Opinion

The world hears a cry from Gaza

Around the world, there are cities that breathe history while others bleed it. Gaza experiences both. Today, the wind that moves through Gaza’s crushed streets carries more than dust; it carries stories, but without endings. These stories tell of a grandmother’s last prayer, a father’s grief and a child’s shoes beneath a collapsed roof.

Gaza has become a poem written in fire and silence. The sun still rises there, but it brings no light, only reveals what the night tried to hide: the broken bricks where a bakery once stood, the twisted metal of a child’s wheelchair and the silence in places where laughter once lived.

To some, Gaza is just a place on a map. To others, it is a wound that won’t heal; rather a scar stitched with years of blockade, bombing and betrayal. There are those who say, “It’s complicated.” But to the child trapped under ruins, nothing is complicated. To the mother who wraps her daughter in a white sheet instead of a wedding dress, nothing is complicated.

For the people of Gaza, this war is not merely a current crisis, it is a reflection of decades of displacement, military occupation and homelessness. The Gaza Strip, home to over two million people, has lived under a strict blockade for ages. This has suffocated its economy and turned it into what many describe as an “open-air prison.” The war has only deepened this sense of isolation and despair.

What does it mean to be born into war, to grow up surrounded by fences and drones, knowing the sky is more likely to bring death than rain? The cries of children, the wails of mothers and the silence of crushed homes rise like smoke from a land overwhelmed. For the people of Gaza, this is not a moment in time, it is a continuing blockade, where hope is limited like water and every dawn is just another surprise.

This is not just another chapter in a long conflict; it is a humanitarian disaster marked by profound suffering, scarred families and a collective trauma no statistics can capture. The people of Gaza no longer count days; they count losses: a son, a sister, a street, a future and more.

Israel, armed with unmatched military power, claims the right to defend itself. But when a hospital becomes a battlefield, when journalists are buried beneath their own headlines, we must ask: what exactly is being defended? Worldwide protests have erupted in solidarity with Gaza. Millions have taken to the streets — not for political gain, but out of shared sorrow over images of children pulled from ruins, of families huddled among wreckage. Yet despite global outcry, political action has been slow, and repeated calls for ceasefires have been drowned out by geopolitical interests.

The war in Gaza has exposed not only the fragility of peace in the region, but also the moral failure of the international community to uphold justice and human rights. What is needed now is not more weapons, but a genuine commitment to ending the cycles of violence that have plagued Palestinians for generations.

The world has been watching Gaza burn. Every moment it fails to act — every leader who chooses politics over principle, every silence that follows another massacre — is a moral scar on the face of humanity. And yet, from the chambers of the United Nations to the halls of Western parliaments, there is only a deafening quiet. A silence not born of ignorance, but of deliberate choice.

In the stillness of night, beneath a sky scarred by drones and rockets, Gaza bleeds and the world turns away. But Gaza speaks through the eyes of children who have stopped asking when it will end because they no longer believe in endings, only survival.

History will be remembered these days. The question is: will it remember a world that stood by silently or one that found the courage to act?