In the Shadow of Resolutions: Gaza’s Unburied Dead

It begins with the news, always the news, a daily ritual now so ingrained it feels less like information and more like penance. I sit at the kitchen table in Tokyo—or perhaps it’s Kuala Lumpur, the cities blur these days, their edges softened by the sameness of this grief—and I read of fresh martyrdoms in Gaza. Men, women, children, their names unlisted, their faces unseen, reduced to a tally that shifts with each dispatch. The reports come without specificity, a deliberate omission: how many were Hamas fighters, how many were civilians clutching nothing but their lives? The distinction matters, or it should, but it’s lost in the haze of numbers, in the smoke rising over a strip of land I’ve never walked but can now describe in excruciating detail. Our fate, it seems, is to consume this litany each morning—April 7, 2025, today’s date stamped on the screen like a postmark on a letter from hell—and to do nothing with it but turn the page.

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I see the videos next, because the videos are inescapable. They arrive unbidden on X, on feeds I once curated for distraction but which now serve as a pipeline to obliteration. A bomb falls, or a missile—I can’t tell the difference anymore, the taxonomy of destruction eludes me—and a cloud of dust and smoke rises, a pillar that could be biblical if it weren’t so profane. It towers, twenty, thirty stories high, a monument to something I lack the words to name. And then I see them: human bodies, flung upward with the debris, three or four hundred feet into the air, their limbs splayed against the gray sky like broken marionettes. The force required to do this—the physics of it—staggers me. I try to calculate it, as if numbers could explain the unexplainable, but I’m no engineer. I’m just a man watching, a witness who can’t unsee. The buildings collapse, the children wail, their cries piercing through the tinny speakers of my laptop, and I turn my head, not because I want to but because I must. Our fate is to watch this, to see the pricks of flesh and concrete mingle in the air, and then to forget, to let it dissolve into the ether as if it were happening on Mars, not a mere 9,000 miles from where I sit.

Gaza’s destruction unfolds in increments, each video more grotesque than the last, a progression I can chart like a fever. One day it’s a marketplace reduced to rubble, the next a school, its chalkboards buried under ash. The footage is raw, unpolished, shot by trembling hands—there are no journalists left in Gaza, no professionals to frame this apocalypse with the cool detachment of a newsroom. The last of them were killed or fled months ago, their cameras confiscated or smashed, leaving only amateurs to bear witness. The UN says 50,000 are dead as of last week; local estimates whisper 70,000, maybe more. The numbers blur, as numbers do, becoming abstractions that shield us from the reality of severed heads, of arms torn from sockets, of children whose blood pools in the dust. I think of my niece, Aimen, dead now 12 years, and I wonder what I’d do if I saw her body flung skyward like that. I’d scream, I suppose, but here I sit silent, sipping coffee gone cold, because screaming changes nothing.

Our fate is to hear the rest, too: that medical aid has been stopped, that relief trucks lie charred on the roadside, their drivers’ bodies unrecovered. Hospitals—those that still stood after two years of war—have been flattened, their wards now open to the sky. Medicine doesn’t reach Gaza; it’s intercepted at the border, held in warehouses while children die of infections that penicillin could cure. How do we even know this? God knows, because no one else does. The details trickle out through smuggled phones, through voices hoarse with desperation, and we can only guess at the scale of what’s unspoken. A million people—no, two million, the population shifts with each census of the living—survive without electricity, without water, without food. I marvel at their endurance, at the sheer stubbornness of life in a place where dust is sustenance, dust is remedy, dust is the shroud for the unburied. Hunger and thirst should have killed them by now, should have spared them the bombs, but they persist, and I don’t know whether to call it courage or curse.

