if she had held it in her hands, warm and real, her child wouldn’t be dead. Because he died hungry. Not just poor. Starving. His ribs sharp under his skin. His lips split from thirst. The kind of hunger that gnaws at you slowly until even death seems like relief. He died without a piece of bread that costs less than a dollar in a world filled with excess. And she, She thought a loaf could have saved him. That bread was stronger than war. That love and sesame seeds might be enough. I turned off the screen. And I sat in the dark for a long time. I did not cry for the child. I cry for children every day. I cried for her. For her belief. For the broken world that made her think bread was all it would take. And maybe, in another world, it would have been. #GazaGenocide
