Dr. Ezzideen@ezzingaza
This morning, on my way to the clinic, though even calling it that feels absurd now, it is more graveyard than refuge; I saw a girl. She was sixteen, no older. She was thin, with the kind of tiredness around her eyes that children should never know. In her hands, she carried a pot, a blackened metal container, steaming faintly. Inside was a thin, soupy liquid. It was mostly water, with a few pale white beans floating like little wrecks in an ocean of absence.
Behind her, her father moved through the crowd with a soldier’s gaze. It was not the gaze of one trained for war, but of one forced to survive it. He was scanning faces, perhaps for danger, perhaps for hope, or perhaps for something in between.
The girl looked back once, then again. When she saw him turn away, she seized that brief moment of freedom. She dipped her fingers into the pot, scooped a few beans, and stuffed them into her mouth with the speed of guilt. Her eyes darted around as she chewed, terrified that he might see her, that he might scold her. Not because he was cruel, but because that pitiful soup was meant to feed not one child, but an entire family. Perhaps five. Perhaps ten. We no longer count mouths. Only spoons.
There was a kitchen once, a charity. They cooked for over a thousand families every day. They did it not for profit, and not for recognition, but because their souls could not do otherwise. That kitchen shut down three days ago. Not because people stopped being hungry, but because the shelves became empty. The rice, the oil, the flour — everything ran out.
And now the people go to the American aid centers.
Yes, of course. "Humanitarian corridors." What a beautiful phrase. How clean, how sterile, how bureaucratically elegant. It sounds like "collateral damage" or "operation." The Americans built them. The Israelis secured them. And forty people die at their gates every day.
Crushed. Shot. Starved. They come seeking bread and leave as corpses.
Everyone knows this. Absolutely everyone. And yet they still go.
Hunger will drive a man to walk toward his own execution if there is even a shadow of rice behind the gun.
Yesterday, my friend Al-Aloul went. He is not a fighter. He is a software engineer, a quiet man.
He came back stabbed, in the neck.
Six stitches. Blood soaked through his shirt.
But he smiled.
"I got the box," he said. "They did not take it."
What kind of world is this? What kind of man smiles through blood because he has a box of flour?
This is not the war of tanks and planes. Those have become irrelevant. This is the war of hunger, the war of slow death.
Mothers fast for days, not in spiritual devotion, but because their sons must eat first.
Children stand in line for aid, not knowing if they will return alive.
Girls eat in secret, and fathers carry shame heavier than bread.
This is genocide by exhaustion, by silence, by paperwork, and by averted eyes.
Do you want to know what the modern age has made of evil?
It has made it bureaucratic.
Digitised.
Professionalised.
A genocide in which the world debates definitions while children chew air.
The child who ate those beans is more real than your opinions.
My friend who smiled through blood has more dignity than your excuses.
Gaza is not a headline. It is a mirror.
And when you look at it, what you see is the measure of your own humanity.
You want God to speak?
Perhaps he already has.
He speaks through the silence of that girl.
Through the blood on that box.
Through the words I now write with shaking hands.
Gaza is not dying.
It is being crucified.
And we are the crowd at Golgotha.
Watching.
#GazaGenocide
