How will you go on with your day after hearing that a father in Gaza, trapped beneath the rubble, begged rescuers not to save him?
21 June 2026 – Not because he had lost the will to live, but because he could hear the fading breaths of his daughters beneath the debris. Their tiny hands were holding onto his in the darkness, as if calling for him one last time. He was the father who had always been their safe haven, yet this time he was powerless to pull them from the earth and shattered concrete.
Only his head was visible above the wreckage. He looked into the eyes of the rescue workers with a gaze exhausted by fear and helplessness and said:
“Leave me. My daughters are here. I don’t want to come out alone”.
They all died.
What heart can bear such a scene? What language can truly describe a father’s agony as he realizes he is losing his daughters one by one, while still holding their hands until they grow cold – unable to save them, unable to offer even one final embrace?
How will your day continue after knowing this story? How will you sit at your table in peace, or laugh at something trivial, knowing that a father’s last wish was not to survive alone?
And the question that continues to haunt the human conscience remains:
How much pain must the world witness before it hears the cry of a single father in Gaza?
And we must listen to the Israeli government brag about its war crimes: “The entire first line of Lebanese villages has been destroyed. We are destroying all the houses. The residents will never see them standing before their eyes again”:
And in Gaza: “We control 60%-70% of the Gaza Strip, we are destroying all of its infrastructure, everyone knows what this means. Gaza will be left in ruins and the inhabitants will have to migrate because there will be nothing left to live in there for the next decades”.
It . is . endless. Just these 4 examples:
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Are there any limits? None. Israel killed Mona Khalil, founder of the Orange House Project and a prominent figure in marine turtle protection along the Sour coast. On June 6th, the Israelis dropped a bomb on her home in Mansouri — flattening it. There was not another building near her. It was a targeted attack.
She stood firm through two wars, refusing to abandon her home in Mansouri just a few meters from the beach and the sea turtles she watched over for a quarter century.
She succumbed to her injuries on Friday. She had regained consciousness the day after the attack before her condition gradually deteriorated. She had been hospitalized for two weeks at AUBMC in Beirut, after being transferred from Jabal Amel Hospital in the south, according to Fadia Joumaa, an environmental activist: “Doctors tried in vain to save her in recent days”.
I knew of her due to my work with a Greek organization that saves turtles in the Mediterranean. Mona was an environmental activist who dedicated her life to protecting endangered sea turtles along Lebanon’s coast.
And sometimes a single photograph makes you realize how many of the things you once worried about were small compared to the suffering others endure.
There are pains that leave no room for words and no space for complaints. Pains reflected in the eyes of a father holding his child close, trying to offer a sense of safety in a world that no longer feels safe.
In Gaza, parents are not asking for the impossible. They simply hope their children survive, sleep through one night without fear, without explosions, and without having to say goodbye to the people they love.
Behind every image is a human story that should never be forgotten. Behind every child is a simple dream: to live in safety and peace.
All of this did not start on October 7th. Long before the current war, there were people who lost their homes, families who were displaced, children who grew up under occupation, and generations living through cycles of conflict, fear, and uncertainty.
For many Palestinians, the pain did not start in a single day. It is a story carried across decades of loss, separation, displacement, and the struggle to preserve dignity and hope despite immense hardship.
Understanding the present requires understanding the history that came before it. I have spent almost 10 years studying the Holocaust, Palestine, and now Ukraine. It has been brutal.
And I am still trying to understand the world we live in right now, because nothing about this is okay.
How can anyone watch the videos and statements I have inserted above, and not feel sick to their stomach?
Think about who they are protecting. These are the soldiers who are actively occupying a nation, stealing land, and killing thousands of innocent civilians. They are the ones inflicting the pain.
But according to this mindset, the aggressors must never face retaliation. If a single soldier is harmed while occupying someone else’s home, the answer is to make a thousand mothers weep and burn an entire country to the ground.
In the name of defeating Hamas and Hezbollah. As Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Knesset, said any child born in Gaza “is already a terrorist”. And Michal Woldiger, a member of the Knesset, who claimed during a parliamentary session that there are “no innocent civilians in Gaza or Lebanon”. Every civilian death is justified.
It is a demand for absolute submission. They want to steal land, occupy homes, and kill civilians, and they expect the victims to suffer quietly. And if anyone dares to retaliate? The response is a threat to burn them all.
What kind of world have we built? What kind of world has allowed this? When leaders can publicly threaten the mass slaughter of civilians to protect the people committing the crimes, we are no longer talking about rights. This is pure, unadulterated madness.
For the Israelis it is easy. Now that Gaza lies in ruins – shattered, like a beloved face after a long brutality – Israel moves with a terrible confidence to the next act: the act of leaving every soul there not merely wounded, but permanently disabled. Injured, sick, hungry, homeless, without work, without hope.
This is not war’s collateral damage. This is design.
This is the prelude to expulsion. Think of it: a society without teachers, without doctors, without social workers, without engineers, without clerks. That is not a society. That is a holding pen. A slow erasure. And when nothing functions – no school, no hospital, no office, no heart – then it becomes “easy” they tell themselves, to scatter the people to the four corners of the earth. Like seeds from a broken pod, except no soil will take them.
We must name this. Not with rage alone, though rage is honest. But with the cold, clear tears of recognition: they are making life impossible so that departure becomes the only “choice”.
And the world watches, adjusts its spectacles, and calls for “restraint”.
I have no idea what intervention it would take for people to stop killing each other. I think it is impossible. This is beyond anything that should have ever been tolerated.
But when you reach a certain age, or perhaps it is just me (75 years), you realize human life really has no value, no meaning, no purpose.
I shall go back to saving my turtles and hope mankind’s duration here is short.
Below: In Gaza, a wounded father carries his child on his shoulders after an Israeli attack