Page 9 - North Star 2024

dying patient needs it most. ICUs have gone dark, killing infants in their incubators. Gazans will not be breaking their fast at sunset like I do - seventy percent of the population is experiencing a severe famine. Malnutrition, starvation, and thirst have already claimed lives beyond count. Aid workers cannot bring in enough food because their trucks are being bombed. Innumerable Palestinian children will not be celebrating with their families on Eid-- the rate at which they are being orphaned is beyond any modern comparison. Doctors in the region have a new term known as WCNSF (“Wounded Child, No Surviving Family”) due to how prevalent this is. According to the UN, more Gazan children have been slaughtered since October 2023 than have died in the last four entire years of global conflict. Combined.
In the past six months, the attacks on Gaza have produced pictures and videos no one should ever have to see. Human beings with limbs and faces blown off. The mutilated corpse of a young girl dangling from a window. Young children trying to wake up their dead parents. One that has particularly haunted me is a video of a family of girls wailing helplessly from a rooop as their father burns alive on the ground below. I could not bring myself to turn the audio on; I knew their screams would ring in my ears forever.
Seeing these every day has a strange effect. It leaves a numbness that lingers in your bones. You realize suddenly that the world works differently than how you thought it did. The “international community” has not protected these people, and nor has the UN or its dozens of conventions, and there is no reason to believe they will protect you. Aer all, what stopped you from having been born in Gaza instead of wherever you were? Sheer, blind luck. It is nauseating and infuriating to watch what is happening, yet averting your gaze brings excruciating guilt. You can’t look and you can’t look away. I call myself a Muslim and part of the ummah, and yet I am not living the same Ramadan as them. I am not even living the same reality as them. When I have never experienced anything even similar to the mass killings in Gaza, trying to “put myself in their shoes” becomes futile. Empathy becomes impossible. It gives way to disbelief.
Given the barren hellscape that occupied Gaza has become, it is easy to expect a feeling of defeat, nihilism, and numbness from the Palestinian people. Faith in an all-powerful, all-loving God does not come easily when your community has been bombed to dust and literal shreds of corpses are strewn around you. And who can blame the nonbelievers? What would I say to a teenager carrying his brother’s remains in a plastic bag to reaffirm that God loves him and is watching over him? During what must feel like the end of the world, there are no sermons to