They gave out a hundred shekels today.
Imagine that: twenty-five dollars is handed out like bones thrown to starving dogs.
I saw it.
I saw them, the doctors, the nurses, the radiologists ,people who once stood tall, who once wore their suffering with quiet pride, who worked through the entire war without pay, through the blood and the smoke and the endless nights, lining up, heads bowed, hands outstretched like beggars in the street.
And it was filmed.
Of course, it was filmed.
What use is charity without humiliation?
What use is a crumb without the spectacle of groveling?
I watched, and a sickness took hold of me, a loathing so deep it crawled under my skin and sat there, rotting.
I called a friend, a nurse. “How could you allow yourselves to be filmed like that?” I demanded.
He answered without anger, without shame even - that is what broke me - he said, “You didn’t see the rest. You didn’t see the ones who didn’t get anything. They chased him. They begged.”
God, they begged.
I sat there, my throat closing, the phone heavy in my hand. Three months without salaries. Endless nights under bombs. And now, now they chase a stranger with a camera for the dignity of a few coins.
Dignity? No, not even that. The last rags of human pride, torn away in the dust.
Picture it: a physician, a man who once commanded life and death, reduced to running after a man he does not know, for a handout he does not deserve to need.
This is what is left of us. This is what remains.
Gaza is the only place where war has humiliated everyone, doctors, nurses, children, and mothers all dragged down into the same pit.
We are not only defeated. We are made grotesque, monstrous, pitiful even to ourselves.
Those in far-off places, with full bellies and clean hands, they talk of peace, they talk of aid, they talk and they talk while here, here, the soul itself is being crushed into the earth.
I want to tear my skin off.
I want to howl.
I want to gouge out the eyes of those who watch and do nothing.
But instead, I sit here, alone in the dark, writing words no one will read, feeling everything rot inside me.
We are not men anymore.
We are something else.
something that crawls, that begs, that forgets what it once meant to walk upright.
#GazaGenocide