Rauda Altenaiji

Nothing enrages me more than hearing Hamas leaders and their supporters boast that October 7 brought Palestine back to the forefront of the world's attention, or celebrate the fact that Israelis are now being thrown out of restaurants around the world, as though any of this were a victory. Do you know what I wish for? What so many of us in Gaza wish for? To go back to October 6. Yes, October 6. With all its injustices, hardships, and imperfections. I would give anything to have our old lives back. Our homes, most of which we owned, not rented. Our jobs. Our cars. Our neighbourhoods. Our families gathered under one roof. Our children sleeping in their own beds. The ordinary, precious stability we never imagined could be taken from us so completely. I would give anything to return to a time when Palestine was not the world's most urgent headline, when our lives were not reduced to death tolls, our homes to rubble, and our suffering to speeches about resistance, sacrifice, and victory. What good is putting Palestine back on the world's agenda if the Palestinians themselves must be buried beneath it? What kind of victory demands that we lose our homes, our loved ones, our livelihoods, our communities, and the very lives we were supposedly fighting to protect? We were not born to be sacrifices for someone else's political glory. We were born to live. And if the price of making the world remember Palestine is the destruction of everything Palestinians hold dear, then I would rather the world forgot us. Forget us. Leave us out of your headlines, your speeches, your celebrations, and your grand declarations of victory. Just give us back our lives.