From Hani Almadhoun
Lives now in Washington DC
Works for UNRAW
Formerly of Gaza
Vice President of Philanthropy.
Parents and family still live in Gaza
His Facebook page (no need to go there unless you want to check him out and get at lot of testimonies from Gaza and how some aid agencies helping, how women are playing a part)
www.facebook.com/alkabeer.alhani
"Here has not been a single moment to catch our breath.
I know the people doing this are vile. I have stopped expecting them to do the right thing — that is not on brand for them.
What I have learned is how they respond when you refuse to go away and weep in silence.
They do not come after you for their war crimes. They come after you for the inconvenience of your grief.
They put you on lists.
They search you at airports.
They attach labels and adjectives to your name designed to make everything about you instead of what you are saying. All because you would not disappear quietly.
What I have not stopped noticing is what is happening underneath the headlines, the thing that does not get reported.
The fabric in Gaza is melting.
We have cheapened death without meaning to. A Palestinian looks at bodies in the street,disfigured, unclaimed, turns their head, and posts about the next food parcel registration
Not because they do not care. Because they cannot afford to stop. Grief has become deferred. Pain arrives on an installment plan. Everyone has gone numb just to keep functioning, and the numbness is its own kind of damage — quieter than a bomb, slower, and harder to treat.
The desperate need is turning people against each other. People are not themselves anymore — they do not recognize themselves, and neither do we. It is psychological, and it is spreading.
You hear it in how people talk to their families, in the conversations coming out of Nablus and Hebron. The trauma is not staying in Gaza.
It is moving.
The Israeli regime keeps moving the goalposts. They told the last administration "two more weeks" for two years, while shifting to new objectives, new targets, new justifications.
And in the process we lose our families, our places, and our faith that any of this ends the way it should.
I sometimes ask myself: when this is over, what will I do? What are my hobbies? What does my mind reach for when it is not carrying this?
I honestly do not know anymore. The anniversaries alone — if we are lucky enough to survive to them — come with videos we have to revisit, family members we have to miss all over again. There is no clean way through that.
It has been going on so long I cannot imagine the other side of it. The person who sells homes or writes code or makes your overpriced cup of coffee can burn out and step away.
This is not a job I can leave. It is tied to everything I define myself by.
A simple hello to my parents on the phone brings it all right back
If someone is not feeling well, I catch myself praying they will not need a medical evacuation that is not coming.
Some of these posts heal me. Some of them cost me something. But I feel a fundamental obligation to keep writing.
Not because I am not exhausted. I am.
But staying quiet is a privilege I do not have. If I tune out, this becomes background noise. And these are not statistics. These are my people.
So I keep writing. Not because it is easy. Because it is the bare minimum I owe to the people living through it."
sent to me by my cousin.