I want to talk about a doctor today.
A doctor i’ve been watching for a long time.
Long enough that his face became familiar the way the faces of people you deeply respect become familiar. A pediatrician who had decided, at some point before any of this began, that his patients were his responsibility and that responsibility did not come with conditions.
What I watched him do felt like a film.
Not because it was dramatic. Because no real person should be able to do what he did. Press conferences in rubble, still in his white coat, covered in blood and in things I will not name, speaking calmly and professionally while the hospital around him was being destroyed. His own family dying the same way his patients' families were dying. The same bombs. The same rubble. The same unbearable loss. And him still there. Still treating children. Still showing up.
I kept watching and thinking this cannot be real.
It was all real. Dr Hussam is real.
On November 27, 2024 Dr Hussam disappeared.
His last photograph is the most dystopian image I have ever seen. Walking through rubble in his white coat toward a military tank. Just walking. Toward a tank. As though the coat still means something. As though I am a doctor still carries weight in a place that has decided nothing carries weight anymore except what falls from the sky.
He was taken to an Israeli prison.
A pediatrician who stayed while his own family was being killed. In a prison.
That was eighteen months ago.
A few weeks ago Dr Hussam got a message out.
Eighteen months in the dark and the message was not about his conditions or what was being done to him. It was about continuing the work. He asked for Anas Al-Sharif. The journalist he trusted above anyone else. The one who had covered Gaza with the specific fearlessness of someone who understood that bearing witness was not optional.
Report on me, he said. Keep reporting. Do not stop.
Anas Al-Sharif was killed in a targeted airstrike on August 10 2025.
Almost a year before Dr Hussam sent that message.
He does not know.
Eighteen months in a prison cell holding onto a name. Believing that somewhere outside those walls Anas is still there, still reporting, still refusing to let Gaza be disappeared. That name a lifeline. That name the thing between being forgotten and being known.
Anas has been gone for almost a year.
The rope Dr Hussam has been holding was cut a year ago and nobody could tell him.
There is no word for what that is. A man in the dark holding onto a name that is already a grave.
I cannot bring Anas back.
Nobody can replace what he was. The specific courage of a journalist who kept his camera up because he believed the world needed to see. There is no filling that absence. There is only the absence and what we do in the face of it.
Dr Hussam showed up for eighteen months covered in blood while his family was being buried.
Anas showed up until the last second of the last breath he had.
Neither of them waited for the conditions to be right. Neither of them stopped because stopping would have been easier and more survivable and completely understandable. They showed up because the alternative was to let Gaza disappear into silence and they could not live with that.
The question this email is asking is simple.
Can you?
Because Dr Hussam is still in that prison tonight. Still in the dark. Still not knowing. Still being the most extraordinary person in any room he has ever been in and getting nothing for it except eighteen months of walls.
And Anas is gone.
And Gaza is still there.
And the only people left to show up are us.
Show up today.
Not in a white coat through rubble.
Just here. Just this. Just refusing to let their stories disappear into the same silence that took them.
Give today.
Stay loud.
Do not stop.
For Dr Hussam, still waiting in the dark. For Anas, who never stopped. For Gaza, which keeps giving us people like both of them,
Hafsa