Maria ماريا retweetledi
A few days ago, I began setting up a small medical clinic in the central refugee camps of Gaza. Today, though the shelves are still empty and the walls unfinished, we opened our doors, and the place became more than a clinic. It became a witness.
This morning, a fourteen-year-old girl crossed the threshold of my clinic, her mother walking behind her like a shadow.
Her dress was simple and dignified, a reminder that even here, among the dust and ruin, there are still mothers who insist their children remain human, remain whole.
But as soon as the girl entered, the world broke.
She muttered a curse, a word too sharp for her young mouth, and then at once, in the same breath, begged forgiveness: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
She struck the table with her small hands as if to punish herself for existing, pressed her finger to her lips as if to seal her own voice, and then suddenly and violently slammed the table again, crying out the same curse as though it had forced its way out of her soul.
I looked at her mother.
Her face bore the weariness of exile, the quiet despair of someone who has walked too far and too long.
They had fled their home two days ago, she told me, walking under the merciless sun.
The girl’s nose was burned, its redness a small, almost trivial wound compared to the greater injury that had seized her spirit.
When I asked more, the mother lowered her gaze and confessed what I already sensed: the child was not merely sunburned.
She had been diagnosed with severe autism in childhood, once improving, once reaching toward the light, until the war dragged her back into a darkness deeper than any prison cell.
She had not taken medication for nearly nine years.
Now, in the tent that serves as her only refuge, she is unraveling, piece by fragile piece.
I am a doctor, trained to see symptoms, to trace patterns, to write diagnoses in neat letters.
But what diagnosis do I write here?
Echolalia? Behavioral regression?
Or something older and darker, the soul itself crying out under the weight of a world too brutal to be borne?
Those who live with autism are not built for sudden uprooting.
They need silence, order, the same doorframe to touch every morning, the same light falling through the same window.
But now there is no window, no doorframe, no silence.
There is only the screaming of the sky, the roar of artillery, the stench of strangers’ fear pressed close together in tents.
And I am supposed to treat her nose.
This child does not know what war is.
She does not know why she suffers.
She only knows that her world, the small, ordered, sacred world she needed to survive, has been destroyed.
And she must now apologize to everyone, to me, to her mother, to God Himself, as if her existence were an offense that brought the bombs down.
I, who have seen death by the thousands, find myself trembling before this girl.
Not because of her outburst, for that is merely her humanity breaking through, but because I see in her the whole tragedy of this land.
A land where children must beg forgiveness for the noise of their own voices, where innocence itself is crushed until it can only whisper: “I’m sorry.”
What will become of her?
What will become of all of them, the unseen ones, the ones whose suffering will never make the news?
And who will atone, if not us?
Who will carry this record to the tribunal of eternity?
I left my pen hovering over the page, unable to write a diagnosis.
Instead I wrote: The patient trembles in a tent. She whispers apologies to a world that should fall on its knees before her and weep.
#GazaGenocide
English