I think of my own life, the absurdity of it. Tonight, I’ll sit at a table laden with food—roast chicken, perhaps, or salmon, the kind of meal I once described in minute detail for The Halal Times pages—and I’ll swallow a pill for indigestion while talking about Gaza. The juice will be red or gold, poured into glasses that catch the light, the ice clinking as I stir it with a silver spoon, and I’ll mention the thirst in Gaza, the children dying of it, as if it’s a footnote to my evening. Our fate is to tally the dead—50,000, 60,000, 70,000—and to parse the causes: bombs, starvation, disease, grief. How many died because a missile found them, how many because no doctor could? How many simply gave up when their families vanished in a flash of light? The numbers are a game we play, a way to keep score without feeling the weight of each digit, each life snuffed out.

The world watches, or pretends to. In New York, in Geneva, men and women in tailored suits—white faces, brown faces, faces of every shade—sit around polished tables, their cufflinks glinting as they draft resolutions. The Security Council condemns Israel, the United Nations mourns the dead, and the papers are signed with flourish, as if ink could stop a missile. I’ve seen these scenes before, in Vietnam, in El Salvador, the same theater of futility. The resolutions pass, or they don’t—vetoes come swift from Washington, a reflex now—and even when they succeed, they’re scraps, tissue-thin promises that flutter away like the bodies in those videos. Our fate is to know this, to see the effort it takes to produce even these meaningless gestures, and to watch as some recoil at the very idea of paper, as if it offends them more than the carnage it’s meant to address.

Then there are the summits—Arab League, OIC—held in palaces dripping with gold, where men in embroidered robes gather to denounce the bombs. I can picture them, their voices rising in choreographed outrage, their pledges to stand with the dead as hollow as the halls they fill. They’ll appeal to the world, call Israel cruel, and return to their thrones, their bravery lauded as if drafting a statement were an act of war. I want to believe they mean it, but I’ve lived too long, seen too much. Our fate is to curse them daily—the oppressors first, then these spineless rulers who claim to be ours but aren’t—and to feel the impotence of that curse, its echo lost in the wind.

Gaza is not alone in this, though it feels singular. I read lists of oppressed Muslims—Rohingya bleeding in Myanmar, Kashmiris stifled in India, Uighurs erased in China—and I see their images, too, grainy snapshots of despair. In Delhi, Muslims march against the Waqf Bill, a law that could strip them of 950,000 acres, their heritage parceled out to the highest bidder. I analyze it, as if analysis helps, as if understanding the mechanics of theft could undo it. I wonder where the next blow will land—personal law, perhaps, or something subtler, a slow strangulation of identity. Our fate is to watch this global unraveling, to think about it, to do nothing but think.

Back home, in Pakistan or wherever I imagine myself today, the concerns are smaller but no less pressing. I calculate America’s new tariffs, their bite into textile mills and garment factories, the jobs lost, the exports gutted. The Pakistani Prime Minister cuts electricity prices, a gesture I should applaud, but I’m too busy wondering what my next bill will be, whether I’ll run the air conditioner in June’s heat. The dams are empty, the rivers dry, WASA’s incompetence a given—will water reach my tap, or will I ration it like Gaza rations dust? Our fate is to juggle these mundane crises while Gaza burns, to weigh our petty losses against their infinite ones.

And yet, the question gnaws: Are we the last to see Palestinians alive in Gaza? Are they the last to see the world? I think of 1948, of Nakba, of decades of displacement layered atop this new extermination. I think of the blockade, eighteen years old now, a noose tightened by degrees. I think of the West Bank, carved up by settlements, and of Jerusalem, its mosques ringed by soldiers. Gaza is the epicenter, though, the place where the end feels closest. A voice whispers that their fate will change—not through survival, perhaps, but through annihilation. I can’t bear it, the thought of a world without them, but my courage fails me. I turn from the videos, the pictures, the whispers, as if blindness could rewrite destiny.

What remains is this: a plea I can’t finish, a sentence I can’t complete. I falter, my words trailing into silence, because to finish is to accept, and I refuse. Understand me, though—understand that Gaza is not a footnote, not a number, not a video to scroll past. It’s a wound, a scream, a demand. Our fate may be to watch, but it need not be to forget. Complete my thought, if you can, because I cannot.