I have been thinking about a photograph I cannot describe to you.
A fetus. Gaza. Blown out of its mother's body by the force of a bomb.
I am not going to tell you more than that. You do not need more than that. Some things do not require elaboration. Some things are already the worst thing you have ever heard before the sentence is finished.
I have been sitting with that image for days.
Not the violence of it. The baby.
Because it was still a baby. Is still a baby. A specific, particular, irreplaceable human being that existed and was forming and had a heartbeat and fingernails and the beginning of everything it was going to become. Not a casualty. Not a number. A baby that had not yet decided what its favourite colour would be or whether it would be shy or loud or whether it would love mornings or hate them.
A baby that never got to find out.
I keep thinking about the womb.
About what it is. What it does. The most complete safety a human being will ever know. A place built entirely around protecting one small life, keeping it warm, keeping it fed, keeping it growing in the dark toward something. A mother's body saying, without words, without choice, just by existing: you are safe here. Nothing can reach you here. I have you.
Gaza's babies are not safe there.
The bombs reach them there.
The place that was supposed to be the beginning of everything is becoming the end of everything. Mothers whose bodies are trying to do the one thing a body does completely automatically, protect the child inside, and the bombs are undoing even that. Reaching into the most protected place a human being can be and saying: nowhere is safe. Not even here. Not even before you have begun.
I think about what comes after the womb.
A father's arms.
That is the second womb. The way a father holds a newborn like something that might break, like something he cannot believe he is trusted with, like the most important thing he has ever been handed. The way that holding becomes carrying, through first steps and fevers and first days of school and every hard thing the world eventually delivers. A father is supposed to be the womb that continues. The safety that extends beyond the body into the world.
Gaza's fathers are burying their children before they are born.
Gaza's fathers are identifying small bodies.
Gaza's fathers are sitting in rubble holding things that were supposed to be held differently.
The womb failed not because the mother failed but because a bomb was dropped on it.
The father's arms never got the chance.
I do not know how to hold this and I have been trying for days.
A baby that existed in the safest place a human being can exist and was not safe. A body that was built to protect and was not protection enough. A life that had not yet started being a life and is already over.
This is not collateral damage.
This is not an unfortunate consequence of conflict.
This is a baby.
Was a baby.
Will always be a baby in the mind of a mother who is still alive somewhere in Gaza right now, carrying the absence of it, which is its own kind of womb, the hollow where something was and isn't anymore, the body that remembers what it was holding even after the holding is gone.
I cannot give that baby back.
Nobody can.
But there are mothers in Gaza right now who are still pregnant. Still trying. Still carrying life in a place that keeps trying to end it. Still being a womb in a city of bombs, which is the bravest and most devastating thing I can imagine a body doing.
They need us to be the safety the world has stolen from them.
Not because it fixes it.
Because a mother should not have to be brave just to be pregnant.
Because a baby should be the one thing that is always, always safe.
For the baby that never got to begin,
Hafsa