On the Edge of Our Humanity

I woke up to the news of Saleh’s murder in Gaza and felt as though the air had been pulled from my lungs. I did not know him personally, but his death struck with an intimacy that surprised me. Perhaps it was the timing, the cruel irony of his killing just as word spread of a ceasefire and of his brother’s long-awaited release. Just as we allowed ourselves to exhale, and hope... Perhaps it was the knowledge that his life was cut short not by chance but by design, a product of an unrelenting machine of occupation and treachery. Or perhaps it was simply that in Saleh’s story, I saw the story of so many other martyrs: lives snuffed out between headlines and negotiations, reduced to statistics in a tragedy that feels endless.

It frightens me how easily the world absorbs this kind of horror. As a collective, we grieve, post our condolences, and then move on, leaving behind entire nations to suffer in silence. As long as the bombs stop falling, we convince ourselves that peace has arrived. Yet beneath that fragile quiet lies a different kind of violence: the violence of containment, of starvation, of moral indifference. We accept captivity as a compromise, oppression as order, and turn the act of resistance into a betrayal when it is the only logical outcome to oppression and occupation.

What are we becoming? 

I fear that our collective soul is growing numb, that our compassion has been rationed to the point of extinction. The suffering in Gaza, in the Congo, in countless unseen corners of the world reveals not only the brutality of systems but the fragility of our empathy. When the powerful plunder land and life without consequence, and when we remain silent so long as it doesn’t disturb our comfort, we participate in that violence in spirit.

I am haunted by how easily our faith is held hostage by humans. Our religion and our humanity are twisted in the global imagination (how often we are painted as villains in a story written by those who profit from our pain). Yet even beyond that, I am afraid of what it means for all of us if we accept such a world: a world where the lives of some are disposable, and the grief of others is optional.

Still, amid the despair, there remains one fragile hope. That feeling unsettled is itself the beginning of resistance. To be grieved by injustice, to refuse to normalise cruelty, is to keep a fragment of our humanity alive. Perhaps that is where we begin: in the discomfort of the heart that refuses to look away.

Change begins with the individual, but there are billions of us...imagine how powerful we are to affect change for the good of all mankind.