Witnessing Gaza - Journal 1
The First Days
During the initial sleepless nights, there were gently spoken people sitting in rooms lit dimly by small generators, showing me their beautiful homes, their children’s artwork, their gardens that still held life in early October, 2023.
They talked about their families with a tenderness that felt almost ceremonial. Their faith, their humor, their gratitude, their small joys. They trusted me with stories about their childhoods, their weddings, & hardships. They spoke to me like someone who needed to understand who they were before I spoke of what was being done to them.
The parallel still shocks me: these gentle, ordinary conversations happening in real time while my other screen showed bodies of children. Joy and horror running in split-screen.
Children using play as comfort on my livestream while, one swipe away, another child lay on a metal table. Gaza forced me to hold both truths at the same time – the life they were fighting to preserve and the life that was stolen before it even finished forming.
To understand Palestinians with true depth, I had to bridge the language barrier. One translator stepped into my TikTok livestream panel like someone walking into a burning house with bare hands. Walid .
A Palestinian man who didn’t owe me anything, didn’t know me, but offered me months of his life without hesitation. He absorbed the trauma in Arabic – parents bravely describing losses, children gasping as bombs struck – and then reshaped it into English so I could understand. He took my trembling response and turned it back into Arabic. I will never know how he carried that weight.
We stood in the trenches together from separate countries. Screens and grief between us, but distance never softened what we saw. He and I watched walls shake behind parents clutching their babies. We cried in voice notes when things became too heavy. I have never had a more pure companion.
In the hours I was streaming – I watched a colonizer cage a people and bomb them at the same time. I saw crowds sit on hills and watch the bombardment like a theatre, cheering as lives disappeared in real time. Meanwhile, I was inside those lives, trying to convince these families to believe in humanity.
Witnessing Gaza wasn’t a political awakening. It was a human one. We’d been lied to – Gaza didn’t just need my sympathy, they needed my honesty. They needed people who weren’t too afraid or numb to look directly at what was happening.
I would never return to believing the world functions the way I was raised to believe. I could only go forward – with them, beside them, trying to carry a fraction of what they should never have had to bear. This was only the beginning…
@AmyraCull
#Gaza #Palestine #Genocide
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