Gaza is no longer a trend and our deaths are no longer shocking

Nobody asks me anymore how I’m doing, and I no longer respond the way that I used to:

“I’m okay, but my family is dying.” Everything has changed.

It’s as if Gaza has moved to another planet—no more news makes it out of here: no martyrs, no painful or heartbreaking scenes, not even the anguished words that social media users once shared with their raw sorrow and emotion: “Yousef, 7 years old. He has curly hair, and he’s fair-skinned and beautiful, ” or “She is the soul of my soul,” or “That’s my mother! It’s her, I swear it’s her! I know her by her hair.”

Although we continue to die under the same violence—dying alone and in groups, in shelters, homes, tents, streets, and along the shore—and although we still mourn our loved ones with an insatiable grief, something has changed. After more than a year of our genocide, our deaths are no longer a trend. They no longer matter. We are no longer trending on the news. If anything, we have become as bothersome as a fly that refuses to go away.

Nobody asks me anymore how I’m doing

In the earlier months of the genocide, people around me always asked me “How are you? How is your family? Are you all safe?” Of course, these questions pained me because I didn’t know how to respond, but their absence now wounds me in a way that I never would have expected.

Although we continue to die under the same violence—dying alone and in groups, in shelters, homes, tents, streets, and along the shore—and although we still mourn our loved ones with an insatiable grief, something has changed. After more than a year of our genocide, our deaths are no longer a trend. They no longer matter. We are no longer trending on the news. If anything, we have become as bothersome as a fly that refuses to go away.

I should have embraced each and every one of their questions with wide arms. I should have stored them away in my heart for a later time, when the questions faded away, as it is now, despite the abundance of answers that I have. Today, no one asks me how I’m doing or how my family is doing. I know that these questions won’t do anything to tip the scales against a genocide. It won’t put an end to the slaughter or stop the bloodshed. But at the very least, it might console me or bring me some solace. It might allow me to forgive the world, even make up lies and fabricate excuses for it.

It might allow me to deceive myself to believe that they see us, hear us, and feel our pain, to believe that they too are anguished by what is happening to us. I can convince myself that it’s out of their hands; they, too, are powerless, just as we are.

But now that I understand it was never about us, that Gaza was just a trend, how can I keep lying to myself? And even if you ask me again, who will give me back my answers?

I know that these questions won’t do anything to tip the scales against a genocide. It won’t put an end to the slaughter or stop the bloodshed. But at the very least, it might console me or bring me some solace. It might allow me to forgive the world.

The news anchor no longer announces anything about our deaths. What once was reported in painstaking detail—our neighborhoods, our streets, our homes, our names—has now been reduced to numbers. “Five, ten, a hundred killed in an airstrike,” the voice says, before moving on to the next story, as if nothing had really happened.

Our annihilation has shifted from being a profound tragedy to another ordinary event. The details no longer appear on breaking news feeds; instead, they've become a brief segment buried in the middle of a long bulletin. What was once the headline has become just another passing report. We’ve been reduced to a passive news update, where we were once the lead story.

The television screen no longer displays condemnations of our extermination. The famine in the North is not moving nations to convey statements of outrage, and the bombings of shelters and the sieges of hospitals no longer warrant public outcry and denunciation. The repeated massacres have rendered them a routine occurrence in the eyes of the world. Killing, starvation, thirst, and despair have become ordinary matters that happen on a daily basis.

If we must die, let us do so quietly, without disturbing the spectators. Let us consider, in our dying moments, the ordinary days others are entitled to live, free from the sight of our torn bodies on your screens. Let us spare them the burden of our suffering, or the guilt they may feel. Let our deaths be silent, without any cries for help or pleas for rescue, without seeking solidarity or condemnation. Without photos, videos, or screams of pain. Without images of burned remains or torn-apart corpses.

The world has realized that condemnation and outrage do not halt genocide. We’ve known this, too; we’ve cursed those who issued statements of indignation without any subsequent action. From the bombing of al-Ahli Baptist Hospital to the massacre in al-Mawasi and the burning of refugee tents, we’ve presented the world with a year-long feast of death in every imaginable form: bombed, burned, suffocated. We were killed whole and in pieces, dismembered into scattered remains. We were killed in our homes, in tents, and in hospitals. We were killed on- and off-camera. We were killed live on air and in the silence of our homes, in front of reporters and behind them, in ambulances and at hospital doors. We were killed slowly under the rubble, in the fields, and in our mothers’ arms. We have died hungry, terrified, hopeless, broken, and utterly powerless.

Israel has experimented with every form of killing on our bodies. Perhaps that’s why our deaths are no longer shocking. Even those who initially saw our extermination as a deeply personal matter no longer care as much. We have vanished from their daily conversations, our pleas have disappeared from social media, and the images of our slaughter have faded from their minds.

But I excuse them, to some degree. They’ve grown tired of watching us die. Their eyes have been saturated with blood. And let’s not forget—they have lives to live. But has anyone thought about us? We, too, have lives we want to live. Only now, we’re preoccupied, drenched in blood day after day—this is not a metaphor, but a cold, undeniable truth.

A year of genocide has proven one thing: The world’s response to our deaths was never about true empathy or solidarity. It was pure shame—shame that faded as soon as the viewers grew accustomed to the sight. Blood, for them, has become just another shade of red.

Our deaths are no longer shocking

So, if we must die, let us do so quietly, without disturbing the spectators. Let us consider, in our dying moments, the ordinary days others are entitled to live, free from the sight of our torn bodies on your screens. Let us spare them the burden of our suffering, or the guilt they may feel—if they even see us as a source of guilt. Let our deaths be silent, without any cries for help or pleas for rescue, without seeking solidarity or condemnation. Without photos, videos, or screams of pain. Without images of burned remains or torn-apart corpses.

A year of genocide has proven one thing: The world’s response to our deaths was never about true empathy or solidarity. It was pure shame—shame that faded as soon as the viewers grew accustomed to the sight. Blood, for them, has become just another shade of red.

They turned off their televisions, stopped posting our massacres, and went silent. Whether we live or die no longer matters. And because of all this, no one asks me anymore, “How are you?”

If we must die, let us at least hear the world denounce our deaths as we perish. This is all that’s left for the powerless to hope for.

But, now, we need everyone, anywhere in the world, to denounce our extermination and condemn this genocide. If we must die, let us at least hear the world denounce our deaths as we perish. This is all that’s left for the powerless to hope for.

But I wish someone would ask me now, so that I could reply: “I’m not okay. My family died of hunger, heartbreak, missiles, and betrayal. But we’re no longer a ‘trend,’ so you wouldn’t know.”

* The views and opinions expressed in Opinion and Blog articles are those of the author’s, and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Raseef22