I had hoped to write to you: “Wishing you a blessed Eid.”
But the Palestinian wound runs too deep, carved into the very marrow of our days.
Some of us are still buried beneath the rubble.
Most of us are without homes.
All of us are hungry, craving even the simplest meal.
Death encircles us in fragments, laying traps in every step we take —
it waits, patient and silent,
for us to stumble into the abyss.
And just across the border, Eid arrives — singing, dancing, jubilant —
while we remain imprisoned behind barbed wire strung with death.
No one heeds our hunger,
our dying,
our wound that bleeds yet again into another Eid.
Every holiday, we tell ourselves:
The brothers of Joseph will awaken.
They won’t abandon him to the wolf this time.
But the brothers of Joseph are reckless —
they do not stir for their youngest brother’s blood
nor for his hunger —
though they are a band, standing on ʿArafah,
as fleeting and weightless as foam upon a flood.
Dr. Saeed Mohammad Al-Kahlout
Palestine Trauma Centre Gaza, Palestine
The next Next Century Foundation meeting on Gaza can be found here Photo featured above from Osama Al-Kahlout, Gaza
