A statement of disgust, and a refusal to despair
By Yaseen Aboobaker (Grade 11A)
I am disgusted. I state it plainly because the occasion permits nothing softer. More than twenty-one thousand children have been killed in Gaza. Were a person to attend the janazah of one child each day, and to miss not a single day, that person would stand at gravesides for fifty-eight years. He would begin on the first morning his legs were strong enough to hold him at a funeral, and he would still be praying over a stranger’s son when age had bent his back and emptied his strength. An entire human life, from the moment one is able to stand to the moment one is carried, expended upon nothing but the burial of children. And at the end of it he would not yet have reached the last of them. I am disgusted, too, that we permitted it. This was never concealed from us. It was documented, broadcast and archived, and we grew accustomed to it.
And yet the people of Gaza have not surrendered. Teachers conduct lessons in tents without walls or books. Physicians operate by torchlight, having buried their own families that same week, and return the following morning. Children who lost their legs are learning to walk upon new ones. A people furnished with every excuse the world could manufacture to abandon hope have declined to accept it. That refusal is not naivety. It is sabr, and it is a form of resistance in itself. It ought to shame us into action rather than console us into stillness.
There is reason to believe the world is beginning to wake. Courts have been compelled to hear the case, governments that spent years in silence have found themselves obliged to speak, and millions who once looked away now cannot. But beginning to wake is not the same as standing up, and Gaza cannot live on a world that is merely stirring. Al Falaah stands firmly with Palestine, as our Palestine Day made plain, and we ask every parent in our community to raise their hands alongside us.
اللَّهُمَّ انْصُرْ إِخْوانَنَا الْمُسْتَضْعَفِينَ فِي فِلَسْطِينَ
O Allah, aid our oppressed brothers and sisters in Palestine. O Allah, heal their wounded, accept their martyrs, feed their hungry, and grant them a victory that returns them to their homes in safety and in dignity. O Allah, do not permit our hearts to harden, and do not raise us among those who were silent. Ameen.
Keep Palestine in your duas. May Allah make it easy for them.