Emma Baron

I was sitting in the clinic on the first morning of the cold wave, the kind of cold that does not merely touch the body but gnaws at the soul. A journalist had written to me earlier, asking about the weather and its effects on patients. I read the message and thought I would answer later. I believed, foolishly, that one could still think calmly in a world like this. Then I raised my eyes. Before me sat a woman, silent and exhausted, with two small girls clinging to her. They were dressed in thin clothes, the sort one might wear on a mild spring day, not in the cruelty of winter. Over them hung a jacket so worn and torn that it mocked the very idea of protection. On their feet were flimsy plastic slippers, the kind meant for tiled bathrooms, now forced to confront mud, cold, and misery. I felt a strange shame for my own shoes. I took the hand of one of the girls and placed it on the table. Her fingers were small and delicate, still belonging to a child who should have been learning to draw or to write her name. Instead, they were wounded. The skin was broken. The injuries were deep despite their size and dirty despite their simplicity. They resembled disease, yes, but not a disease I had learned about, not one with a Latin name that could be explained away. As I examined her hand, she spoke. She said that while she was sleeping in the tent the night before, rats had eaten her fingers. She did not cry. She did not dramatize. She stated it as one might state that it had rained, or that the night had been cold. And because the mind rebels when confronted with absolute obscenity, I asked her again, almost angrily, almost begging reality to contradict itself. “Rats?” “Yes,” she replied at once, surprised by my surprise. In that instant, something inside me collapsed. Not slowly, not philosophically, but violently. The world shrank and became cramped and airless, as though God Himself had stepped back to avoid witnessing what His creation had become. I had read about suffering. I had studied it. I had admired its descriptions in books. But this was not suffering. This was humiliation elevated to a principle of existence. A rat. A living creature driven by hunger and filth, gnawing on the fingers of a sleeping child. And the greater horror was not the rat. It was that this act had become ordinary. That the child found my disbelief strange. That the universe had trained her to accept the unacceptable. I wanted to scream. I wanted to accuse someone, anyone. Humanity, governments, history, God. But there was no one to accuse. There was only the child’s hand resting quietly on the table. I realized then that I did not know what to do. No textbook had prepared me for this. No lecture, no exam, no brilliant professor had ever spoken of rats eating children alive while they slept. And even if such a chapter had existed, I am certain I would have skipped it. Who could read such a thing and still believe they lived in a civilized world? This was not poverty. This was not war. This was moral collapse. Later, when I remembered the journalist’s question about the cold wave and its impact, I almost laughed. To answer such a question requires no intellect, no statistics, no expert commentary. One must simply walk through the streets of Gaza for an hour. One must look carefully and honestly, without averting the eyes. The answer will be there, breathing, bleeding, and waiting quietly for someone to finally admit what this world has allowed itself to become. #WoundedGaza