The tears turned to stone in my eyes the moment I heard the news of the journalists’ assassination on Al Jazeera.
A moment I had feared — one I knew could come — as it did a year ago with Ismail, as it did before with Shireen.
Back then, tears were still possible.
Back then, rage still had space to scream.
This genocide, merciless and deliberate, leaves no place for anyone who does not fit their design.
In their eyes, we are half-humans, breathing only so they can prove to this cowardly, complicit world that someone still breathes here,
that the oxygen we draw is a gift granted by the machinery of extermination.
It is a crushing grief, a rock upon the heart,
forcing the breath to claw its way toward a gasp of life that no longer holds meaning.
I don’t know if writing in English can hold my blocked emotions — the despair.
I cannot write another obituary for yet another ascending soul.
Maybe this is the only way of keeping myself together — trying to believe there must be something up there,
a justice that has no place on this earth.
Yet another obituary for a slain voice,
a burst head,
witnessing eyes,
a camera that captured the truth,
a cameraman who dared to stand behind it.
A genocide.
How can anyone survive a genocidal existence?
It is Armageddon —
and it is not the Messiah who is waging the flames of salvation, of revelation.
It is pure evil.
Murderers.
Killers.
Criminals whose thirst for blood is never fulfilled.
These are not just martyrs — they are witnesses to what humanity has lost.
These are not mere victims — they are offerings to a gluttonous world that feeds on exploding bodies,
its bombs and bullets craving more.
These are not simply people — they are angels who descended briefly into this brutal life,
and found it too narrow for their light.
Anas Al-Sharif has ascended, but his voice remains a sharp blade cutting through us,
splitting the stillness of our feelings,
breathing life back into them — life mixed with rage choked by fear and despair.
Mohammed Qariqa has ascended, but his eyes remain —
silent cries steeped in the salt of pleading,
like a drowning man in a sea that never rests.
And we remain here — without hope, without purpose —
caught between waiting for the end of this massacre or for our own.
They kill truth as if it were a phantom threatening their existence,
an existence soaked in unending evil.
They kill the human in us, because every Palestinian face reflects back to them
the truth of their crimes.
They kill the witnesses, so no one remains to speak.
This world belongs to the murderers of truth —
our truth, for which there is no place in this monstrosity.
No elegy for the witnesses who have fallen,
for they are souls who chose to return to their Creator,
content, purified of the filth of this earth,
soaring in a sky untouched by evil,
beyond the reach of a killer’s hand.