متوحدة

"By Allah, if you lose hope in people to the point where you don't want anything from them,

Allah will give you everything you want."

اللهم ارحمنا إذا برق البصر وخسف القمر وجمع الشمس والقمر، اللهم اجعل خسوف قمرك هذا رحمة لنا ولا تؤاخذنا بذنوبناولا تنزل غضبك علينا واغفر لنا وارحمنا برحمتك يا ارحم الراحمين امين

How dare you call this outrage? 

We’ve watched the unspeakable unfold, 

our screens soaked in blood 

like ink spilled across history. 

Yet you are outraged at what? 

At the volume of the cry? 

At the noise of grief? 

We’ve been watching a genocide

in 4K for over two years— 

Thousands upon thousands of civilians gone, 

half of them children. 

The numbers are ash. 

The names dissolve in headlines. 

The entire population is being starved 

with deliberation, like a siege 

performed for a global audience. 

Even now, soldiers fire 

At people crawling toward sacks of flour, 

At hands reaching for water. 

And I will never unsee what I’ve seen— 

Small bodies lined in rows, 

Their faces blurred not by modesty 

But by the blast. 

A girl with half a smile, 

Still clinging to her doll. 

A boy in a shroud, 

His name scrolling past in silence. 

I’ve watched mothers carry limbs 

That used to be children, 

Heard the breathless wails 

Through my clean, well-lit screen. 

These are not images. 

They are wounds I carry in my chest.

I will never forget Hind Rajab’s voice, 

six years old, 

trapped in a car full of her family’s silence, 

whispering into a phone, 

“Is someone coming to help?” 

She was on the line for hours. 

Then only static.  

Then nothing. 

Amputations without anesthesia. 

Hospitals bombed, 

reduced to rubble and dust. 

Operating rooms, 

buried beneath the weight of steel. 

And the doctors? 

Names— 

scattered like ash in the wind. 

Hundreds of journalists 

shot in the mouth— 

their lenses shattered beside them 

like one last, unblinking eye. 

Entire families erased 

from the civil register. 

From history. 

Whole bloodlines folded like tents. 

Millions displaced. Millions. 

Wrap your head around that, 

if your screen hasn’t numbed it out, 

if your coffee still tastes like coffee. 

And now, 

when the streets fill with cries— 

when people scream 

at the architects of this horror— 

you clutch your pearls. 

You say you’re outraged? 

Where was your outrage 

when we watched children die 

in real time? 

When grain trucks were filled with death, 

each bag of flour a tombstone, 

each kernel, a casket? 

When bread became contraband 

and water, a death sentence? 

Don’t lecture us about tone. 

You don’t get to police 

the volume of grief. 

You say you didn’t know. 

That it’s complicated. 

That both sides… 

As if symmetry could be drawn 

between the drone and the infant, 

between the bulldozer and the cradle. 

But let me ask you— 

who taught you this symmetry? 

Who taught you to ignore the body’s cry? 

Silence is a choice, 

and you chose it. 

Every neutral word 

was another inch of earth 

shoveled over a child. 

Every euphemism—conflict, incursion, strike— 

was a disinfectant poured over blood. 

You scrolled past the body, 

paused only to share 

a poem about empathy, 

then muted the feed. 

Too much sorrow 

for a Monday. 

You call for peace 

but not for justice. 

You beg for calm 

but not for the siege to end. 

You ask for dialogue 

after the microphones have been crushed. 

The silence is not passive. 

It is a cushion, 

a luxury of escape, 

air-conditioned, sealed in plastic— 

a door that clicks shut, 

locked with a key you forged yourself. 

We speak, 

and lose jobs. 

We speak, 

and lose friends. 

We speak, 

and become unpublishable, 

unfundable, 

unheard. 

But we will not forget 

who kept their hands clean 

by turning their faces. 

So, what does it mean— 

that we watched it all, 

in high resolution, 

heard the children scream 

through clean speakers, 

read the names 

as they vanished 

from family trees 

and GPS maps— 

and still, 

the world did nothing? 

What does it mean 

that governments armed the killers, 

pundits blurred the crimes, 

and poets 

were told to stay quiet 

or stay unpublished? 

What does it mean 

that people stood in the streets 

with severed names on cardboard signs, 

and were met not with justice 

but with riot shields? 

It means the atrocities of the past 

were never exceptions— 

only the rules in plain sight. 

We asked how people could sit by, 

say, “We were just following orders.” 

Now we know. 

We are watching it unfold. 

So, the question is no longer “how.” 

It is not how this happens, 

but how we stand here— 

knowing, seeing, 

and still, 

still, 

we remain the same. 

What does it make of us 

to witness the end of children’s futures 

and call it “complicated”? 

What does it make of us 

to close our eyes 

when the world burns?

إِنَّ اللهَ مَعَ الصّٰبِرِيْنَ