I couldn’t write today, so I did.
All day today, since the horrific attack on my family’s neighbours, an attack that also took some of my own, I’ve been thinking about every friend, every cousin, every neighbor who’s survived this same ache. How are they still standing? And yet somehow, they’re the ones sending me love, sending me words of comfort.
Everything I said or did yesterday doesn’t mean the same thing today. It doesn’t carry the same weight. Grief broke the scale.
But here’s what I know in my bones: this genocide will end. Not because justice is inevitable, but because we are.
My family were “collateral damage” in the eyes of Zionist machines and their Western sponsors. I will never say those words without tasting blood in my mouth. I will never feel the same again. I don’t know how we rebuild from this-I honestly don’t-but I know we will. We always do. We’ve been rebuilding from rubble for 77 years and counting.
We’ve been bleeding souls, one generation after the next. I said goodbye to none of them. I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again. Nothing comforts me. Nothing, except this one truth:
Israel will be dismantled.
Not because it’s poetic justice. But because no settler colony built on bones lasts forever. It will crumble under its own hatred. It will be remembered, not as a genocidal regime, but as a gang of Zionist thugs, mobs with flags. Just like it started.
And Palestine? Palestine will be free because we’re still here, still saying their names, still writing our future.
For my family:
I’m sorry Israel burned our babies again.
Forgive me, I would’ve traded my breath, my body, my everything if it meant you’d still be here.
Dena. Mohammed. Nineteen other souls whose names should be shouted, not silenced.
The mamas. The babas.
Your absence isn’t quiet, it screams through my chest.
Forgive me, Auntie.
You should have never had to bury your children and grandchildren. Never.