My feed has gone quiet.
Not peaceful. Quiet. The specific quiet of people who are no longer posting because they are dead.
For two years, the way most of us knew what was happening in Gaza was that a handful of young Palestinians picked up their phones and refused to stop filming. Saleh was one of them. He had millions of us watching. He reported from the rubble of his own city, and he sang, and he laughed with his hands shaking from exhaustion.
He was twenty-eight.
And what I understand now, a year on, is something I didn't take in properly at the time.
They knew each other. All of them. Saleh, Anas, the rest. They worked the same streets, checked on each other, shared what they had.
And they buried each other one by one.
Saleh grieved Anas publicly, with his whole chest. Months later Saleh was gone too. By then so many of them had been killed that there was barely anyone left who'd worked beside him to stand up and say what he was like.
That's what stays with me. Not only that they died. That they watched it happen to their friends first and went out the next morning and filmed anyway, knowing exactly where it ends.
More than two hundred and fifty of them.
And in one of his last videos, Saleh took off his press vest and put it on a child.
He said he was raising the next generation. So that if they killed the adults, someone would still be there to tell you.
A child. In a press vest. Because he already knew what was coming for him.
I remember thinking, when the ceasefire came, that I could finally exhale. That the bombs had stopped. That we'd be talking about rebuilding instead of burying.
Then his name came up on my screen, days later, and I understood what that ceasefire actually was.
Not peace. A curtain. A pause long enough for the world to look away.
And that is exactly how the year has gone. Quiet that isn't quiet. Strikes that never stopped. More than a thousand Palestinians killed since the ceasefire took hold, children among them, including a four-year-old in a tent last month.
And almost nobody left to film it.
That isn't a side effect. It's the point. A killing nobody records is a killing that can be denied later.
I thought we'd be rebuilding by now.
But what's left to rebuild? The homes are dust. The schools are ash. And the hands that would have rebuilt Gaza lie beneath her.
I keep whispering their names like prayers, as if saying them out loud might bring them back. Might bring Gaza back.
But all I hear is silence. And in that silence I understand. This isn't the end of the war. It's the end of witness.
Saleh already handed the vest over. To a child.
No child should have to wear it.
So it has to be us. If the cameras are gone, we're the ones who look. If their voices are buried, ours have to rise.
Because if the journalists are gone, the world's last light on Gaza is us.
For everyone who kept filming,
Hafsa