If Gaza is not okay, we are all not okay.

With the end of the holy month of Ramadan, the unhappy Eid al-Fitr arrives this year while the war of extermination in Gaza continues, and the people there are in a difficult situation under bombing, killing, and policies of starvation and ethnic cleansing.

The scene in Gaza remains the same, but is getting worse: killing, oppression, injustice, hunger, and nakedness in ramshackle tents, to the point where even the trees and stones weep. How can we be okay? How can humanity be okay in light of this bitter reality, whose cruelty has surpassed the limits of imagination? The reality in Gaza is more severe and harsher than any description, and the tragedy is greater than words can describe.

Over the past months, since the outbreak of the war, massacres have continued unabated, bodies continue to be pulled from the rubble, and blood mixes with the soil of a land once teeming with life. Children are left without fathers, and mothers bid farewell to their children at the doors of hospitals that can no longer accommodate more victims and are no longer fit to provide treatment, having been bombed, vandalized, and besieged.

Hunger ravages bodies, disease spreads without cure, people live in tents and in the open, while the world watches with silence that is almost complicit.

The holiday, which was supposed to be an occasion for joy, has become an occasion for sadness, a season of great loss, a time to enumerate the names of the martyrs and wounded, and a day of weeping. Joy no longer has room in the hearts of those who have lost their loved ones, or those awaiting death at any moment, in every alley, house, and corner of Gaza, which has been transformed into a land of ruins.

This Eid is not a happy one, neither in Gaza nor outside it, because the Palestinian pain has become an Arab pain, even a human one, whose impact extends to all free hearts that still beat with conscience and humanity. And Gaza is not alone in its suffering; the state of the Arab countries today reflects the same pain in different forms. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and other Arab countries that are suffering from the ravages of war, or that are burdened by economic crises and sectarian and political divisions. In all of these places, Eid is no longer just an Eid, but an occasion to feel loss, pain, and the scale of the destruction. It has become a day that reminds everyone that this world is still ruled by the balance of power, not the balance of justice, and that humanity is selected according to interests, not principles. If Gaza is at the heart of genocide today, this ordeal has revealed the true face of the world: countries that claim to uphold human rights, but remain silent in the face of genocide, and international institutions that stand idly by while innocents die under bombing, starvation, and policies of ethnic cleansing.

This Eid is not a happy one, as Gaza is living under a war of extermination and ethnic cleansing, and is experiencing difficult and impossible calamities. As long as Gaza is not well, we are all not well, as Gaza’s condition is our condition, its blood is our blood, and its fate is our fate.