what it means to keep watching, while the world moves on

On the other side of the glass, the world celebrates having moved on. They call it resilience, perhaps their warped version of healing. They call it “not letting tragedy consume you”. They scroll past the dead… commuters stepping over a body on the platform. Simply trained to continue the fiction of the life they live, the life they are allowed to live by those who are killing those not allowed. And it makes me angry, really angry, all the time.

Even my own people, it seems, have learned this performance. Last week my feed filled with photos of the Palestinian football team at the Arab Cup. Hundreds of posts celebrating, cheering, sharing the jerseys and the goals and the pride. And I stared at my screen thinking: Gaza is still starving. Thinking: babies are freezing to death in tents. Thinking: how are we doing this? How are we posting about football?

That is a performance: either of moving on, or never having cared enough in the first place.

And still, I am trapped behind the glass, unable to perform with them.

We post, as if thats activism, and we share the stories, as if we might win a pulitzer. And then we return to our own living, because what else can we do? The dead are dead. The dying are dying. And somewhere along the way, grief became a quota we’ve exceeded, a balance we can no longer afford to carry.

But I am still there. Still standing in that first moment of understanding. Still watching the glass fog with my breath, still pressing my palms against it, still mouthing words no one can hear.

They are still dying, I want to scream. It is getting worse.

But the glass swallows sound.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, because there is always a meanwhile, because the freezing and the dying operate on different clocks, winter storms sweep across the Strip. Fourteen people die. Not from bombs (even though the bombs still fall and the people still become parts), but from cold. From rain. From the collapse of structures that Israeli missiles had already hollowed out, waiting for weather to finish the work.

Nine-year-old Hadeel al-Masri dies in a shelter west of Gaza City. Baby Taim al-Khawaja dies in Shati camp. Eight-month-old Rahaf Abu Jazar dies after rain floods her family’s tent, the tent they pitched in a roofless, bombed-out home after an Israeli airstrike destroyed their house.

“Yesterday, we were surprised to hear his mother screaming, saying, ‘My son is blue!’” the child’s grandfather tells reporters. “His temperature remained between 33 and 34 degrees Celsius, which has affected all his organs. His brain began to deteriorate, and that was the end of it.”

The end of it?

I read these reports from behind my glass. I read the Amnesty International statement: “Israel’s genocide in the Occupied Gaza Strip continues.” I read about the 6,480 metric tons of humanitarian relief materials blocked from entering Gaza between October 10 and December 12. I read about the children dying of malnutrition in hospitals that have no medicine, about the 93 Palestinians shot for trying to return to their homes beyond the “yellow line,” the arbitrary border Israel drew to keep people from their own land.

I read, and my face stays numb.

There is a particular violence in being made to witness what you cannot stop. In having your grief treated as old news while the dying continues in new forms. The bombs have somewhat slowed (this is what the world celebrates)? A slow death is better than a loud one it seems.

But the glass swallows sound, and on the other side, people are congratulating themselves on a ceasefire they had nothing to do with, quick to celebrate, quicker to forget.

So, here is what I have learned about freezing:

It is not the same as stillness. Stillness is a choice. Freezing is what happens when your body understands that movement will not save you, that screaming will not make them hear, that breaking the glass will only leave you bleeding on both sides.

Freezing is a mercy the body grants itself. A small death before the larger one.

But I am not supposed to freeze, my people are freezing. I am supposed to be resilient. I am supposed to process violence and move forward. I am supposed to understand that I cannot carry the weight of every death, that I must protect my own mental health, that there is nothing I can do anyway.

This last one is the glass itself. The final seal. There is nothing you can do.

So the world does nothing, and that, I am led to believe, is wisdom.

I don’t know what to do with all these names. Hadeel. Taim. Rahaf. I write them down. I say them out loud in my apartment when no one can hear me. I think if I can just hold onto them, if I can just keep speaking them, then their deaths will mean something. Then my watching will have mattered.

But I’m starting to understand that it doesn’t work that way.

Grief requires witnesses. But what happens when the witnesses go numb? When even I, who cannot stop watching, have stopped feeling the way I’m supposed to feel? When I read about Rahaf drowning in his tent and my first thought is not horror but: of course.

I used to cry. Now I catalog them. I save the articles. I take notes. I build my case as if somewhere there is a court that will hear it.

The dead used to live in our collective memory. Now, I am not sure. I can watch every death, speak every name, press my face against this glass until my breath fogs it completely, and on the other side, the world will keep celebrating the ceasefire, keep posting about the football team, keep asking me why I’m still so angry when it’s over.

It’s not over. It will never be over. But I am one of the few who seems to be stuck in that knowing.

Where do we put the grief when the witnesses have fled? When even our own people need to look away just to survive the day? When I understand their need to look away and still cannot forgive them for it?

The glass is getting thicker. Or maybe I am getting farther from it. Either way, the distance is growing. Some days I wake up and for a full thirty seconds I forget. I forget there is a genocide. I forget that children are freezing. I forget that I am supposed to be watching. And in those thirty seconds, I feel something like peace.

Then I remember. And the glass reappears. And I am back inside my frozen moment, pressing my palms against it, watching the world move on without me.

So I freeze. I am writing this from behind the glass. I don’t know if you can hear me. I don’t know if anyone can hear me. But I need to say it anyway:

They are still dying.

I cannot move on. I will not move on. Even if it means staying frozen behind this glass forever, even if it means being angry forever, even if it means losing my mind to the cold, even if it means being the last person still watching when everyone else has fled.

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