Clare

Since early morning, my family and I have been living in a state of total psychological collapse. Today we learned that our homes, our land, and our entire neighborhood, every house belonging to our family and our neighbors, have been completely erased. Bulldozed. Flattened into a barren stretch of yellow dust. From the first light of day, we have been living the full meaning of defeat. We have lost more than seventy members of our family. We have lost our land. We now have no home to return to, no walls to protect us, no place left to call our own. And then, one of Hamas’s leaders appears on television declaring that “the people have not been defeated,” that “Gaza has stood firm and fought a historic war.” So let history record this: I, Dr. Ezzideen Shehab, from Gaza, together with my family, my friends, and their families, did not fight any war. We were the victims of an annihilation ignited by Hamas from within our homes, only for the Israeli army to descend upon us and unleash its full cruelty on the civilians of Gaza, while Hamas’s fighters vanished into their tunnels. Let history record the truth: we were defeated, utterly, painfully, and completely defeated. And it is we, the people of Gaza, who have the right to say whether we were defeated or not, not those who sit comfortably in Qatar or Turkey. We were crushed, humiliated, and broken after our city was destroyed, occupied, and erased from existence. We were displaced, stripped of everything we had built, left to wander through the ruins of our own lives. And somewhere amid all this, I understood something simple and terrible: My mother’s tears are holier than the homeland itself, and my father’s brokenness matters more to me than any flag. Because what meaning does a homeland hold when it devours the ones you love, when it glorifies death but forgets the living? We were not steadfast. We were held hostage in our own land. We could not leave. We could not change those who claimed to rule us. We were trapped between a merciless occupier and rulers who feed on our suffering. And if there is one moment in my life when I must speak the truth, without fear, without hesitation, then this is that moment. Let it be written clearly: We were not soldiers in a war. We were the bodies buried beneath it. #GazaGenocide