Bee

Yesterday, at Al-Awda Hospital in northern Gaza, a girl-child came into this world, and the world rejected her. She had no brain. Not in the poetic sense of innocence or purity, but anatomically, literally: anencephaly. No cerebrum. No future thought, no dreams, no memory to be made. A skull empty of purpose. She was full-term. Her mother carried her for nine long months, through burning nights and weeping mornings, through dust, grief, and sirens. And then, birth. But no life to save. Only silence. The doctors stood helpless, mocked by the limits of their hands. I saw them, people of medicine, their skilled, sterile fingers trembling. Not from confusion, but from recognition. Teratogenic damage. Developmental failure. Genetic disfigurement, not by chance, but by war. Bombs struck not only buildings, but chromosomes. The weapons, steel, shiny, American, fell not just to destroy the present, but to corrupt the womb. To poison the idea of tomorrow. What do we call this horror? Radiation? Dioxins? Depleted uranium? Invisible toxins that do not kill quickly, they wait. They embed, cross placental walls, and twist the neural tube. They disrupt life before it begins. There are more cases. Miscarriages. Premature births. Malformed limbs. Cleft palates wider than sorrow. Spinal cords like broken scrolls. The doctors whisper now, this is no cluster. It’s a pattern. A Lancet study warns of up to 200,000 indirect victims, not from blast wounds, but from genetic harm passed down to generations unborn. But the world is deaf. It counts the dead by explosions, not deformities. It tracks casualties by limbs lost, not genes shattered. And here, beneath the rubble, the deepest wound is in the womb. I saw her yesterday. The mother. She didn’t cry. She only looked. Her arms were empty. She had carried a daughter with no brain. But the child had eyelashes. Fingers. And that’s the most terrible thing: that life tried. That the body obeyed. That, even in apocalypse, the cells kept building. Somewhere, another child may be born marked by air their mother once breathed. And they won’t know why. They say war ends. That ceasefires come. That healing is possible. But how can it end when it lives in cells? When the placenta becomes a battlefield? When biology becomes the archive of war? This is not just a war of fire and steel. It’s a war against life. Against women. Against the act of birth itself. I have seen death, bodies torn, lungs gasping under broken ribs. But never have I heard a silence as loud as when a mother delivers a child already condemned by the sky above her. And so I write. Not to accuse. Not to weep. But to remember. Because some weapons do not explode. They incubate. #GazaGenocide