Halima_Mahmoud

A Palestinian man, nervous and excited to become a father, left Rafidia Hospital in Nablus for a quick stop at the local supermarket while his wife was getting ready to give birth to their child. The Israeli occupation raided the area, and shot him in the head. He was pronounced dead in the same hospital his son was born in.

Let’s talk about Khaled Daher. A paramedic in Lebanon’s Civil Defence. Not a fighter. Not a “target.” A first responder who ran toward danger to save lives. Two days ago, he was killed, along with two of his colleagues, when they were directly targeted while trying to rescue a civilian trapped under rubble. But his story doesn’t start there. Khaled wasn’t just a paramedic. He was the backbone of his family. After his brother died in Bulgaria, he went searching for him, across borders & through uncertainty, until he finally located his grave & brought him back to Lebanon, where he laid him to rest. He then became a father figure to his brother’s daughter, raising her as his own, carrying a responsibility that wasn’t his to bear, but one he chose anyway. He was a son, a brother, a provider, a quiet pillar holding others up. And in the end, he died the same way he lived, trying to save someone else. Khaled Daher didn’t just lose his life. His family lost their support. People lost the man who showed up when everything else fell apart. His niece has now lost both fathers. Khaled spent his life saving others. He was killed while doing exactly that. This is what is being lost. Over 103 medics and rescue workers have been killed since March 2. Not numbers. First responders. Lives that held other lives together.

"If anyone has survived this starvation, it is this chicken. She survived my knife through nine displacements. Every time I reached for her neck, someone stopped me: my wife, Ayloul, and Zein [my children], who found in his chicken friend something worth saving. In a tent whose thin strips were colder than the hunger surrounding it, she felt she was a burden to us—eating anything, moving so lightly no one could hear her. Even her clucking was faint, and her gaze seemed to apologise for still being alive. But what truly saved her wasn’t us. It was the egg. Every three days, she laid one egg—warm— in a time when even a loaf of bread had disappeared. We would divide it: half for Zein, the other half for Ayloul, and I would postpone my hunger, filling myself just by watching them. And between one egg and the next, a question circled in my mind: Do I slaughter her, so we can eat for two days, or keep her alive… so we can endure longer? Even when my friend Hamed broke his arm and needed any protein in this void, I decided to slaughter her for him. He looked at her for a long time, then said: “No, Malek… I can’t bear this guilt. I won’t drink her broth… I won’t be the reason.” In that moment, I understood: we were saving ourselves from ourselves. It was a test of the last part within us that had not yet turned savage. We could not bring ourselves to harm a chicken— yet this vile world found it easy to abandon our children." - Malek Shinbary, Palestinian from Gaza