Every year, in Palestinian homes, the days before Eid smell like orange blossom water and butter, like semolina dough worked by hand into the wooden molds our grandmothers have carried across generations, the same patterns pressed into the same dough for longer than the state that is currently trying to eliminate us has existed. Mamoul is what you make when you want to hold onto something. Date-filled, walnut-filled, dusted with powdered sugar and arranged on plates to be carried to neighbors and anyone who comes through the door, made in assembly lines where one person fills and one person presses the mold and one person lays them on the tray, the whole tradition a kind of organized insistence that we are still here, that the holiday still belongs to us, that no army has yet figured out how to bomb a recipe. This year I made them and opened my phone and learned that Fadi Al-Meghair had been killed in Gaza, twenty-five years old, a photographer, a man whose entire vocation was the insistence that what was happening there would be seen.

How civilized of them to do it on the eve of Eid.

Nine Palestinians were killed in Israeli strikes across occupied Palestine in the hours before the holiday. The attacks hit a residential building in one of Gaza City’s most crowded shopping districts while families moved through the market trying to prepare for the celebration, a civilian vehicle in Khan Younis whose two occupants arrived at Nasser Hospital so badly burned they could not immediately be identified, a gathering of civilians near the Maghazi refugee camp, and tents where displaced families were sleeping. A fourteen-year-old girl died from wounds sustained the day before when Israeli warplanes struck the displacement camp at Al-Mawasi, having survived the initial strike, dying in the night before she could wake for Eid prayer. This is what a ceasefire looks like when the country enforcing it answers to no one, when the word ceasefire has been drained of every meaning it once had and refilled with the specific content of 906 Palestinians killed since it was signed in October.

Eid al-Adha commemorates the prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son and God’s mercy in replacing the child with a ram, the founding story of a faith built on the premise that devotion does not require death, that at the last moment something intervenes. For the third consecutive year, Israel has made sure that no such intervention reaches Gaza, that the holiday of substitution and mercy is observed without the animal whose presence is the ritual’s whole point, without the Hajj whose impossibility marks a third year of closed borders, without the mosques of which 1,109 out of 1,244 have been completely or partially destroyed, the people who remain praying in the rubble of what used to hold them, conducting the same prayers in the ruins with a persistence that the people bombing them have clearly decided is not their problem. Gaza’s Agriculture Ministry says the number of sheep and goats in Gaza has fallen from sixty thousand before October 2023 to three thousand today, 90% of the livestock sector destroyed or damaged, a single sheep now costing seven thousand dollars in a land where families are selling everything they own to buy flour, where a father named Hazem Shalla spent last Eid risking his life at a militarized food distribution point to bring home a bag of flour because his pregnant, malnourished wife needed it and his daughter Mesk had asked for a doll and he had to choose between the doll and the flour and chose the flour and this is the math that two and a half years of deliberate starvation produces, a father calculating whether his daughter eats or plays.

The starvation is the point of it all. Doctors Without Borders documented that between late 2024 and early 2026, 90% of babies born to malnourished mothers in Gaza were premature, eighty-four percent had low birth weight, neonatal mortality was twice as high among infants born to malnourished mothers as among those born to mothers with adequate nutrition. A woman named Mona lost her youngest son at five months old to severe malnutrition while she herself had been malnourished through the pregnancy, living in a partially destroyed house, her husband’s fishing boat destroyed by shelling, no income, no way to feed the child she had carried through bombardment and displacement and finally brought into a world that Israel had methodically made incapable of keeping him alive. The blockade built the conditions of his death the same way it built the conditions of every death in Gaza since October 2023, which is to say intentionally, bureaucratically, with the specific planning of a government that understood exactly what cutting off food and water and medicine and livestock and fuel from two million people would produce and chose to produce it anyway while the United States signed the checks.

I made the mammoul and arranged them on a plate and thought about Fadi Al-Meghair, twenty-five years old, a photographer, dead on the eve of Eid in a territory where over two hundred journalists have now been killed, where the people whose job it is to make the dying visible keep dying themselves, as though visibility itself is what is being targeted, as though the camera is the threat, as though a young man standing in rubble with a lens pointed at what is happening there is a military objective, which of course he is, because the whole project depends on the world not seeing clearly, on the deaths remaining statistical, on the mammoul-makers in the diaspora opening their phones and feeling the vertigo of distance and then closing them again and going back to the kitchen. Fadi did not close his eyes. He kept them open and pointed outward until they killed him for it, on the eve of a holiday about mercy, during a ceasefire, in a war that has killed at minimum 72,000 people while the creators of evil have given speeches about “self-defense” at every podium the international order has made available to them.

The mammoul survives because the tradition was carried forward by people who refused to let what was taken from them also take what they carried inside. That is not a metaphor I am offering as consolation. It is the only honest account of what Palestinian survival has ever looked like, the maintenance of a life and a culture inside conditions designed to make both impossible, not because steadfastness is enough, not because resilience is a substitute for justice, but because the alternative is to disappear and disappearing is what they want.

Eid Mubarak to every Palestinian observing it this year, in Gaza and the West Bank and the diaspora and everywhere the years have scattered us. What is being done to Gaza is God’s test, but not in the sense of an unavoidable tragedy descending from the heavens. It is a test of us. A test of what people tolerate, justify, normalize, and look away from. A test of whether the world can watch a people starved, bombed, displaced, and erased in real time and still find ways to call it complicated. It is a choice, made and remade every day by governments with names and addresses, funded without interruption by a country that will spend this week flying flags, holding sales, celebrating freedom, and still has not once been made to account for what it has purchased.

Perhaps the test was never Gaza’s suffering but whether the rest of us could witness such suffering without becoming cowards, and every day this world answers God with the same disgraceful silence. Everyday, the distance becomes an excuse to look away and we allow ourselves to forget our people carrying entire worlds on their backs inside refugee camps, tents, and hospitals – all while being bombed.

May God protect Gaza. May He return the displaced to their homes. May He have mercy on our martyrs, heal the wounded, free the prisoners, and soften neither our hearts nor our memory. May God refuse peace to those who can witness this and remain unmoved.

Share