War on Gaza: Their names were Nisreen, Waseem and Ahmed. Do not normalise their slaughter
For the past 16 months, I have started and ended my day with a review of news stories and social media posts on Gaza.
As I glanced through WhatsApp messages from family members in the morning, the dread and fear that consumed me had to be quickly pushed down to get my children ready for school and join my morning Zoom meeting.
As time marched on, 10 family members killed became 20, then 30, and the numbers kept ticking up. Today, the figure is incomprehensible: at least 100 family and extended family members lost.
Try to process that every single day.
Try to grieve and mourn every day. It is not possible. Reading the news to see whether my loved ones were alive or dead began to feel normal, albeit dystopian.
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I saw the faces of my children in every photo and video from Gaza. I cried with the mothers kissing their children goodbye through white burial shrouds. I cried with the children hugging the graves of their mothers.
I wiped away my tears to create the facade that everything in my life was normal - but it will never be normal again.
Many Palestinians in the diaspora operate in a state where we are high-functioning, but ridden with survivor’s guilt. We operate on traumatised autopilot, watching as the world normalises the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza - and knowing that we, as an extension of them, would suffer the same fate if roles were reversed.
Unrelenting pain
Bearing witness to the mass murder of your family members changes your life forever. It is a pain you can feel all the way through your fingertips, heavy and unrelenting.
It pulls you in, like a tsunami pulls everything in its path into the sea. I felt a similar type of pain when I learned that my daughter was born with an incurable illness. I grabbed onto my faith to keep me afloat; I have not been swept out to sea yet.
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You learn to carry the pain with you as you continue to parent, work, love and hope. The worst part of the past 16 months, beyond enduring the loss of loved ones, has been hearing others deny our pain, justify these murders, and try to dehumanise our people.
My cousin, Nisreen, had sparkling blue eyes. One of my daughters has the same eyes. Nisreen was killed in an air strike. I wonder what her final moments were like; did she hear the screams of her little ones before they were killed? I could have been Nisreen. Only divine fate and luck separated us.
My cousin Waseem, who always had a cute, mischievous smirk on his face as a child, was last seen on Instagram shouting at Egyptian border guards. He pleaded with them to open the border, shouting: “We are all going to die here. They are going to kill us all.”
The next week, Waseem was killed. His ominous words on Instagram will forever haunt me. I wonder whether he dreamed that this would be his fate. His youngest son suffered a traumatic brain injury from the attack; I learned of it from an Instagram post that showed him sleeping on a cardboard box, wrapped in a bloodied cloth.
Will he one day see the Instagram post of his father shouting at the border guards, and wonder why they did not help?
In December, I came across a story of a physician who froze to death in his tent in Gaza. Many people in Gaza have been living in the streets or in flimsy tents, making the cold weather more deadly.
I can only imagine how malnourished this man must have been because of the aid blockade. I instantly recognised the name of the physician, and quickly sent a message to my mother to confirm my suspicions: he was our cousin.
Dreams crushed
His name was Ahmed. He was 35 and worked at the European Hospital in Gaza. Although Ahmed was offered opportunities to leave Gaza, he committed his life to caring for his fellow Palestinians in the enclave.
Ahmed’s family took care of my grandmother during her final years. My eldest uncle was so grateful that he promised to fund Ahmed’s medical education when the time came, and he fulfilled that promise.
This was a rare success story of a boy in Gaza who dreamed of becoming a doctor and made it a reality. Many children in Gaza dream big, only to see those dreams crushed under the weight of Israeli oppression and a lack of opportunities. Their eventual demise is seen by the Israeli state as a potential security threat eliminated.
Ahmed’s name has been added to a long list of slain healthcare workers in Gaza.
He stayed with his patients until he closed his eyes in his tent and never woke up. A friend sent me a picture of Ahmed on Instagram before the genocide. It showed the warm smile of a good-natured man who cared for his fellow Palestinians until his last breath.
Imagining Ahmed’s frozen, lifeless body in a tent haunts me, just as Waseem’s last words do.
As a nationally recognised advocate for the rights and needs of physicians and patients in the US, as they navigate the country’s broken healthcare system, I felt defeated upon reading Ahmed’s name. Despite my work and passion to improve healthcare, I realised there was nothing I could have done to save him.
Forever in my heart
Over the past 16 months, I have contacted my congressional representatives to advocate for the people of Gaza; attended protests and organised awareness campaigns; and volunteered my time to support local students and families who were experiencing bullying and discrimination.
All these humble attempts felt like a huge failure when I read Ahmed’s name.
Ahmed is dead, killed in this brutal genocide. He is now another statistic of a boy in Gaza who became a man whose dream was killed; another healthcare worker whose life was cut short in a place where they are targets.
I will carry their names in my heart always, and share their stories. My faith carried me through a tsunami once before, and I pray it will again
And I, a so-called healthcare advocate, could do absolutely nothing. I advocate for Ahmed’s colleagues here in the US, even though most of them have never advocated for Ahmed and their fellow colleagues in Gaza. It stings beyond the normal grief I feel. It’s like I betrayed Ahmed.
Despite the Gaza ceasefire, my daily routine continues. I question whether I should work in a space that does not seem to care about my family members or the people of Gaza. By extension, it feels as though they do not care about me or my children, either.
But I am reminded that to honour the memories of our loved ones, I cannot allow myself to stop caring for others. Ahmed kept caring for his patients until the very end. I must continue to care for those for whom I advocate every single day.
At the same time, I will not give up on advocating for my family in Gaza - and for all Palestinians. I will humanise them, despite a world that tries to strip them of humanity.
I will carry their names in my heart always, and share their stories. My faith carried me through a tsunami once before, and I pray it will again. Let us never normalise any of this.
Rest in peace, dear Ahmed. I will never let the world forget you or forget Gaza. We will carry your spirit on.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
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