I have to confess something.
Gaza has been fading for me.
Not the facts of it. Not the death toll or the airstrikes or the numbers that keep climbing. Those I still see. But the people. The specific, breathing, irreplaceable human beings inside it. Somewhere in the last few months, without noticing, I started to see Gaza the way you see something on the periphery of your vision. Present. But not looked at directly anymore.
I noticed it in what I was watching. What I was choosing to read. The way I could scroll past something that six months ago would have kept me awake for days. The way delivering aid there has started to feel, if I am being honest with myself, like a job. Something we do. Something we are good at. Something that has lost the fire it had at the beginning.
I think a lot of us are here right now.
And I think Gaza is counting on us not to stay here.
Because the dying did not stop when we got tired of watching it.
The starvation did not pause because the news cycle moved on. The babies did not stop being hungry because we ran out of new ways to feel about it. Gaza is still there. Still sealed. Still a place where tiny lives are waiting inside an open air prison, living as though they are serving a sentence they were born into, for a crime that was never theirs.
We just stopped looking.
And I am including myself in that. Fully. Without excuse.
I have been delivering aid into Gaza and somewhere along the way the urgency became routine and the faces became cases and the babies became part of a body of work instead of the whole entire reason for it. That is not something I say lightly. That is something I am ashamed of. Because those babies did not become less real when I became less present. They just lost one more person who was supposed to be paying attention.
And then yesterday a picture came through from our team.
A baby. Gaza. The biggest smile I have seen in longer than I can remember. Eyes so full of light they looked like they belonged to a child somewhere safe, somewhere ordinary, somewhere babies are allowed to just be babies without it being remarkable. His little hand reaching toward the formula our volunteer was holding out. That particular full-body baby urgency, that complete uncomplicated joy of a child about to receive something good.
He has no idea he is not supposed to be that happy where he is.
He is just a baby. Reaching for his bottle. Smiling at the person holding it.
And I felt every single thing that had made me go numb come back at once.
That smile exists inside a sealed open air prison. It is alive right now, today, entirely dependent on whether people like us decide that Gaza still matters enough to keep showing up. The formula that caused it costs almost nothing. The decision to keep delivering it costs us only the refusal to forget.
We cannot let Gaza disappear.
Not from the map. Not from the news. Not from us.
Please give today because it is still happening and he is still there and he is still hungry and he is still, against everything, still smiling.
Don't let that smile be the last thing we send him.
For the baby with the sparkly eyes who reminded me why we cannot look away,
Hafsa
