Asem Alnabih, Spokesperson of the Gaza Municipality

"I wish my words could rise to meet the weight of this feeling, the feeling of genocide.

It’s something every Gazan knows intimately, yet struggles to articulate. No photo, no word, no headline can truly capture it.

How do I begin to describe a child sobbing, clutching his mother’s clothes, pleading to be carried while she, worn down by exhaustion, flees with her children from death, carrying what little food she has left?

How can I explain the image of a man placing his eighty-year-old mother on a bicycle, escaping from Shuja’iya to nowhere, displaced into the unknown, with no destination, no certainty?

How do I convey the heartbreak of a young girl, separated from her family, confused, shaken, standing alone in the street, trying to call someone? There’s no signal. Her loved ones don’t appear. No one stops to help.

People sleep in the streets, unable to find a place to pitch a tent. A mother, still in her damaged home, hears the bombing and doesn’t know where to go or how to protect her frightened, starving children.

Death, in all its finality, begins to feel merciful. Truly, it seems gentler than what we continue to endure. Perhaps death is easier than this life.

If only the death of those we loved could bring this horror to an end.

I wish, if only my own death could satisfy death’s hunger, so it would stop devouring the rest of us."