Gaza Now

Now a baby girl is born in the open, inside a shabby tent on the border in Rafah or Khan Younis. Fate brought her during a time of genocide and death, and brought her into life by the midwife who extended her a hand of salvation, pushing her from the womb of her mother who died at the moment of the bombing. She was an orphan from the first moment, without luck, without a lap to shelter her in, without a father to guard her days, or a family to train her how to crawl in her first days, so that she could then stand on her feet and breathe the air of life.

Now another old man is dying nearby, inside a shelter, after being bombed by aircraft with a guided missile. He was eighty years old, with a worn-out body and a strong memory that had managed to banish the disease of forgetfulness. However, his memory was shattered into pieces by the missile that struck the old man's body while he was performing the dawn prayer on Bloody Sunday.

Now hunger and thirst are gnawing at the bodies of the children, and a woman weeps over the cries of her hungry children, complaining of her helplessness, her weak condition, and her uncertain fate, after food distribution centers were transformed into death traps and killings, as a result of the raids carried out by the occupation with premeditation and deliberation.

Now, a grandmother is breathing her last in grief, having lived her life through a succession of catastrophes, living between two tents. In the first, she witnessed her birth in 1948, and in the second, she would witness her death in 2025. Between these two tents, she spent a lifetime gathering hopes in her chest and keeping the key to the house from which she was displaced in Ashkelon.

Now, for a second year, Gaza's students are being denied the right to sit for their high school exams, due to the ongoing war of extermination and the destruction of schools and universities. While students in the West Bank and Jerusalem are taking their first exams today, their hearts aching for the pain of their classmates in Gaza, Gaza's students are watching the scene unfold as they endure pain, hunger, and the reality of devastation.

Now, the war between Iran and Israel is capturing the attention of satellite channels, analysts, observers, and followers, while the voices of the starving and dying under the weight of the genocide are being silenced, with the killings intensifying by the moment.

Now, behind the noise of major wars and the flurry of political analyses, the stories of the people of Gaza are being buried in painful silence, where life is born on the brink of death, hope is buried under the rubble of destroyed tents and homes, and childhood dreams are erased from the notebooks of tomorrow.