The bombs still fall when we turn off our phones

The future of the Palestinian people is incredibly bleak. If we really want to understand what Israel intends to do to Gaza, it means part of Palestine is gone, until something drastic changes everything.

I recently sat down with this thought that Gaza as we know it is gone. We shout during protests: “Gaza don’t you cry, Palestine will never die”, and I always felt delusional. Palestine is dying.

No matter what happens after the tens of thousands of Palestinians that are murdered, half of Gaza’s population will inevitably be ethnically cleansed from Gaza if they’re not killed off before then.Of the survivors so many will die soon after this genocide "ends" from whichever from the number of diseases that comes with 100,000 tons of bombs dropped on the most densely populated place on earth in the span of 19 months.

Then Gaza as we know it will not exist. Israel will occupy Gaza with the help of the PA and whichever bootlicker Arab country or EU member state that will help. God knows what they will do with the North of Gaza, maybe turn it into a buffer zone. Maybe build condos. Maybe raze it and leave it to rot.

Meanwhile, the 500,000 Palestinians who remain will live under a suffocating military occupation worse than anything we’ve seen in the West Bank or in Gaza before October 7. And the over one million refugees ethnically cleansed from Gaza will suffer in Egypt’s Sinai, one of the most underdeveloped, militarized, and neglected places in the world.

However you look at it, from any angle, the future is unbearable.

My family is currently under evacuation orders but don't know where to go. All are starving, all do not know if death is better than whatever this future entails. Israel has been able to conduct a genocide, an annihilation campaign, and they will continue to occupy all of Gaza, build whatever they want on top of it, and fascist Israeli teenagers will dance on our graves because that is the configuration this world agrees is normal.

I felt defeated. I shut down, and manually turned off everyone in my life for one week. I could not see the photos. Could not join the protests, and canceled a lot of speaking commitments I made. I stopped engaging in the conversations with people in my community. I gave up.

For a week, I believed everything we are doing is in vain as I will probably never see my family, my children’s cousins and uncles and aunts and friends ever again. I will never see Gaza again.

But here is the thing about saying you “give up”: the bombs still fall.
Israel will still murder, displace, and starve those in Gaza even when you look away or pause to “live your life.”
They destroyed and annihilated lineages. They wiped whole families off the civil registry while I was wallowing in despair.
Entire family trees burned to ash in seconds, and the world scrolled past it like it was noise.

Grief doesn’t protect anyone. Silence doesn’t shield anyone.
And survival, here, on this side of the world- starts to feel like complicity when your voice goes missing.

While I turned inward, children were buried under the rubble with no one left to remember their names.
While I canceled my talks and ignored the messages, settler mobs cheered the flattening of homes that once held generations.
And while I told myself I needed a break, Gaza needed breath.

We don't get to opt out.
Not because we are stronger than despair, or immune to hopelessness, but because the cost of our silence is paid in lives we love.
Because we are part of something that is being erased, and if we stop naming it, if we stop screaming for it, it disappears faster.

Giving up doesn’t stop the genocide.
It just makes it quieter.

So I am here again. Not because I feel better.
Not because hope returned.
But because Gaza is still being erased, and silence is not a shield, it is a grave.

We return to the fight because they still breathe.
Because someone in Gaza is still trying to hold their child together with their hands.
Because someone is still searching the rubble for a photograph, a pot, a body.
Because someone still believes, impossibly, that we might live free one day.

And if they haven't given up, neither can we.