Witnessing Gaza - Introduction
I left the hospital on the 6th of October, 2023 and slept through the 7th, so by the time I woke up and opened my phone, the world was already burning. What I saw was disorienting, terrifying, and impossible to comprehend: people on both sides dying in real time, in 4K clarity, on live streams, on endless feeds. Murder, unfiltered, delivered straight into my hands.
That night, I went LIVE on TikTok without a plan. I simply sought Palestinians. I expected anger, suspicion, maybe hostility. Instead, I met gentleness. I met clarity. I met people who welcomed me instantly, with a sincerity I had never seen from strangers online. Some of them, the ones who are still alive, are still my friends today.
These were the people who helped me understand their culture, faith, community values, and the depth of their family bonds. They explained what Islam meant to them, how it shaped their resilience, and held their communities together through eras of hardship. It was the first time I felt a bridge forming between me and a world I was raises to fear - despite my own heritage.
They knew exactly where I was from. They knew my tax dollars paid for the bombs that fell on their homes. They knew the geopolitical weight behind me. Yet they didn’t treat me like a threat. They treated me like a welcome guest and a genuine friend.
That changed me. I began to disbelieve the headlines I’d been spoon-fed for years. So I started asking simple questions.
“What was your life like before all this?”
They told me about the decades-long siege, about children being shot for crossing arbitrary lines, about teenagers detained without trial, about thousands of men, women, and even minors held unlawfully for years. They told me about the bombs that had already been falling on Gaza for years before 2023, sometimes hitting homes with entire families inside. They told me about the apartheid restrictions: streets they couldn’t walk on, hours they weren’t allowed outside, borders that had caged them in concrete for generations.
And yet, inside that cage, they built an impossible miracle.
Gaza had joy, culture, had a passion for life. Even when the occupation banned chocolates and other harmless pleasures, they created their own sweetness. Men learned a special tenderness. Women built beautiful family life out of whatever they had. Children grew up surrounded by their entire lineage: mothers, fathers, grandparents, cousins. Family wasn’t an accessory. It was the sun everything revolved around. Education was right behind it. Gaza is full of some of the most educated people I’ve ever met.
Through their microphones, between their words, I could hear gunfire and explosions. Every conversation was layered with the sound of death approaching from a distance. Sometimes there was fear in their voices. But most of the time there wasn’t. There was pride and an unshakable dignity that I don’t think most people ever get to witness up close.
Then I had to watch everything they told me about be taken away. For some families it happened slowly, over days or weeks. For others, everything disappeared in a single moment.
Homes. Streets. History. Dreams. Entire bloodlines wiped out between one text message and the next.
This is only the beginning of me finally talking about it. There is no easy way to do this, so I’m doing it the only way that feels honest: starting at the root, with who they were before the bombs, and what I witnessed as the months unfolded. I won’t be sharing names unless the individuals have explicitly asked me to. Their safety matters more than anything, especially while this genocide is ongoing.
I will return to tell you what happened over the last 26 months with Gaza.
Nobody is Free Until Everybody is Free
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